The Virtual Success Show

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Some of the areas covered include:

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

In this episode:

01:30 – What can a Virtual Assistant do for me?

03:35 – The mindset of ‘Investment vs. Expense’

04:34 – Will I get a return on my investment?

07:30 – Setting your Virtual Assistant up to win

12:26 – Misconception of the super VA

14:30 – Speeding up the transition process

15:45 – A bit about Matt’s book – The Stop Doing List

19:04 – Wrapping things up

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

Barbara:  Hey Matt, how are you?

Matt:  I’m excellent. How are you going?

Barbara:  I’m good, I’m good and loving all these shows we’re doing, I’ve been this week listening back to a few of the older shows and some of the tips and stuff we’ve been talking about, because I’m actually revamping some of my own processes in my business and I just pick up such great stuff, even from the stuff that we talk about and some of the guests that we interview, so yeah it’s been a good week for that.

Matt:  Excellent. Excellent. Well, I’m really excited about today’s show too, Barb, as we were talking about just before we started recording and what we find in both Barbara’s business and what I do as a coach is we’re constantly asked, well what could a VA do for me? I think a lot of people like the idea and understand the concept of having a virtual assistant, but they’re not really sure on what a VA can do for them or for their business. Barb, do you find this?

What can a VA do for me?

Barbara:  Yeah. Yeah, a lot. You know we get, I’m actually to add to that one of the things that I hear quite a lot as well is, I’m not sure what a VA can do for me and then there’s also a little bit of confusion about what a VA doesn’t do. So implicit in that, sometimes people have an expectation that they can do, this superhero VA type thing, the myth of the superhero VA that they can do everything possible, from video editing to web design and all the sort of things in the middle. So it’s a very broad topic and problem right there.

Matt:  Absolutely and I think what this leads into is people having a clear understanding of the value that a VA can bring to their business. Because one thing I see is people grappling with the decision on, well, okay … This is an extra cost in my business. Am I going to get my return? And I think if you start with that mindsetaround this, then in my experience you’re actually setting yourself up to fail right from the start.

Barbara:  Yeah, so Matt, you know one of the things that we see as well, when people are booking calls with our ad sourcing strategy consultants at Virtual Angel Hub we ask them a series of questions because we’re trying to get an insight into where they’re at before the call and one of the questions we ask is, ‘what’s your biggest fear about hiring a VA or working with a VA?’ And often one we see, the comment is, the cost and the ongoing financial commitment. Which I find quite interesting because if you’re running a business and you’re willing to hire a VA, they’re not that expensive, so sometimes it makes me wonder, are you ready for a VA or should you take a step back in that business and say well, let’s have a look at your product, I mean what are you selling? Have you got product to market fit right? Have you tested your sales? To get rid of this fearbefore you start to grow it.

What’s your sort of take on this Matt, because from a business coaching perspective I’m interested to hear how you feel about this.

The mindset of ‘Investment vs. Expense’

Matt:  Yeah, you know it’s one of the areas that I wrote about in my recently launched book – The Stop Doing List – which I think the biggest thing around this Barb, is that mindset of investment versus expense. And you see, when you’re bringing on a VA or any team member for that matter, it is an investment. You’re investing in labour. You’re investing in someone’s skills to enable you to then focus on the things that are most important in the business.

What often hampers the growth of a company is the owner being pulled in every direction to try and do everything or learn everything. And fast growing and consistent growing companies understand that they’ve got to build teams around them and so that every person they bring on is an extension of themselves and they’re actually buying back time. Hence it’s an investment which pays off, not a cost.

Will I get a return on my investment?

Barbara:  Now Matt, I’ve got such a great question to ask you. I’ve just been listening to you talking and going, okay so another sort of follow on question or query that we get from clients and again it’s a legitimate one, they say another fear is that they won’t get a return on their investment, so that the first set of people will say I’m worried about the cost. The next set of people will say I’m worried I won’t get a return on my investment. Because obviously, it is an investment. So some of these people I wonder, well, what return are you expecting? You’re sort of expecting a VA to make money for you when really it’s sort of your jump to go ahead and make the money and use the VA to free up your time. But it’s going to take time to get to the point to where you get a return on your investment from a VA because you’ve got to train them, right?

So how do you deal with, where’s this line on this one?

Matt:  Yeah it’s a great question. I think there’s a few aspects to this. In order to assess your return or the value return, you’ve actually got to create a measure for it. So one thing that I created in the Stop Doing system was first and foremost you have to get clear on what an hour of your time is worth. And so it’s a simple formula. You’re getting clear on the profit, your goals and what you’re trying to make. How many weeks of the year you want to work and then how many hours per week you intend working. Because then once you actually get a clear understanding and metric on an hour of your time, it’s actually really easy to then compare and go well, if I invest into a virtual assistant and I’m paying, what, between eight and 10 dollars an hour, Barb? Would that be reasonable?

Barbara:  Yeah. Yeah. Even if you get an Australian or an American VA at higher prices, I would tip that most people are hopefully making more than that in their hourly rate in the business anyway.

Matt:  Exactly. And so, majority of people will, even in start-up phase when you look at your initial projections, on what you’re looking to make for your business. If you then put an hourly rate against that, then all of a sudden, a resource at eight, 10, 20 dollars an hour seems really reasonable and it’s really easy to get a return.

Now the second part of this is if I invest, we’ll just use the scenario of a VA where the investment’s $10 an hour.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  If I invest in $10 an hour and I can offload certain tasks which frees me up to then go and focus in on the most important money-making activities – so more marketing, more selling, more proposals, whatever it might be in your business. As long as that time is re-invested in that way, into those important tasks, the return becomes infinite.

Setting your Virtual Assistant up to win

Barbara:  Yeah. Now I’ve got something to just intersect here with and again I know what the answer to this is, but I know that some of our clients would come back and say, I get that but I’m spending all of my time training the VA. So let’s say your time is more at the $150 an hour or whatever and your VA is $10 an hour. And some clients don’t realise that there is a transition phase where yes, you will still be using your time or maybe a substantial portion of your time still while you’re transitioning to a VA at $10 an hour.

So it’s not going to happen overnight. So how do you sort of get people past that? That is a mindset issue.

Matt:  Hundred percent. There’s two sides to that. First and foremost is the immediate tasks I want to leverage to a VA and delegate to them are the tasks that they’ve identified in the interview process that they can do without thinking. They’re already trained in. So what you’ll find is that in most instances, there’s probably five to 10 hours worth of work a week that they can do without very much training because they’re already trained in those things.

Secondly, that is to look at, well for every hour that I invest and you may want to set a little target around this. Let’s say I’m going to invest, we’ll just use some simple math. Let’s say it’s 10 hours a week and on that $150 an hour, so I’m going to invest $1,500 a week of my time to train this person and set them up to win, knowing that if I do this consistently for say, six to eight weeks that at the end of that six to eight weeks, they’re going to be able to do these other eight tasks and I’m going to buy back another 10 to 15 hours a week.

Barbara:  Yeah that’s a great way of looking at it because I think it’s a more realistic way of looking at it as well. You know, one of the challenges I face in the market and I saw it again, I saw a webinar where someone in America talking about VA’s and you know, she just made it sound so easy. You just all you got to do is this, this and this. And really, you know with any team member, it doesn’t matter where they are in the world unless you’re hiring a specialist who is, can step in and just take something over for you. If you’re hiring someone who’s on a lower level, like a VA or an assistant or whatever, you need to allow time for this transition process to happen.

As Matt, you’ve done it in your business. I’ve done it over and over and over and over again in my business obviously and I just cannot tell people enough how good the dividends are that you get paid in the end, once you focus on this transition time and accept that it is an investment of your time, that you have to invest to get this right. And the dividends will be higher than if you didn’t do this at all. If you just continued to do everything yourself.

Matt:  Absolutely. And then I think we need to put things into perspective with this, Barb. Which is, if my time is worth $150 an hour and I’m investing in someone at $10 an hour, even if it takes them three times the amount of time it takes me, I’m still way ahead.

Barbara:  Absolutely. Absolutely.

Matt:  And that’s never considered in what I see. Because everyone wants their VA to do it as quick or quicker than what they do. And they don’t have the experience and they don’t have the skill yet to be able to do that. So I remember my mindset coming into a virtual assistant, I worked it out, my first VA, I had a part-time VA many, many moons ago and the investment was $250 a month, part time. And I just had the mindset that, you know what, if I was to employ someone locally it was going to cost me $30 an hour, so if I got eight hours of productivity a month out of that person, that was break even and anything above that was a bonus.

Barbara:  You know what, I’ve actually had people on my team that … I’ve had people on my team idle for six weeks. In January I basically said to them all, look, I gave them all a couple projects to do and things to work on and I basically said look, I’m away. I don’t expect you to be working all the time, just report in on these particular projects. And the reason I was happy to do that was because I also thought, well they push hard all year, am I going to be stressing myself trying to worry … Am I getting every squeeze the lemon for every minute of time that I’m paying for, or do I just say, look it’s January, you know I’m away … Just do these projects and let’s reconvene in February and it worked a dream. Because everybody came back alive, rested, enthusiastic for the year ahead. It worked really well for me. So I don’t see clients doing that very often, and I think that pays dividends as well. Again, that’s a mindset thing though.

Misconception of the super VA

Matt:  Absolutely. Absolutely and so I think the … I think we also, well I see often and Barb I know you and I talk about this, is this misconception around, and we mentioned it earlier on this whole super VA, how virtual assistants are people. If you employ them in your office of they’re sitting in the Philippines or somewhere else in the world, they’re a person, they’ve got specific skills, they’re going to make mistakes. They’re going to have to go through a learning process. And I think it’s just setting these realistic expectations of yourself and of them right from the start.

You’ve got … One little exercise that I do with clients regularly is I say take your pen in your non-writing hand and write your name. And you know, for most people have been writing our name with our natural writing hand since we were, I don’t know, maybe four or five years old, maybe younger. You take your non-writing hand and you do that, and you’ve got to think about that. Even though you know how to spell your name and even though you know how to write and for many of you, hiring a team member whether it’s locally or overseas, it’s the first time you’ve done this. And it’s like writing your name with your left hand.

Now if I asked you to write your name with your left hand just every now and then you’ll probably find, number one, you’ll have to do it quite slow. Number two, it’s a bit messy, it’s not neat and it feels awkward. Then if I ask you to do it with your natural writing hand, you could probably do it with your eyes shut and it would be neat because you’ve been doing it repetitively over time, every day, every day, every day.

So what you’ve got to understand is if you want to bring a VA or any team member and have them work, and have them do the things you need them to do, delegate well, train them, etc. It’s practise for you as much as it is for them. Because this is like you writing your name with your left hand.

Speeding up the transition process

Barbara:  And Matt, you know, another area of your book which I just love, which I was thinking as you were talking there it leads us into this. If people want to make this faster, let’s say you want to make this transition period a little bit faster, what my recommendation and I know yours, your book dissects this, is, if your processes are rock-solid, now I’m talking you can give them to anyone and they can successfully do that process for you, it’s going to be much faster and you’re going to get to return on investment much faster than someone whose business is kind of all over the place with no systems, no processes and you’ve never really thought about how you do things.

Matt:  It’s the recipe for success because you’ve downloaded from your head your knowledge on how you want something done. It’s like baking a cake, isn’t it? You get the ingredients, you follow the recipe and if you do it consistently you’ll get the same outcome.

Barbara:  Yeah. Absolutely. Now I know Matt in future shows we’re going to be getting more into the strategies you talk about in your book and dissecting them even more because it’s just so pivotal, so do you want to give us a quick … I think to maybe end this but, do you want to give us a quick synopsis of the book and what’s to come in our future shows?

A bit about Matt’s book – The Stop Doing List

Matt:  Sure. Sure. Absolutely, so the book was written for the intention of helping, around this topic of what can my VA do? Or how do I actually continue to focus on growing my business? And so over the years I understood and through working with many people that it’s more about what you stop doing, than it is about what you do. And when you focus on what you stop doing, you then have more time to focus on what I term your ‘genius’ in the book.

So the book is a system. It systematically shows you the mindsets that are essential and need to be adopted in order to succeed in leveraging and delegating. It then helps you to identify all of the tasks that you’d love to leverage or delegate. It helps you identify what your genius is, but then most importantly, I’ve developed a system to help you then take that list and actually stop doing it. And this is all around imparting knowledge with people, training them, building the systems, utilising technology, but then more importantly it’s all about how do you give a team member permission to take responsibility for the tasks or their role. And then how do you manage them. It’s a combination of all of these that really leads to somebody’s success, or failure, in leveraging and stop doing.

I think that one thing that I talk about in the book and I want to leave everyone with this because it’s so important. If all you did today was start, have a piece of paper next to you and every little thing that you did, you started to document and note, do I love doing this? Or would I rather someone else doing this? Very, very quickly you’ll have a clear job description of what you would have somebody else doing for you. And what the book does is it takes that list and then teaches you how to stop doing those things forever.

Barbara:  You know Matt, for the listeners out there, this is one of the reasons, you know a Virtual Angel Hubwe’re working very closely with Matt because on this, on the concepts and the systems he’s built through the stop doing list book, because it’s so pivotal to the clients we see getting success versus the clients who fail. The ones who actually follow this kind of system that we propose as well get a lot of success, so yes … Fantastic. And there’s nothing out there in the market like this, not really. There’s a lot of focus on delegating and start-ups and scaling businesses and growth, marketing, all these things, but a lot of people get left kind of hanging when it comes to this ‘internal leverage’ as I like to call it that you get from getting a well-oiled machine going in your business. And your book framework deals with that.

So where can we get the book? It’s out now isn’t it? In the airport?

Matt:  So yeah, first of all you can go to stopdoing.com.au and learn a little bit more about it, but also too it’s available in Booktopia, it’s available in Dymocks and other online retailers also.

Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Yeah and we’re going to have little, we’ll have all the links in the show notes and I’d encourage anyone, I’m about to dive into reading the book completely because it’s just come out now so I’m very excited about looking at what I can implement in my business from the book. Listen, Matt, it’s been great, thanks so much for those tips today, as always. It’s like free coaching on this call which is just amazing. So to the listeners, thanks again for tuning in. If you’ve got any comments, please leave us a comment below or on iTunes if you can subscribe to the show and leave us a review and a rating, we’d love to hear from you and it helps to get the show out to more people which would be really helpful.

Matt:  And also too, send in what you’d love to hear more about, because Barbara and I are constantly conversing on what are the challenges we’ve helped our clients with, what are we hearing people wanting to learn more about. Please feel free to put comments around that because we’d love to make sure that we can fulfill what it is that you’re looking to learn on this show also.

Barbara:  Yeah we’ll do shows on that. Great. Well, listen, thanks, Matt. Until next time, thanks, listeners. We’ll see you then.

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.

Some of the areas covered include:

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:

VSS Episode 17: How to Expand Your Business, Rather than Contract it, when Important Life Events or Business Goals Result in You Having to Take a Back Seat in the Day-to-Day Operation of Your Business

The Four Hour Work Week

Asana

In this episode:

01:42 – About Elle

03:10 – Taking the plunge into the VA world

05:18 – Challenges in the early days

09:37 – Challenges faced on-boarding a new VA

11:10 – Speak up when things aren’t going well

12:06 – All processes are evolutionary

14:07 – More time to work on your business vision

15:44 – The importance of sound internal processes

18:40 – Communication is key

21:40 – The importance of using project management tools

24:38 – Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success Show. Today I am flying completely solo again, my co-host Matt Malouf is not going to be on this show today. He has been doing some epic work with some clients, and I am just doing a couple of shows by myself.

So it’s Barbara Turley here and I’m delighted with the guest that we have on today because she is one of the longest standing members actually of Virtual Angel Hub, the company that I run where we recruit, train and manage VAs.

Elle Kealy, she is the founder of Rebelle, which is an amazing online health and fitness coaching business for women. A beautiful platform that is just about to launch an on-demand video streaming platform, I guess, where we can find beautiful fitness and health strategies and tips online for ourselves as women.

So Elle, welcome to the show.

Elle:  Hi Barbara! Welcome, thank you so much for having me.

Barbara:  Yeah, and look, you know you’re probably going to explain this a lot better than me, but I’m really keen first of all to kick off and, just tell us a little bit about the business and … You were raised up in Hong Kong, so tell us about …

Elle:  Yeah

Barbara:  …. tell us about, you know, your journey there and how this business started and where you’re at now.

About Elle

Elle:  Sure. So I’m actually originally from the UK if you can’t guess from my accent.

Barbara:  Yes.

Elle:  Found myself living in Asia about 10 years ago, so, I’ve been here a while. But my business is actually a global business. I made the decision to go online because I am global, because I travel a lot, and now I run Rebelle, which is an online fitness and nutrition coaching business, exclusively for women, which I think you just mentioned.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Elle:  And you know the grand vision really for this business is to be able to support women from all over the globe, which is why we made the decision to launch an online business. In revolutionising, you know, their approach to health and fitness, and to make being in great shape easy. And so this is something I’ve been working on for quite a while now actually. I’ve been in the industry, in one form or another for nearly twenty years, but it’s only been in the last couple of years that we decided to make it more of an online focus.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Elle:  And actually that’s when I found you guys at Virtual Angel Hub as well. So yeah, no it’s really exciting and we’ve got clients from all over the world as well, so.

Barbara:  Yeah. Amazing. The online thing is just fantastic once you can crack the code on it.

Elle:  Yeah.

Barbara:  Now obviously, so, you know, when you came and found us, I mean, it sounds to me like you sort of went the VA route pretty early on. So can you just tell me quickly and just for the listeners, like how did you … first of all how did you find about the VA thing, getting a virtual assistant, and what was the thing that made you decide that you were going take the plunge into this.

Taking the plunge into the VA world

Elle:  Yeah. So I was essentially a solopreneur, I think my philosophy for when you’re starting out, and I was doing everything myself. I think we’ve all been there, you know when you’re trying to build a business and you want things done to, you know, your way or the highway. And I was, I got to the point where I realised I literally had no time to build this vision that I had created, because I was stuck in minutiae and I was getting really stressed and I was doing, you know, small tasks every single day. I hadn’t learned at that point the art of delegation at all, and so I just really, I wasn’t moving forwards. And so I actually learned about, I didn’t know what a VA was until I read The Four Hour Work Week.

Barbara:  So many people start there, it’s like the holy grail.

Elle:  That was exactly where I started, like, this is amazing, I need this in my life. And, you know I can work four hours a week and everything’s going to be grand…it’s not like that. And so, that was when I decided that I needed to actually get some help with the repetitive tasks that I didn’t need to be doing, because I think I sat down and figured out that, you know what the value of my time was and how much time I was spending on things that would actually cost me less to outsource so I could work on other more…

…financially lucrative parts of the business. And so my first foray into having a VA was with another company actually, it wasn’t with you guys. And I didn’t have any clue what I was doing, and that was a couple of years ago. And it was, I think after that, that had some issues, shall we say, it wasn’t quite as easy as they make out in The Four Hour Work Week.

Barbara:  No, it’s not. And that’s I think, you know, one of the reasons we have this show, is you know, is because we want to try and expose some of those challenges and really help people to get through that. Because it isn’t as easy as people think at all, but very lucrative when you do when you get it right. So …

Elle:  Yeah exactly. It’s definitely helped me, it definitely helped me achieve what I wanted to achieve in the long run, now that I’ve gone through that process and come out the other side.

Challenges in the early days

Barbara:  So talk to me about, so that first foray into it, talk to me about some of those early challenges that you had, like what was the biggest sort of challenge that you faced.

Elle:  So I think at the beginning I had absolutely no idea how to hire a VA.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Elle:  I didn’t really know what I wanted them to do. Or how I was going structure them to do this work. So I guess the thing I was most concerned about at the beginning was “This is going to take me loads of time, you know I’m going to spend … it’s just quicker…” I had that classic “It’s just quicker for me to do it myself”.

Barbara:  Yeah and you know initially it always is. It is quicker for you to do it yourself.

Elle:  Yeah.

Barbara:  But I always say to people, like, the challenge with that one is, and it could be quicker to do it yourself for the following few months, but in twelve month’s time you’ll still be doing it yourself and your business won’t have moved forward. So that’s the…

Elle:  Yeah.

Barbara:  …So many people get stuck in that mindset. So I’m keen to, how did you, because this could’ve tripped you up if you had all these challenges in the beginning and it didn’t go that well, you could very easily run back to going ‘Oh that just doesn’t work for me, the outsourcing thing’.

Elle:  Yeah. I think what happened was … there’re lots of different ways of hiring your VA obviously, whether you do it individually or if you go through an agency and there’re lots of different companies out there. And I went with somebody that didn’t really, you know, it was mass market, there was no specialisation with my VA being matched to the skills that I needed for my business.

So I was just assigned somebody who was…very junior and probably would’ve taken me a lot more time to train in the basic skills that I needed them to be across. And so things like … I’m not a details-oriented person, in fact to be honest, I’m an ideas person. Details are not my thing.

Barbara:  Most entrepreneurs would be the same, though.

Elle:  I know.

Barbara:  That’s, that’s the classic sort of thing with entrepreneurship.

Elle:  Yeah. So I needed somebody who was really all over the details and the processes and the admin, and I found that that wasn’t what I was getting with the original service that I’d signed up for. So there was just, it was just very generic, there was no systems, it was very difficult to manage for me and as someone who’d never had a VA before, I think that really tripped me up. Maybe if I’d had a bit more managerial experience in this area, I may have not made those mistakes back in the beginning.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Elle:  But I think that was something that I really quickly realised this wasn’t going to work.

Barbara:  Do you think … I mean I think what a lot of people do, particularly when they do read The Four Hour Work Week, which you know, was a fantastic book and all that, but a lot of people sort of just think “Oh my god, that’s the answer, I need to get a VA”, when actually there’s a lot of work to do before you get a VA to make that actually work. So, you know, the VA is kind of the, is a piece of the puzzle but there’s a lot to do in terms of your own set up so that you can get success with a VA, which is a totally different thing.

Elle:  Yeah, and I think that was what I was missing. And so then I heard about you, because I was working with Jane Copeland, and even though I’m based in Hong Kong, she did an event down in Sydney and I flew into Australia and you were speaking at the event.

Barbara:  Ah that’s right, yes.

Elle:  Yeah, and so I heard you talk about your approach to hiring VAs. And because of the experience that I’d had previously, I just thought that’s what I was missing. This is the part that I was missing, you know, all of that preparation, all of that actual thought about what it goes into, what you need to do to your business, what you need to prepare on your end and your systems, and the communication to make this a relationship that actually works. And so that’s when I decided to reach out to you as well. So…

Barbara:  Great, yeah. I mean that’s interesting, you know, to sort of delve into that because I think … You know my own experience, I mean, as you know I started out, I was business coaching for a long time when I saw a lot of people fail with VAs actually. So that was why I realised that actually the real problem out there is not necessarily getting a VA, it’s how to structure, people don’t know how to do this properly. And I guess that’s something that we, that I, you know, built successfully Virtual Angel Hub for clients like you, and that’s why we have clients for so long, I guess.

So now let’s talk about though the sort of elephant in the room is when you first joined, it was probably in the very early days of Virtual Angel Hub. We had sort of, we were only I think a few months in really, at the point when you joined the company, and your first, you’ve had a couple of VAs through us, so it took a while to actually…

Elle:  Yeah.

Barbara:  Even with the extensive work that we do, it took a while to get this right. So talk to me about the first challenges that you had with the first VA.

Challenges faced onboarding a new VA

Elle:  So…we had, I mean, one of the things I think is really useful for me is the onboarding process for clients that you have.

Barbara:  Yes.

Elle:  And anyone who’s worked with you would know as well you go through significant training at the beginning to kind of help you get your end of stuff in order. And so even having done all of that, when I first started working with my first VA, who I had chosen, so I’d interviewed several, and really liked this woman actually. She just, I thought she was going to be a good fit for me. And at first things were fine, but I think what I found was that when I’m trying to think back actually to what issues…

Barbara:  Yeah

Elle:  I think there were processes that weren’t being followed, and guidelines and things that just weren’t, stuff just wasn’t happening in the way that it should’ve been happening.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Elle:  And so that was frustrating, and so that didn’t work out. And actually you guys were great because, when she left, what was really good was that I didn’t have no-one. You guys actually supported me and gave me access to one of your VAs…

Barbara:  Yeah.

Elle:  …to help my business kind of tick through while I was interviewing other people as well. So that’s something that I think wouldn’t have happened, you know, had I done it alone, so to speak.

Barbara:  Yeah. That’s crucial for us that we kind of make sure that there’s no blip in the client’s business as much as we can possibly manage, and we usually put in somebody very experienced to go in and sort of just take the reins for a little while.

Speak up when things aren’t going well

Elle:  … when things aren’t going well I think it’s really tempting to think ‘oh you know it’s going to be really difficult for me to change this, it’s going to be really difficult for me to fix this, so I’ll put up with it for a bit’. Or you know, just make it work because it’s too much hassle.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Elle:  And I think that’s not the right mindset to have. I think if there is an issue, it really helps to be able to fix it, fast.

Barbara:  Yeah. Fix it fast. And realise that you know, in my experience anyway, when someone starts to act up or there’re failures happening, and you know, holes happening all over the place, you can sort of fix it if it only happens a couple times but typically if it’s going on, once a failure always a failure in my opinion, and sometimes you just have to move on. So we’re pretty quick at getting in there and saying ‘look’. We’ve had some clients where we’ve said, they say ‘Oh maybe I can do this and make it work”, we’ve gone ‘No, let’s just move on”. We know because we’ve had experience with this.

Elle:  Yeah.

All processes are evolutionary

Barbara :  So, but one thing I want the listeners to kind of get from this little part of the conversation is that, even us as a company at Virtual Angel Hub, like we learned, we had a couple of these situations happen like what happened to you Elle with that first VA, where we had gone through an extensive recruiting process, we had built this massive recruiting funnel that is quite hard to get through. We had a massive training programme that all VAs have to go through, but we had, even though we were doing this, we still, this particular VA, the work ethic was a bit low. To be honest, and the focus and all that was a bit low. So we realised then that even with all that work, and this is for anyone trying to hire direct as well. Sometimes a VA can come on, say all the right things, have the right experience, the right resume, the right everything, and still make a mess of things. Because you’ve got to have a way of teasing out what kind of person are they. So there’s a … we had to refine our process even more after those particular situations so that we could weed out the kind of personality profiles that we don’t really think work.

Elle:  Mmmm.

Barbara:  So that was a whole extensive piece of work that we had to do, you know after we had these initial problems that came up. So we evolved our process to manage for that. And the other thing I’d like to add there for anyone listening is that you know, evolving your process is a great thing, so when mistakes or real mess-ups happen, often people will just run away and not do the thing anymore. Whereas my view is, well look at the process and go ‘how do I now fix this process to make sure that doesn’t happen again’, with my next person or with the same person, whatever. So you know all processes are an evolutionary thing.

So then let’s talk about, so then we finally got success. We got you a fantastic VA who you’re flying high with right now because I see the feedback…

Elle:  Yes. She’s amazing.

Barbara:  Yeah. We loved her in training. You know, I know your VA quite well, and her brother actually works for us as well. So they’re a fantastic family.

Now talk to me then about, you get a great VA, it’s all humming. So how has that changed your ability to bring your vision more to life in your business.

More time to work on your business vision

Elle:  Right yeah, so. I mean, Sheeka is incredible and I have to thank you because actually, you guys made me hire her. I think there was, in the end, I gave up interviewing people and Barbara said ‘You have to hire Sheeka she’s amazing” and she is. And I think what’s really happened to me, and how this has transformed my business and even my day to day, is that I have more time to concentrate on the drivers of my business…

Barbara:  Yeah.

Elle:  …instead of getting bogged down with implementing these routine tasks. So, essentially I’ve been able to move a lot faster, launch, you know, projects quicker, and the bottom line is that it’s actually made more money because I’ve been able to get these, you know, programmes that I’ve launched … in the previous year I’ve had a lot of different programmes out there. Sheeka put all of those together.

I’m less stressed and I’ve actually been able to, I travel a lot as you know, I’m international so I have family all over the world and I travel a lot for work as well. And so one of the things that’s been super helpful for me is enabling me to do that and still have my business run in the background. So previously, everything would stop if I was, you know, not at my computer doing whatever it is I needed to be doing. Whereas now, that my VA has taken on all of those processes, and I can be on the other side of the world teaching a workshop or whatever it is, and she’s still making things tick over as if I’m still there. So, that is hugely hugely liberating.

Barbara:  Absolutely yeah. I mean, I know that … I mean I experience that every day in my own business. I mean I’ve just had a baby and my business kept growing, without me. It actually grew more while I wasn’t there than it ever did when I was there, so, which was an interesting experience.

The importance of sound internal processes

I want to talk here a little bit about, you know, yes you’ve got a great person, and yes she came through our training so she had a quite a lot of, a good backbone in online marketing implementation sort of strategies from us before she went to you. But you also put a lot of work into your own internal processes, how things work. So how important has that been in your success even when you got a good VA.

Elle:  I would say it’s vital, and actually for me, in honesty, it’s still a work in progress.

Barbara:  It always is. It always is. Mine are still evolving as well, it never stops, I’ll be honest with you.

Elle:  Yeah. The more you can create a process for everything you do, and document everything you do and refine those processes, the easier your life becomes in the long run. I know that’s something that you actually teach…

Barbara:  Yes.

Elle:  …but I would say you cannot underestimate how important that is. And even if you don’t have a VA now, one of the things I would say to myself if I could go back a year would be, you know, “Even if you’re doing things yourself, document the process“. Because when you do bring someone else on board, whether it’s a VA or another member of your team or whatever it is, having those processes and that documentation in place just speeds up the entire process, it makes it a lot smoother.

Barbara:  And look if anyone’s interested in knowing, it is a bit of a process to do that. But, Matt and I did a show a little while ago, and it’s up on the virtualsuccessshow.com website and up on iTunes, where Matt actually interviewed me about the process of how I fired myself from my own business because I was about to have a baby. So I went through a sort of a five-step plan around how I actually did it. And even though I had been very good at delegating and I had, you know, I bang on about processes all the time, what I actually realised was when I went to do this big job, this project, I was still quite involved in every process in the business, even still. There was a little, I had my fingers in everything and this sort of … I guess the holy grail is how do you eventually take your fingers out of everything, but yet keep control of your entire business.

So that’s where you can really go with this, and that’s why that evolution of process and as you go more global with your business, you’re going to find that’s going to start happening for you as well, where you’re going to have to start looking at that.

Elle:  Yeah that’s definitely something that I’m focusing on looking at, and actually, my VA herself has been great at being able to document stuff that she does regularly. I think going back and reviewing those processes certainly I would love to be able to take myself out of certain tasks. And I think a lot of that is in your head as well, and letting go of that control. So initially before I hired a VA, we all have that kind of, you know, “This business is my baby and things have to be done my way” …

Barbara:  Of course, yeah.

Elle:  That also is a process. Really think about, I would say really think about what you absolutely need to do and then what you would quite like to have a finger on the pie in…

Barbara:  Yeah.

Elle:  …and then really what you don’t need to be doing. And be really honest about that as well.

Communication is key

Barbara:  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now I want to talk a little bit quickly about communication, because one of the biggest challenges that we see even after like, you know, recruiting, training, processes, systems, all that sort of stuff, communication between anyone on a team, and this is not just for virtual teams, this is really in marriage or anything, but, communication can make or break anything.

So how do you and Sheeka make sure, how do you communicate – do you communicate every day, do you talk on Skype, do you have project management systems, how do you keep the communication flow going without bogging down your day.

Elle:  Yeah so I think I’m quite hands off with my VA, and I prefer to work that way. So we have a weekly meeting on Skype where I’ll just call her and we’ll check in together and I’ll ask her if she has any questions on anything that she knows she’s working on or has been working on in the past week so we can clarify it. We use project management software, so we use Asana, which is just a lifesaver.

Barbara:  Were you using it before you had the training with us?

Elle:  No, you introduced me to this and it has revolutionised my world.

Barbara:  I’m so glad to hear you say that because for me if I didn’t have Asana, I mean … high five to Asana. They’re just an unbelievable, Asana.com, business. I mean I run, my entire business runs off that, between that and Ontraport. My whole business runs, so it does change your life.

Elle:  So, I put everything into Asana, I have the app on my phones, even if I’m not in the office, if I suddenly think of something that I’ve forgotten to do or that I needed to do, I can just quickly create a task on the go and she’ll pick that up. So we communicate through Asana and if she has anything that’s pressing, like if she has to ask me a question and it’s urgent, normally I’m on Skype so she can just drop me a quick Skype call or leave me a message on Skype and I get back to her as soon as possible.

And I think one of the reasons I am quite hands off is because what I do, I’m often with clients or I’m teaching a class or I’m filming. You know I’m not available on the phone 24-7, I’m not sitting in an office at the end of a computer able to talk all the time. And I think for me an ideal situation with my VA is where they don’t need to talk to me all the time, but we have those communication channels in case there is issues, and we have those open … you know, open ability to ask questions and clarify things when needed.

Barbara:  I think your weekly meeting is vital as well. I mean … I’ll be honest, there are VAs that I work with that I don’t have weekly meetings with. I mean we just, we talk every day but it’s through Asana. So it’s task-based, it’s stuff, it’s strategy based, and sometimes we might not have a meeting for three weeks. But we’ve actually had quite a lot of dialogue on various things going on, so it’s all on Asana. And I’m the same with you, I do it on my phone. It’s a lot…

Elle:  Yeah.

Barbara:  …based on my phone. So I think it’s really important though, for the listeners to realise that you can be really hands-off, but you still need to have project management tools. And you need a way of kind of … your processes need to be … the VA need to be able to run them by themselves but you still need to communicating a little bit and getting reporting back.

So…does Sheeka, does she report back to you on stuff when it’s done, deadlines that are looming, all that sort of thing, how do you keep things moving in that way.

The importance of using project management tools

Elle:  Yeah, exactly. So what I really love about Asana is the ability to actually follow projects as you go. So we like you, where we’ll communicate in Asana about every single task that’s going on, and at the end of the day she sends me a report on what she’s been working on so I can see what she’s covered, and I review at the end of my day, which is after she’s finished. I will review what she’s done and go through anything that she’s been working on that I need to look at and I can follow up and just comment really quickly in that software if anything needs to be changed or not.

So, we have a review process which is daily. I might not get around to actually reviewing everything daily but I certainly do it every couple of days depending on my workload.

Barbara:  Yeah. But I love the fact that you said we have a review process, because you know there’s the processes for how everything’s done in your business, and this is something I want the listeners to really pick up here, there’re the processes for how everything’s done but I think where a lot of stuff starts to fall over with some outsourcing and virtual sort of teams, is when there is no reporting back or review process. So as a business owner, I mean, you can fire yourself from all the processes, but you still need to have some level of oversight, which doesn’t take a lot of your time, but you still have to have that oversight process with your team. And for them to have, to feel like you’re still either, you know, guiding or mentoring or whatever way the review process goes. But they have to report back to you on results, otherwise it can become a bit mundane for everyone. And then holes start to appear. That’s good that you’ve got that.

Elle:  Yeah absolutely.

Barbara:  So talk to me about the future for Rebelle. Dot Club. ‘rebelle.club’ is the website. So talk to me about the upcoming year that you’ve got going on.

Elle:  Yes. Yeah, so this year we’re going to be launching our new video on demand subscription service. So Rebelle is currently a 10-week makeover, so lifestyle, fitness, nutrition makeover for busy women. And we’ve been running that online for some time, but I’m so excited to be launching this video on demand, subscription service because it’s just going to be able to take what we do to the next level and reach more people and make it easier to access really high-quality workouts.

So I’m going to be working not just with me this year but with other experts in health and fitness and women’s health and fitness, all over the world. And I can’t wait to actually share this with everyone.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Elle:  This is going to be launching in a few months.

Barbara:  Yeah so where do people go if they want to find out more about your work and they want to get onto this, is there a waiting list for your video streaming? Maybe you should…

Elle:  There is a waiting list. Yeah, so they can sign up actually. We’re having a free trial for those people who are on the waiting list. So if they go to rebelle.club, so R E B E L L E, dot club, then there is a link there which they can sign up to add themselves to the waiting list and they’ll get notification to trial it for free as soon as it’s released.

Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Fantastic. And look, listeners, we’ll have all this stuff in the, all the links and the show notes of the show … so I’ve referred to a couple of podcasts and a couple of tools, and obviously Elle’s amazing new platform. So we’ll have all the links in the show notes.

Listen Elle thank you so much for coming on the show. The insights you’ve shared today, it’s really good for us to get these real world case studies and experiences of people who are really getting massive success with VAs, but also talking about … it is challenging, and there has been challenges to get where you are, but you’re killing it now. So that’s the goal, and you know, we’ve helped you get your business to that level, so we’re very excited to be showcasing you today on the show.

Elle:  Fantastic, thank you so much for having me.

Barbara:  Yeah. Thanks listeners and we’ll be back, Matt and I, next week with some more virtual success. Thanks very much.

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.

In this episode, Intuitive Motherhood & Embodied Parenting Coach & Speaker Maria Golding, talks us through how she has built a team of virtual specialists to assist her in achieving her business, and personal, goals. 

 Some of the areas covered include:

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

In this episode:

01:47 – About Maria

04:26 – Why Maria sought help

06:41 – Accepting sound advice

07:16 – The importance of having specialists on your team

09:45 – Expanding, rather than contracting, your business

10:46 – Business automation

11:27 – Having a VA with the correct training and support

13:04 – Identifying your genius…and letting go

14:15 – Transitioning to a new VA

17:20 – Following the success formula

20:30 – Facing your fears

23:08 – Maria’s advice for overcoming your fears

25:43 – Wrapping things up

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

Matt:  I’m well Barb, and yourself?

Barbara:  Very well, thank you. Sweating in this constant heat that we’re having. We’re still having this heat in Sydney as we record today.

Matt:  Yes, it’s brilliant though. It’s better than wet, freezing, or any other type of weather there could be. I love it.

Barbara:  Well, you know though, I’m just back … I had the joy of spending Christmas in Europe this year and I spent six weeks in Europe, and some of that was spent in the French Alps. It was minus 20, but blue skies and snowing. And it was amazing. It was a beautiful … like red wine, big fires, cold outside, very very nice. So there is joy in cold weather too.

Matt:  Beautiful. I’m looking forward to today’s episode Barb.

Barbara:  Yeah. Me too, me too. I mean look, for listeners out there, hands up. I know so many people want to launch online programmes, and it can be… Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker is probably the most overwhelming thing that you will ever do. I know I’ve done it. Lots of people try and pull it off, and it’s a huge job to do. Particularly when you’ve got no real experience with technology, systems, VAs, strategists, or any of this sort of thing.

About Maria

So today’s show, we’re going to talk to a Virtual Angel Hub member, Maria. And Maria runs a beautiful programme called Intuitive Motherhood. And she was someone who came to us looking for a VA, and I think she was just about to throw the towel in on all this online stuff, because it’s so difficult. And we actually spoke on the phone. She very kindly sent in this support ticket asking for some help around platforms, and I spoke to her and I gave her some advice around the things that she needed to do if she wanted to launch her programme. She needed a strategist, a VA, and a system like Ontraport, which is what she ended up taking on.

But the beauty of this story that we’re going to share with you today is that then she told me her timeline for her launch, and she had announced that her launch was supposed to be the beginning of November. And this was the end of September that we were talking. So Maria, welcome to the show.

Maria:  Thank you Barb. It’s fascinating just to listen to my journey through someone else’s eyes.

Barbara:  Yes. So let’s start at the end. I’m going to start at the end of the story.

Maria:  Okay.

Barbara:  I know what happened, but tell the listeners. Your programme launched, pretty much on time, and you didn’t have a nervous breakdown. But how many weeks was it from when we spoke to a successful launch? So you sold programmes in this thing as well, and people came in and bought it. And you had a very successful programme. Roughly how long was the time period?

Maria:  Well, by the time we started and then we ran the programme which was six weeks, it was like I said, beginning of October right through … only until the middle of December, was the whole phase. So it was only weeks. Yeah, it was pretty intense.

Barbara:  Middle of December. Just for the listeners, middle of December was the end of the six-week programme. So you launched basically beginning of November. So that’s no easy feat. Even for someone with lots of experience. And I sort of had told you, “Look, you know this is going to be tight, but if you want to do this, here’s what you need to do.” And the beauty of what we’re about to share today is first of all, the steps that Maria took, but also the fact that she let go and she actually listened to the advice that she got and she implemented absolutely everything that she was told to do. And because of that, she had a successful launch. Maybe a bit stressful along the way. What do you think, Maria? Little bit of stress?

Maria:  Yeah, very much so. It was one of those things that I absolutely needed to do. It was important for me to do that for the sake of the essence of the programme. I already made that commitment to myself.

Barbara:  So tell me when we spoke, what stage were you at? Where was your thinking? You had a VA at this point.

Maria:  Yes.

Barbara:  You had a great VA, but what were the problems? Where were the challenges really occurring for you at this point?

Why Maria sought help

Maria:  Well the problem was really that I’d gone off track. I really didn’t have a clear plan of what I was doing. I wanted to launch my programme in the year and it was all new to me, the whole business thing really. I’m a clinician, and I’m very good at that, and a creative as well, and very much an intuitive. But as far as systems and processes, and all the left-brained approach to things, and IT was very much something I was completely unskilled at. So yes.

Barbara:  So your VA.

Maria:  Where were we at? Sorry Barb.

Barbara:  You had a great VA, right?

Maria:  Yes.

Barbara:  At this point you had a great VA. You got a great VA from us. And how did you guys work together?

Maria:  Yeah. So I came to you, and so what happened is we were working well together as far as introducing me really to business, and getting social media up and running. She was doing some great work. I had a website that came together during that time. We also did some webinars and things like that, but I really didn’t have a plan as to how I was going to sequentially roll out my programme, which I’d beta-tested the year before. And so, I’d come to a point where I was being side-tracked, I was doing some collaborative work. I wanted to do two things at once, and it really wasn’t okay to do that. I really needed to focus and to deliver this programme first. And so I came to you at that point where I was like, “Okay I’m not getting anywhere, I’m coaching but I’m not getting enough financial return for this to be viable. And I don’t feel confident in how to actually roll out the programme in a way … You know, using all the systems and processes in the online virtual world. That’s quite unknown to me.”

Matt:  And so, at that point Maria, what was the decision that you made?

Accepting sound advice

Maria:  Well the decision was to listen to what Barb’s advice was and get the Ontraport platform. And employ a strategist to actually help me focus and to help actually direct my VA as well as to what needed to happen for the programme to roll out. A launch funnel and the programme.

Matt:  Okay. So you put together, I’m guessing a plan? A comprehensive plan of what needed to happen?

The importance of having specialists on your team

Maria:   Well actually, there wasn’t any time for a comprehensive plan. It really just rolled from week to week, with the strategist, and I just trusted that I was being taken for this ride and I knew that she’d had a lot of experience. And so we would meet every week and she would tell us what to do next, and I think that was less overwhelming than actually … At that point, there was such a limited timeframe, so to actually just be taken by the hand week by week was probably the best approach for me.

Matt:  And was that you and your VA meeting with the strategist?

Maria:  Yes.

Matt:  Excellent.

Maria:  So we would meet—

Matt:  Sorry, you go.

Maria:  So we would meet quite often and she would give us the plan of what we needed to do next. So she was also helping my VA and explaining things to her and she video-recorded everything so she could look back on that. And some of it was totally above my head, but at least I knew that that was happening between those two. And then there was some things that was between me and her. So it worked out beautifully having this triad.

Matt:  I think that’s such an interesting point because too often, and I see this happening with coaching a lot, like I’ll work with the business owner and then the business owner tries to relay things to their team and the like, and it gets a little bit lost in translation. Being able to have your VA or relevant team members on a call with a strategist or a coach is invaluable, because that way everybody can hear it firsthand, everyone can ask questions direct to the person giving the advice. I think that’s really well-played.

Barbara:  And a strategist as well, if I could just comment. A really good strategist, for anybody out there looking to get one, is someone who is actually going to obviously create the strategy, but then there’s all the steps involved. So like Heather Porter, who I will say was the digital strategist who worked with Maria, a fantastic woman, you can find her online. She was very good also, had worked with a lot of our VAs, so she works with a lot of our clients who have VAs. And she’s very good at creating the task list that that VA needs to execute and knowing how to leave it within their skill sets without overwhelming your VA and making sure that this thing all comes together really really well.

Expanding, rather than contracting, your business

And what I want to point out here, and Maria you were ready to, maybe not throw the towel in, but what I typically see happening is somebody gets a VA, they try a product launch by themselves. It’s them and their VA. It doesn’t really work. They run out of money. They either blame the VA or don’t blame the VA but get rid of them anyway, and then they run back to doing everything themselves. And I want to commend Maria for facing that fear, and you actually went the other way and you expanded rather than contracted, which is something we talked about in a previous show that Matt and I did together about going into expansionary mode and not contracting into fear in this type of situation. Getting the right people around you and the right systems. So I know that Heather was pivotal to you and your VA getting success together, but also let’s talk about having a business automation and marketing platform like Ontraport. How pivotal was that in terms of making sure that your launch went ahead properly, and automated much as possible?

Business automation

Maria:  Yeah, I’m realising more and more how incredible a platform it is. And to be honest, it’s still something I haven’t had time yet to really know all the ins and outs of. I know that it’s helped segment lists, it’s been the place where we’ve been able to then create the online programme. There’s so much to it. I know that it’s brilliant and the great thing was I didn’t have to know all about it, my VA knew how to work it. And I just knew that it was the platform to use and that a lot of … it would take me to the next level in business.

Having a VA with the correct training and support

Barbara:  Now, how pivotal for you was it having a VA that was already trained on Ontraport and had our Virtual Angel Hub Ontraport specialist help desk behind her, so that when she had a problem she came to us and not to you? How pivotal was that?

Maria:  Absolutely. It just made all the difference to know that she could get the support that she needed as far as if she was unsure about something, because apparently it’s quite a comprehensive system, so there’s always something new to learn, particularly there’s so many aspects to launching a programme. So she was learning all the little bits and pieces even though she was already trained. But yes, it absolutely made such a big difference.

Barbara:  Yeah, so just for the listeners, I want to point out that the stuff we’re talking about here today … Look, it’s very hard to get VAs online that actually can cope with this kind of strategy and the speed of a launch like that. So really, what we specialise in at Virtual Angel Hub, and this is a shameless plug because I know how difficult this is, is we do actually specialise in VAs that can cope with that because we have support teams behind them that actually can step in and give support in a situation like this, for example. But you need to have a strategist. Because a VA can’t do this by themselves. Or you need to be the strategist yourself. That’s the key point I want to make here. And Matt I know that you would’ve seen this with clients that you coach, where again, they get a VA to do all the stuff, but they still run back to doing the launch plans themselves, when maybe that’s not their genius though.

Identifying your genius…and letting go

Matt:  Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it’s identifying that genius and then letting go, which is what Maria’s done. Maria’s acknowledged what her strengths are here and the things that she loves doing, and then surrounded herself with an amazing team to bring this to life.

Barbara:  So Maria, talk to me about … You went from, we spoke sort of mid-September, where you really very nervous, fearful, and you were going to throw the towel in on this thing. And then now you’ve launched. So how are you feeling today? And where is 2017 taking your business?

Maria:  I’m excited. I’m really excited. I feel like I’ve broken through something that was really … As I said, on so many levels, there was a lot of fear and the unknown. And I really knew that once I did it, I would see what was on the other side and here I am. I feel like I’ve got such a great foundation to now go again. And I’ve still got the same strategist, and I’m still with VAH, so even though we’ve had a transition … our Virtual Angel had to move on, so yeah.

Transitioning to a new VA

Barbara:  Interestingly, the original girl that worked with Maria is now having a baby. So actually, this has been quite interesting that she worked on this programme with you, because she learnt a lot about being an intuitive mother through your programme, and working on the programme.

And talk to me then about the transitions. So let’s talk about when your VA transitions. How has that transition gone for you? We got to the end of the programme and then your VA had to step out for a little while, because she’s pregnant and wants to cut back her hours, and we got you another VA who stepped in straight away. How has that new girl taken on the challenge, and how have you guys made sure that you get as seamless a transition as possible?

Maria:  So what we’ve done is that the original VA Joanne, she was amazing. So she put together some of the systems and processes that we used through the launch, and has documented those for the new VA to pick up. And that’s made all the difference. And she’s also been available for her to check in with, ask questions about my business, because she became so familiar with everything. And that was a big fear for me, having to move to a new person after I’d already had such a … You know, my business was so well-known by Joanne. So having also the VAH help desk as well, as a support, has been incredibly important and I’ve felt more confident knowing that that’s there. So it’s been really seamless, in a way. Of course it’s getting to know someone new, and getting that familiarity, so there’s some little bit of extra time that’s required, but I just … Yeah, it’s been seamless. And I’m now able to continue with my plan to launch three times this year. So we’re on track at the moment with that.

Barbara:  Now you mentioned processes. Now at the beginning of this call, you openly admitted that technology, platforms, and processes and systems were not your thing at all. How do you feel now about that? And how do you feel about the fact that you took it on, and how has it changed your life by embracing this, and sort of just bringing it into your business?

Maria:  I just really believe in it, and I just let myself be the student. And I’m still the student, and there’s still a long way for me to go with getting the processes all down pat and it’s been such a whirlwind time, just to … And I know the processes are there, and so that’s why it’s working. So for me and my VA to get more familiar and learn a little bit more about that as well. But it’s happening without me doing that. I just know that we’ve got them there, and we’re following them. So yeah, I think it’s imperative. I know it’s this whole new learning curve for me, and I trust it, and it’s working.

Barbara:  Matt, I’m so keen to hear your questions here, because your genius is systems and processes and coaching people through this, so …

Following the success formula

Matt:  You know what I’m loving, just in this conversation is, Maria, your openness to accepting that this is the best way to do it and just following it. It’s just so refreshing to hear, and I think to all the listeners listening, understanding that what Maria’s doing is following a success formula. Everything that she’s following, others have done before her, and she’s plugging into this success system, and putting the right people around her in order to achieve the goals that she wants to achieve. It’s just outstanding. I can’t stop smiling, it’s just so good to hear. It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant.

Maria:  Aw, I’m so grateful. I’m just so grateful. Because I know I couldn’t do this myself. It just shows the power of collaboration, and as I said, staying with your strengths and utilising expertise.

Barbara:  And yes it costs money to do it. You had to hire a strategist, but in terms of the dividends it’s going to pay back, I know you made money in the last launch, but you’re going to launch three times this year with the same strategy. So what kind of dividends is it paying for you? Financially, emotionally, mentally, it was so worth the money, I’m sure, to hire all these people.

Maria:  Yeah, absolutely. It feels to me like an investment, and because it’s my sole purpose work I have a commitment to that, so I’m really committed to following through with my life purpose and my passion. And so in that way, the dividends are immeasurable. And as far as my lifestyle and financially, I know that it will pay off. Well at the moment, I’ve got a lifestyle that I desire, because I’m not tied to a 9-5 job, and I’m feeling so much more alive because my creativity … I’m able to really access that and really create valuable contentthat’s making a huge difference to the mothers that are doing the programme. I feel so personally satisfied. As far as financially, I just believe that it will reward me, because I can see that so far I’ve trusted the strategies and it’s all worked. And once again, I’m going into the unknown, but I know it’s great work, I know it’s changing lives, and so I know that there’s a formula to the financial reward as well.

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s fabulous. I’m actually just brimming. I’m brimming. I’m feeling very warm and fuzzy about your experience because we were so involved in it. And it makes me … You know, I’ve just become a mother myself, so I know that your programme … I had just had Ruby at the time and I said to you, “This programme needs to get out there. You have to go for it. And you just got to get it out there.” So I’m just really, really glad that this all happened and that you trusted that what we said was true.

Maria:  Yes.

Facing your fears

Matt:  Maria, I’ve got one last question, just to wrap this whole thing up. Which is, what fears did you have to overcome through this process, as you went through? Putting these people on, trusting the strategies. What fears came up for you and how did you deal with that?

Maria:  Oh wow. I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with fears over the last number of years. A cancer experience, a pre-cancer experience, a child that’s been really unwell. He’s actually really unwell at the moment, and so I’m actually managing that as well as relaunching. So I use a lot of personal tools to actually manage my fears, my fears of not having money to support my family, my fears of not being here to be able to live my passions, my fears of everything. These are my biggest fears. The fears of pouring money into something that’s a failure. The fears of never quite having made it when I know that I’ve got it inside me. So it’s probably the deepest core fears that I’ve been facing, and I’ve had to walk my talk and use the skills and processes, and presence and awareness skills and everything that I can bring to the mothers that I’m coaching that I’m delivering the programme. I’ve had to walk myself. And I’m about embodiment, so I’m not surprised that I have to actually go through the process of facing my biggest fears, which a lot of mothers do. They face huge fears, and it can be such a stressful world for them and such a stressful and lonely time for them with their children. They can feel so disconnected from themselves and from each other, and from support systems.

Barbara:  You know Maria, as you’re talking there I’m thinking … And you’re talking about mothers, and I know that as business owners as well, when you’re on your own, and you will have felt this, all of those same things. You feel alone, you feel challenged, you feel desperately afraid, you’re awake at night. Because a business, it’s not like your baby, but the same sort of fears come up. So you’ve been feeling them double-fold. Like you’ve been feeling them in your personal life, in your delivery of your product to the mothers who have been feeling it, and then in taking on the challenge of business as well. And stepping up into what you have to do in order to deliver this business.

Maria:  Yeah.

Maria’s advice for overcoming your fears

Barbara:  So what advice would you give to somebody in business trying to get over those fears, who’s running back, who’s running away rather than … You know, they might fire the VA and just run back to kind of the smallness of what they were doing before, or getting a job. What would you say to those people who are feeling like that right now?

Maria:  Keep your eye on your vision. And keep it there, keep checking in so you are able to tune into yourself and go, “What is it that I really desire, that’s really important for my mind, body, spirit connection?” And have it there, even if you need to continue your job part-time, just take steps towards what you deeply, deeply desire. What’s really going to light you up in the long run and really has your best self out there in the world. And gradually take the leap. It’s going to be a lot, there’s going to be a lot of jumping off cliffs, it seems like, trusting that you’ll fly. And take the leap to yes, hire that next person, to take that next step to put yourself in a situation where you are around hearing wisdom around business, and what can support your dream.

So that’s why I think even your podcast series is so excellent because it gives all those little bits that are free, right? Someone can listen to this free, and just be learning bits and pieces, and then to eventually train yourself up to know enough to then take the next step. And train yourself up to know enough to take the next step. Sometimes it is, you know, just free falling, and going, “Okay, now take the plunge.” And there are sometimes where you just have to go, “Look, it’s worth the leap.” And then when you do that, be really focused. And get a strategist in sooner than later, because that was my mistake. I waited too long to do that. And get your team up. I really believe having the virtual assistant, particularly with Virtual Angel Hubbecause they’ve got backup and training behind them. And that I got trained as well, so if you’re like me and you haven’t had experience, then definitely go somewhere like that because that’s where you’ll get the training yourself and you know what you’re doing as far as what systems and processes to use, and you’re not just flailing around. So I think that’s my advice.

Wrapping things up

Matt:  Fantastic. Thank you so much Maria. That was brilliant.

Maria:  It’s my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

Barbara:  I know there’s going to be so many people who are trying to do this online, and I just think your story is fabulous to share. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And listeners, please comment on this show. Let us know if you’re feeling the things that Maria’s been talking about. Especially let us know if you’ve tried to get the people around you and also it’s failed, because sometimes you do have the people but you don’t have the right people. And we’d love to hear your thoughts on this show, so give us a rating oniTunes, give us a comment and review the show, and make sure you come back next week for more Virtual Success. Matt, have a great week. Maria, have a great week, and we’ll be back on the show next week.

Matt:  You too, Barb. Thank you again, Maria.

Maria:  Okay, thank you.

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

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

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In this episode:

01:50 – About Paul Higgins and TrackZEN

06:03 – Tips and strategies for getting outsourcing right

08:19 – Challenges faced when dealing with outsourcing countries

08:56 – Using virtual staff at TrackZEN

10:06 – The 3 key elements to managing a virtual team

11:44 – It’s up to the business owner to get these elements right

13:28 – Managing a large virtual team

15:43 – The challenges of managing a large virtual team

17:14 – Framework for success

21:53 – Paul’s future vision

23:18 – Paul’s top 2 tips on starting out with a VA

24:00 – Wrapping things up

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

Matt Malouf:  I’m well, Barbara. How are you?

Barbara Turley:  I’m great, thanks. I’m great, thanks.

Matt Malouf:  Excellent. It’s sweltering here in Sydney today.

Barbara Turley:  It is. Well, they’re talking about … They’re actually talking about power outages because all the people are using air conditioning. It’s awful.  You know, in the 15 years that I’ve lived here, I don’t think I remember a summer this hot. Ever.

Matt Malouf:   Nah. It’s brilliant. We’ll all be down at the beach later today.

Barbara Turley:  Yeah. All the international guests will be thinking, “Yeah, we really feel for you. It’s terrible.” Very good. So, listen. Today’s show, guys, we’re … we have yet another Virtual Angel Hub client and a good friend of mine and someone who’s just very experienced in this whole outsourcing and systems and managing teams type business. Paul Higgins is the founder of TrackZEN Club. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Higgins:  Thanks, Barb. Good to be here and Matt.

Matt Malouf:  Welcome, Paul.

Paul Higgins:  Thank you.

Barbara Turley:  So, listen, Paul, just to kick off … TrackZEN Club … Let’s talk about…I said before we started the show it would be better for me to let you explain a bit about what you actually do. What is TrackZEN Club? And why should we all know about it? Tell us a bit about it.

About Paul Higgins and TrackZEN

Paul Higgins:  Sure, so, they say if you’ve got an itch, it’s best to scratch it yourself and really, the TrackZEN Club came about me not being able to find the solution. So, I was ex-corporate running my own business. I was lonely. I was missing the corporate team and environment and I was really struggling to sort of focus and be accountable. And I was looking for different groups and I just couldn’t find a group or a mastermind group that sort of suited my experience and exactly where I was. It was either a lot of people for young start-ups or really young business that hadn’t had a corporate career or there were sort of people that were running very bricks and mortar businesses that sort of didn’t suit me either.

So, in short, I created my own and it’s a mastermind where people like my journey, basically, been in corporate, they’re running a good business but they’re not quite where they promised their partner to be so they’re not probably working the hours they thought they were going to work, not getting the income they thought they were going to work, and what we do is, in the club, we basically have the accountability which is fantastic because it can get very lonely, and we also have a five-step methodology that people go through to ultimately get where they thought they were going to when they left corporate.

Barbara Turley:  Yeah, I think that leaving corporate is a big challenge as you say because I know, when I was in my corporate career and I started my own business, one of the first things I said is like, “There’s no help desk.” Like when things go wrong, there’s no … In corporate, you used to just dial somebody and there was always somebody there to help or there’s team meetings, etc. So, it’s very interesting concept that you’ve developed there.

Now, so talk to me a little bit about … obviously, we’re here to talk about outsourcing and virtual assistants and look … I know that you were at Coca-Cola for a very long time, had great career there; were they using outsourcing there? How did you sort of get into this knowledge about VA’s and using off-shoring for your business?

Paul Higgins:  Yeah, look.  I suppose Coca-Cola’s the biggest franchise in the world so that would bring in heading the small team within Coca-Cola but then I had really the bottlers, so the people who actually went and manufactured, distributed, and sold it. It was like their outsource team so, if you think of the heart of it, Coca-Cola is basically like many of us, which is they come up with the fantastic ideas and they get other people to actually help them get that to the consumers.

So, being in that system for 18 years, I was just always used to outsourcing in some form. And for me, within our business, we always had the best experts or the best suppliers in the world helping you solve problems so it was very natural for me to do that and being part of a global business. I always looked for talent around the world so, to be honest, it was something that I think was innate in me but, because of my experience at Coca-Cola, it just became second nature to look for that. And, as you said, when I left Coke, all of a sudden every hat was on myself so I was working 14 to 16 hour days. I was doing invoicing, just all this stuff that in a large corporate you never do and all of a sudden, I was doing it and I thought this is crazy. I’ve just bought myself a job, so how do I start to extract myself?!

And I basically did work for Bain which is one of the biggest consulting companies in the world and I just got their best outsourcing person for the day. So I said, “Don’t pay me for this particular part. I’ll just sit with this expert and get him to tell me everything about outsourcing and, in short, that’s when I came up to the Philippines and that’s when I came up with the first part which was to set up my own business in the Philippines.

Barbara Turley:  That’s fantastic. So you have some amazing insights from how the corporates are getting this right so, because as you know and you’ve experienced this with clients and I knew as well, it’s actually not as easy as people think to get it right so it was great that you had that background.

The Bain consultant … What were the sort of biggest tips or strategies in getting it right that you learned from that particular day that you did?

Tips and strategies for getting outsourcing right

Paul Higgins:  Certainly for a service based industry which is the one I was in, it was really going back to the basics. So the basics were English – so I was predominantly dealing in English. So you had to go where there’s really qualified English and I think it’s the second largest English speaking country in the world or in the top three or something in the Philippines so that was sort of like a simple one.

The second was around customer service, so he said go where there’s a brilliant customer service ethic and the Philippines have certainly got that. So, that was sort of the second tick.

And the third one was the education system. He described to me the way that the education system works and how that’s producing all these fantastic young people that have got great English and basically they’re very service oriented so they’re really willing to help and very loyal and also, they’ve got the education behind them. So, after looking at all different options, it just became quite evident that that’s the place to go to.

Because I used to buy businesses back at Coke and I used to go and do due diligence on companies so I was very good at picking which of the right suppliers. I suppose I found the right suppliers very quickly using my corporate experience and the person from Bain helped me find the right country to work with.

Barbara Turley:  Wow, that’s so interesting. I want the listeners to sort of recap there on those three points you made. So you need to, I mean, if what you’re doing predominantly English speaking, you need to find, because obviously you didn’t go to Vietnam. There’re lots of places in Asia that you can go to get outsourced staff but if it is in a service-based business where you have somebody who will need good English, I mean the Philippines is a fabulous place to go. They are very loyal and the customer service, I mean it’s a huge BPO and call centre industry there so they’re very well trained in customer service actually. So those are great tips to share.

Matt, do you have anything on that because just that this corporate background, this experience of outsourcing, I wonder have you got any specific questions on that?

Matt Malouf:  Well, not specific on that but I was going to ask Paul … So Paul, in your initial dealings then with the Philippines, what were some of the challenges you experienced?

Challenges faced when dealing with outsourcing countries

Paul Higgins:  Look, I think there’s a lot of people out there that have a shop front that they do a great job in saying this is what we deliver but when you actually peel back and ask them some good questions, you realise that there’s just nothing behind the shop. It’s a shop front. So, I think that was the hard thing is trying to weed out the people that could actually deliver what they said they were going to deliver versus those guys that were just really good at selling – so that was probably the first challenge I had, Matt.

Matt Malouf:  Okay. In which ways do you use virtual staff in your business now, Paul?

Using virtual staff at TrackZEN

Paul Higgins:  So I first started using VA’s, virtual assistants, and what it’s evolved to and I’m sure we’ll cover this is now I’ve got project managers and basically everything I do is offshore in some format. So whether the Philippines is the core – I use people around the world to deliver the product and the value to my clients. So there’s myself here in Melbourne. I’ve got my business partner, Scott, who’s also here but other than that, everyone else is virtual or somewhere else in the world. So I suppose the short answer is nearly everything I do, other than create the content and run the mastermind, is done through outsourcing.

Matt Malouf:  Fantastic.

The 3 key elements to managing a virtual team

Barbara Turley:  I’d love to jump in here because I know the big question is, obviously, how do you manage all the tasks, all the projects, all the people? And I know you and I are very aligned and Matt will be as well on the use of project management tools so talk to me about how crucial is it for you in managing your affairs to have a good project management tool and what do you use and how do you use it?

 recruiting

Paul Higgins:  I think fundamentally there are sort of three things – there are people, process and then platform or systems. I think you’ve got to have a combination of those and we learned very quickly that running teams or, from my Coke experience, that software in a platform is critical to running when you’re not face to face. So we use a platform called Podio. It’s fantastic but we also have clients that use other platforms but I think that platform piece is really critical. Then the people, so picking, recruiting the right people and also training them so I think the people … some of our clients think that I’ll get a VA and it’ll be easy to just start and I know Barb, you probably come across it all the time, is that you actually need to learn yourself how to use outsourced teams, especially if you’ve never done it before.

I think that training and development is really key and then having the right processes. We have simple things like … we don’t have job descriptions. We just have task lists that actually sit in someone’s platform so, for us, it’s Podio. And they’re all the things that they have to do on a day to day basis and we’ve also got a list of all the repeating tasks. So if a task has to be repeated, it’s actually automatically put in there so that they can’t forget it. And we have automated work flows so it makes it absolutely dead easy for someone to get something right. So there’s a lot of time and effort that goes into that but I think, if you get that right and get those three elements right, that’s when you get success.

It’s up to the business owner to get these elements right

Barbara Turley:  I just want to make a point here for the listeners listening to this because the problem, Paul, you know this and Matt you know this, one of the problems I see happening a lot with clients that join Virtual Angel Hub is that, as you say, they think I’ll get a VA and those things will just happen. But the three things you mentioned: recruiting, training, and building your processes and deciding on your platform and making it all work, none of those are a VA’s job.

Like you, as a business owner, have to squarely … You have to make sure that you’re the one that has to drive that and yes, it does take time, but it’s the best investment that you’ll ever make. When I see some people thinking that if I get a VA, that all those things are just going to happen and I’ve had some clients say to me, “Oh, I wanted the VA to show more initiative in creating my processes.” And I think, well, that’s probably your job initially anyway until you have somebody working with you a long time who then you can mentor into that taking over that sort of a job for you. So, yeah, it’s very much your job as business owner to set those things up and Paul, you’re very good at doing that.

So I know you’ve moved to … How many sort of people would you have interacting on the platform now in terms of outsourced virtual not staff, but even contractors and various people working with you?

Paul Higgins:  Oh look, I don’t know but as a rough number, probably 50?

Barbara Turley:  Yeah. Now how do you manage that? How do you get from, you go from a couple of VA’s or one VA because a lot of people listening to this might just have one VA and they can’t even fathom how you would manage without using up all your own time. How do you manage that many people without spending all day every day putting out fires?

Managing a large virtual team

Paul Higgins:  And you’re right. I’ll give you a brief synopsis and I’ll start it with my own VA that was great and sort of overdoing what we call the core four, which is email, calendar, task and sales support so that freed up roughly about two hours of my time. So that was great but then I was doing all the work with suppliers and I was trying to balance client work, sales, leadership, and projects and I’ve always, in my Coke days, I learned that if the person doing the project was also the person managing the project aspect of it, it just wasn’t successful. But when you actually decoupled those, that’s where you got real success.

And for example, I launched Coke Zero here in Australia and it was a huge success because we learnt that from a prior campaign. So basically, what I did was say, “why don’t I, with the career progression, I promote my VA to a project manager and what they can do is actually manage all the suppliers and all I’ll do is once a week have a WIP with them and we use a software that when they’re updating, I get updated as well so, instead of going into boring meetings all the time, we just basically get quick notifications to see what’s happening so I’m sort of keeping an eye over it but it kept me … it got me focused on clients, sales, leadership and idea creation and got me out of the actual managing of the projects. You know, are people on time? Do they really know what is happening? Are they aligned to why it’s happening? All of that stuff was actually then handled by a project manager and that made a massive difference to my business. I actually got programmes launched quicker which effectively meant more money in the bank which means I can create more concepts and build the team larger.

Barbara Turley:  Just on that, so, obviously I would imagine there were some challenges initially with that so again, some people listening will think, “Oh great, I’ll just make my VA the project manager and empower them, tell them it’s time to step up”, because we hear this a lot. It’s time to step up and take it on. But I would imagine in the beginning of doing this, there would have been some teething issues, there would have been mistakes, there would have been miscommunications as somebody steps into a new role like that, and it’s quite a full on role being a project manager. Talk to me about some of the challenges in the early days and how are you refining this to make sure it works for you so that you just have that one person reporting to you?

The challenges of managing a large virtual team

Paul Higgins:  Yeah, great question. So the first thing we did is, we trialed it. So we basically said, “Here’s three months and I always talk … I did some coaching when I left so I’m a qualified coach and we would always talk ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line’. So, ‘above the line’ is the things that the organisation or, for me, the owner of the business control and then ‘below the line’ is what the project manager could control. And what I wanted to do is set them up for success and we were sort of … yes, look, they can just do project management  like I used to do project management.

I sort of nearly treated it as like I just had another high paid executive working for me doing project management so I quickly defaulted to that position and then I realised that that’s completely the wrong way to look at it. I hadn’t set them up for success so when they were missing deadlines or they weren’t clear on what the priority projects were, you know, the easy thing was to go back and say, “Well, it’s the individual” but what I realised that I actually hadn’t set them up and I hadn’t given them the right framework so would it help if I just quickly highlight that framework?

Matt Malouf:  That’d be great.

Barbara Turley:  Oh, definitely because I’m thinking … Matt, I know you’re probably just salivating at this point because we did a whole show on this where, you know, and I know Matt you talk to clients a lot about this mindset thing and the natural tendency is to just blame the VA or blame the person because they’re not getting it right but you have to set somebody up for success so I would love to know your framework for how you do that with your team?

Framework for success

Paul Higgins:  So, I sort of touched on it briefly before but I think in most jobs there’s 70 percent which is task-based and then there’s the 30 percent which is project-based. So, having a project manager increases that mix but let’s, for simple say, the 70/30, the 70 percent that we actually listed all the key tasks that needed to be done and made sure that that was put in that platform, which was Podio. So therefore, all the project manager had to do each day was actually go to one button and it had all of their tasks there so they didn’t have to try to check their email or multiple different communication platforms. They just went to one place and that was very easy for them.

The second is that we had automated work flows, so when they did a blog, we listed in the format itself every step that needed to be done, so where it needed to be posted etc, and we automated tasks so when you went from draft to publish, it automatically tasked the project person to then go and publish that or then go and talk to the editor. It was all automated so, once again, someone didn’t have to think, “Oh, what do I do next?” And that reduced a whole lot of missteps so that made it so much easier for them to do it so that was on the task side of it.

In the project side, we just came up with a really good template for projects and the key things in there is the ‘why’ because often we just say go and do that and then, especially if someone’s come from a VA, they’re normally very good at doing quick tasks but what we wanted to do was elevate this and say, “Why is this so important for the business?” So they were actually engaged into why the project was important and that led to success and that came through a really good template. And also measuring what success was.

And then lastly, we had deliverables that sat under the project and what we made sure is there is only five key deliverables at any one time. So we’d have WIP every week and if, you know, sometimes it’d sneak up to 11 and I would say “No, look, here’s the five”, and it was a card system in Podio where you can just simply prioritise and I’d say “These are the top five priorities of deliverables as I see them”. So they were very clear on what success was for that week and then they’d go away and work. And we’d just have a simple To Do, Do, and Doing, so we sort of put the noise away because often, there’s just so much that a project manager is trying to do that they get confused, so that was what we’ve done. We’ve actually created a short online training course showing people exactly how to use that and we found that that brought enormous success and it took a bit of time to set it up but it actually has delivered some great results.

Matt Malouf:  I just …

Barbara Turley:  Wow, so, go on Matt, yeah…

Matt Malouf:  I just want to reiterate that last point that Paul just made which I think is the most important, is that it took a little bit of time to set it up but it made all the difference. And we talk about you’ve got to slow down in order to speed up all the time and Barb, you’ve backed me up on this with many of the guests that we’ve had on the show, have all shouted the same point that Paul just spoke of and I think that’s a really big take home for everybody on this show is that, in order to move with speed, you have to invest the time into the right processes in order to set your people up to succeed. And what Paul just described, you know, that takes time. It takes diligence. It takes focus. But once it’s set up and you train the people how to do that, you can move with immense speed.

Barbara Turley:  Well, I think actually on that as well, and something you and I talk about a lot on this show is that’s the difference between abdicating responsibility which is saying, “Hey this is now your job. You go do it” and actually taking on the responsibility of doing this and getting success and helping your team to get success is actually on you. Now obviously, that means you have to have good people with good work ethic and decent skill sets but once you have that it squarely comes back to you to make sure that you’re taking on that responsibility yourself as a business owner. I mean, it is your business after all. So, Paul, where are we at and I should put in the show notes, by the way, a link to Paul where people can access that little training programme that you’ve just talked about, we’ll have all the links in the show notes, guys, for things we’ve mentioned in the show. So where are you today and what’s the future vision for the business? Where are you taking it from today?

Paul’s future vision

Paul Higgins:  Yeah, so the future vision of the business is to be a number one community for people that leave corporate running their own business. And what we’ve created is a community on Facebook. It’s a closed group making sure that we’ve got the right people in it but it’s called Build, Live, Give. And it’s really about that. You want to build a fantastic business. You want to live a lifestyle and the reason you probably left corporate is to live the lifestyle you really want and working ridiculous hours and doing everything yourself and not paying yourself is not helping that. So we want to help you live and then finally is the give component, so I’ve got a particular inherited condition so I want to make sure that I’m generating income for research to help with that condition. But I know a lot of other people out there have left corporate because they actually want to leave a bigger legacy on the world and give more so we’re giving the opportunities to do that. So we want to be that number one community and to be honest, we’ve just started that journey but, if any listeners out there sort of fit and resonate with some of the things I’ve talked about, we’d love to have you come in and join that community.

Barbara Turley:  Yeah, I’m a member and it’s fantastic and it’s got some good stuff going on in that community. And, Matt, any final questions for Paul?

Matt Malouf:  Paul, my only final question would just be if you had to give two pieces of advice to somebody starting out with a VA today, what would those two pieces of advice be?

 Paul’s top 2 tips on starting out with a VA

Paul Higgins:  I think, one, learn from the people that’ve already gone through the hard yards, so whether it’s, you know, both of you, Barb, or other people, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Don’t try to learn it all yourself. It took me six years to get to where I am now but in a half an hour, you can watch a particular video and get most of that six years in a very condensed time. So I think that’s one.

And the other is really be careful in which partners you pick. There’s a lot of companies out there like I said, are very good with the sales aspect but they’re not good at the operations and they don’t do the people development and they don’t have the processes, so really make sure you do your due diligence and pick the right people.

Matt Malouf:  Fantastic.

Wrapping things up

Barbara Turley:  Great. Great advice. Great advice. Paul, thanks so much for coming on the show and those insights have been fabulous and again, Matt and I are hearing time and time again, we’re getting people like yourself who’ve been very successful with this but the story is always slightly different but the messaging and the processes and the steps to getting success are always actually the same, so I’m hoping the listeners are really picking this up, that we’re echoing the same types of success notes each time and for all the listeners out there as well, other shows that Matt and I do when we don’t have guests on, we often do little workshops on all the things we’re talking about.

So, for example, we have a whole show on how to set a project up for success with your VA, especially if it’s just you and one VA or you and a team of VAs. So be sure to go back through the shows and we do link to them transcriptions as well so you can always have access to those.

So thank you everyone, for another great week of Virtual Success. We’d love you guys to subscribe to the show on iTunes and give us a rating and a review and any questions that you have or anything that you want us to cover, please let us know because we’re always looking for great content for the show. So, until next time, thanks, Paul. Thanks Matt.

Matt Malouf:  Thanks, Paul.

Paul Higgins:  Thanks, Matt.

Barbara Turley:  And see you all again.

Matt Malouf:  See you all soon.

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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In this episode:

02:58 – How the Virtual Success Show started

04:36 – Ready, Fire, Aim

07:49 – Working out potential roadblocks

10:25 – Finding the right person for particular tasks

15:55 – How we fired ourselves from managing the podcast

17:09 – Great people, great process

18:09 – Nailing a process takes time

20:18 – It’s up to YOU to set your team up for success

24:31 – The reason things work is because YOU make them work

24:52 – Wrapping things up

Matt:  Welcome back, everybody to another show of the Virtual Success Show. I’m joined today by my co-host Barbara. How are you this morning Barb?

Barbara:  Hey, Matt, really good. Enjoying the Sydney summer that’s hit us all of a sudden the last few weeks. How are you?

Matt:  I’m excellent. Yeah, I’m enjoying this warmer weather, that’s for sure. It’s been awhile since we’ve been on the show together. You’ve had lots of wonderful things happening in your life with the new bub.

Barbara:  Yes, I have. I know I’ve been very busy with new baby, she’s 3 1/2 months old now so we’re “coming out of the fog,” as they say. She’s very good, though. She’s very good.

Matt:  Excellent. Excellent. You know, I’m really, really excited about today’s show because, as we were talking about just before we started recording, the show we want to do for you all today is to share with you the evolution of the Virtual Success Show podcast and, actually, what’s happened behind the scenes and how what we’ve experienced in utilising our virtual teams to bring this show to life. It was really interesting because we were just chatting a little bit pre-show talking about how things have just developed so well, particularly over the last six months and we wanted to share that in a show with you all because we believe there’s absolute gold in what’s going on.

Barbara:  Yeah, and I think I … Matt, I was saying to you and I want the listeners to hear this, that I was actually just … I was thinking about the show the other day, and I was thinking to myself, look, I don’t even know … We just record, and I know it just goes in the Dropbox, and at this point I have no involvement, really, after that point and it just shows up bang on time on our iTunes account, on our website VirtualSuccessShow.com, at the promotions ground on social media, and it just all works like a well-oiled machine without us having to stress about it or even think about it. All we do is what we love, which is recording the show. I know some people listening are going to think, “How do I get to that point? How do I do that?” And that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today on the show.

Matt:  We wave our magic wand and it magically appears.

Barbara:  Yeah, not quite, but yeah. I think both of us would probably say that having done this one, if we were to do another, because this would apply to anything. We’re talking about a podcast here, but this could be a YouTube channel, this could be a joint venture of any description, and you could literally take this template and transfer it over to any project that you’re doing with another person or a couple of people.

How the Virtual Success Show started

Matt:  Absolutely. What I thought we’d do is give you a bit of a history of the evolution of the Virtual Success Show and, as we go through this, Barb and I are just going to share with you how the back end developed as we went through. I guess it all sort of started, we were having a coffee one day and out of nowhere we thought it would be great to combine our experiences and start the show. It really was that typical, “ready, fire, aim” mindset where we literally left the café, we had a back-of-the-envelope business plan, Barb had her team and I had mine, and we went away and we said, “Here’s the date where we’re going to record the first show,” and off we went.

Barbara:  Yeah, we did. And you know what’s funny, actually? Just thinking back to that day, we caught up not even to talk about … We weren’t even talking about a podcast; it wasn’t an idea. It came from the conversation and I had said to you, “You know, I see so many people, it doesn’t matter how much help we give them at Virtual Angel Hub … With all the processes and training that we do for clients on the way in, we were still seeing people struggling in so many areas.” And I said to you, “What would you think about a podcast to talk about this?” You said to me, “Do you want a co-host on this?” I hadn’t even thought about having a co-host; I hadn’t thought about anything, actually. I just thought about a podcast. Before we knew it, by the end of that half an hour, the podcast was alive. That’s actually how quick it was.

Matt:  I think it was actually within maybe a week or two we’d actually recorded the first show. It was very, very quick.

Ready, Fire, Aim

Barbara:  I think that’s key, actually, as our first point for you guys listening is that often I see people trying to plan podcasts and YouTube channels, and there’s meetings about meetings, and they hire all these people, and they want to strategize the branding, everything. We didn’t do any of that. We were just like, “Let’s just record a few shows and get the thing up on iTunes.” As you say, that “ready, fire, aim” thing and let’s see how it goes. Let’s see what happens after that. What’s the initial feedback? So it’s really important to just start, sometimes, without having too much of a major plan. In case it doesn’t work and you don’t like it. You know?

Matt:  Exactly right. The way we went from here, we recorded the first show. We worked out we needed to have it edited, we needed a website to host it on, and we needed to set up the iTunes account and the like. Between Barbara’s team that she had when she started and my team that I had at the time when we started, we worked it out. We combined our resources. We spent very, very little money and we had this show up and running. We knew that we needed to get it out there. Our expectation was in the initial 5 to 10 shows there wouldn’t be very much going on, but we needed to get some traction and we believed in it and we knew that the energy we were going to put into this was going to help a lot of people.

Barbara:  I think as well, key, I just want to make a point there. We also realised very quickly, and this is important for you guys listening. Within the first, I think we recorded three shows, Matt, in a row and then you and I, afterwards, were like, “Oh, my God! That was so much fun.” We realised that we were very good together on a show and we thoroughly enjoyed it, which meant that we knew we were going to be able to keep this thing going so it was worth putting more energy into more shows and then in the team, etcetera.

To start off with, it was you and me, I had one VA that was kind of … Actually, I don’t even think she was involved in the very early days. I just had a podcast guy that was doing a bit of editing who actually wasn’t very good, but we got rid of him. He was initially there on my team.

Matt:  And your web developer put the website together for us.

Barbara:  Yeah, I did have a web developer, so that was handy. But we literally threw a very simple website together to host the show and make it look good. We did create a logo and a brand. We had Virtual Success, the name, already. I think those few things were key to get going, but the shows were key to get it up.

Matt:  And this is where we probably came up against our first, not a roadblock, but probably the first instance where Barbara and I realised there were aspects of this that we didn’t enjoy. We love getting on this show and sharing and recording. The part was, we’d recorded all these shows and then we needed to write blurbs and we thought it might be a good idea to have transcripts and the like.

Working out potential roadblocks

Barbara:  I think we were doing the blurbs for us, and actually I’m laughing as I think about this, because I can remember … I know you would have been feeling the same. I’d look at our little spreadsheet that we had and I’d think, “Oh, thank God he’s doing the blurb this week!” And you were thinking the same about me. Then the blurb wouldn’t happen, and it would be five minutes before the show was due to go live and I would have to hash together a bit of a blurb from memory. We both talked about that. Again, key point number two here for anyone trying to do this, we were honest with each other and said, “Gosh, that’s a real pain. We just don’t like doing that bit and it’s becoming a roadblock to the show moving forward.” Then we were like, “What do we do? How do we get the blurb written?” Because it kind of has to come from us, right?

Matt:  Just to add to that there was … As part of my stop doing list system, this is what falls into your competence category. It’s a task you know how to do, you don’t enjoy, it’s probably what I call an energy vampire and you avoid it until, as Barbara explained, until it becomes really urgent, and then you put something together and away you go. So, it was actually … We had the discussion, and we realised that there was a system around the blurb. It was a system that we could easily replicate. We had a model that we could put together around this and we just needed to put the right person … To align the right person to take control of that task.

Barbara:  I would like to highlight a little point here that I’m just remembering now. At this point in the show, guys, we had one of my VAs doing … We had your VA, Matt, getting snippets from the show. She was listening to the show and she was picking out tips and quotes and things. Then my VA was putting those together on social media images and spreading them all around social media. The girls were doing a great job at that, but the problem became my VA. I had given her the task … I said to her, “Your job is to make sure that this podcast goes out on time and that you coordinate all the bits and pieces.”

So she was getting very stressed out, because she kept pinging me on Skype going, “I need the blurb.” So, the poor girls, they were trying their best to do the job, but they were failing at their job because of us. That’s a key point. We had great VAs. The poor things were failing and stressing out because we were the roadblock. We became the roadblock in our own show. That was the point at which, Matt, you decided we need somebody who can write the blurb. Which is not really a VA; a VA is not going to write good content for you. So what did we do next?

Finding the right person for particular tasks

Matt:  Well, I had Rose, who was working with me on my team. Rose is a virtual assistant, but local in Australia, and highly trained. So I sat with Rose and went through the process and I asked her does she believe she could manage this part of the process? She was like, “Yep, I can certainly do that.” So I took some time to train her and show her what we do, how we do it, what “good” looks like, what “outstanding” looks like, and what “value” looks like in this. I think that’s important. I took the time to train her well.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  I think it was probably the first couple I needed to jump in on and just tweak a few bits and pieces, but very, very quickly Rose took over that entire process.

Barbara:  I think, as well, the key there is you chose somebody that, first of all we did not expect our Filipino VAs to handle the writing of the blurb. Now, some Filipinos can write very well, okay? That’s fine. But you have to think about if you’re asking somebody to write, make sure … I think we did a show on this before, Matt. It’s that whole thing of skills expectation. So if you’re going to put this job on someone who’s not really at that level, then you’re going to get frustrated, blame the VA, and fail. Matt knew someone in Australia that had a lot of experience in event management. I mean, Rose is not just a VA. She had managed events before, she’s a good writer, she understands what we’re trying to achieve on the show, and therefore the blurb became a success, because we chose the right person for that role.

Matt:  Absolutely. Then we actually came up against the next roadblock, which was we were getting Vanessa, my VA, to do the transcriptions. While Vanessa is an amazing virtual assistant, she’s been with me for almost five years, the transcriptions or transcribing is not her genius. She’s good at it, she’s not great at it. What was happening was Vanessa was doing the transcriptions and then Rose was having to spend quite a bit of time going through and editing the transcriptions, going back and re-listening to parts of the podcast to make sure that it all made sense in the transcription, so that then she could do the blurb.

Barbara:  That’s all of a sudden turning into a multi-day job. All of a sudden this podcast was becoming a huge job for our team to handle. Again, we were asking Vanessa to do … Transcribing … For listeners out there asking your VA to do transcriptions, I would suggest a three or four-minute video is okay, but if you’re doing transcriptions, don’t expect your VA to do it. Because it is actually a specialist skill and your quality level will be low and you’ll get frustrated and so will they. You need to have a specialist do this, and we realised this pretty quickly, didn’t we? Thankfully, we found Rev.com.

Matt:  Absolutely. The beauty with Rev is number one, extremely economical from a financial perspective. And two, they get the transcription back to us within 12 hours.

Barbara:  Oh, it’s fast. And the accuracy is incredible. Big high-five to Rev.com. We’re not getting paid anything for this, by the way; it’s not a promotion. It’s just, I use them across lots of different podcasts now and I recommend it to all our clients because it’s just so easy and cheap and fast.

Matt:  And what it did is it enhanced our team’s satisfaction in what they didn’t have to deliver. Because Rose, her first comment when she got the first transcription back from Rev was, “Wow! Wow!” And her job was now easier. Vanessa was happy, too, because it was adding to her workload each month and she’s very, very busy as it is. So what it’s done is the time now needing to be spent on delivering a podcast has been reduced. And so-

Barbara:  I think as well, just in terms of the Filipino VAs, as well, because obviously that’s where I sort of specialise. I know that the Filipinos, when they feel their work is of low quality, they suffer a lot from low … No, not low self-worth, but more like they start to question themselves a lot. So Vanessa would have been feeling like, “Oh, my God. I’m making a mess of it. They’re not happy with me.” Even though we would never have said that, because it wasn’t true. But they can start to feel like they’re not good enough, because you’re asking them to do something that is not really a skillset of theirs.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  Absolutely. What then happened from there, this was already in Asana, but I think we were using Asana good, average to good…

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  Then what happened was, with Rose coming in, us streamlining the process, it seemed to just tighten up what was happening in Asana. Then we had a change of personnel, didn’t we, Barb?

Barbara:  Yes, yeah, on my side.

Matt:  Yes.

How we fired ourselves from managing the podcast

Barbara:  One of my VAs moved on to do other things and we put a new girl in. I think we had gotten to this point … At this point we were … I think, the point I want to stress here is that, Matt, you and I became quite busy. I was actually having a baby. I was in the throes of pregnancy and about to have a baby, you were extremely busy in your consulting business, and we through the evolution of this process managed to kind of fire ourselves from the management of the podcast. This was the key tipping point for you and I, where we got to the point where we were just recording. Our new VA came in, Michelle, because we already had the process set up now and it was kind of starting to hum and Rose was there and Vanessa, the girls were able to actually start communicating with each other and not having to wait for us to come back to them with answers for things. They had the podcast editor as well. So the four of them, inside of Asana, managed the project for us.

Matt:  What’s key to this, is each of them understands their role.

Barbara:  Yes, and where their accountability is.

Matt:  Absolutely. Each of them understands the sequence, they understand their role, they understand their deadlines. And accordingly, because we’ve got great people in each seat, there’s very, very little management from our part.

Great people, great process

Barbara:  Well, virtually none at this stage. Again, it’s having great people, but a great process that is very clear, with clear deadlines, and clear role descriptions. Like Michelle knows that she … I don’t even tell her when we’re recording. She just knows that every week she’s got to check the Dropbox for the unedited shows. Then her role is to liaise with the podcast editor and make sure that she knows that we have to go live every two weeks. So she knows to get ahead of herself and she wants to be … She can manage that and she’s like, “I want to be ahead of myself” so she and Luke, the podcast guy, get together and they make sure the shows are edited.

Then she makes sure that she tells Rose when it’s done. Rose liaises with Rev.com, gets her transcripts up, gets all the time-stamping in. Vanessa does the snippets. Then it goes back to Michelle who does all the social media part of it and gets it up on the website. Then the promotion starts and the girls start promoting it across social media as well. It’s like a flow there, but we’re not involved in anything.

Nailing a process takes time

If they ask us a question, Matt, you’re too busy; you won’t come back to them for days. Same with me. So if there’s a question, it can hold things up if we’re involved. So it’s better that the team are involved, but we created the process. That’s kind of the key thing I want to stress here. We created the process over a … About six months; that’s what we’re talking about here. This process took six months to nail and for us to be able to fire ourselves from. That’s key. Processes are not really something you can create on day one of a new thing, because you’ve got to see where the roadblocks are and the problems along the way. Eventually when you get it nailed, you get into a position like what we’re in now.

Matt:  Which is everybody’s playing in the role that they love to play as well. That’s what’s critical here. So Barb and I get to jump on and record these shows. At the end of the show, we click stop, we upload our recordings into Dropbox, we go on and then record the next show. It’s this set and forget … You know what’s really interesting? You always, for me, it brings a smile to my face because I’ll often get friends or clients that will SMS me going, “That was a great new show that you had.” And I’ll be like, “Oh, wow, that’s right. The new show’s up.”

Barbara:  Yeah, that happens to me too and I think, “Oh, wow! We recorded that a while ago. That one is now. Yeah.”

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  It’s on a schedule. I think as well, just in terms of the listeners starting podcasts as well. You know, we didn’t go wild promoting this show in the beginning. We had our social media strategy running and our VAs working on that, but the key thing as well is to get a little bit of that going and get some early feedback. We started a Facebook group, so we’ve got a Facebook group called Virtual Success; join that please if you’re listening. We started getting a bit of feedback in that group as well, to the shows, and it gave us ideas for new shows. Our VAs are in there as well, which is fantastic, so they can kind of manage a lot of that for us now going forward.

It’s up to YOU to set your team up for success

I think the key here is this can be done. It’s actually not hard, but it took focus on our part, you and I, Matt. There was quite a lot of work, in the beginning to get the process working. If you’re just handing it to a VA and expecting them to figure the whole thing out, you’re probably going to fail, is what I would say. You need to drive the project initially yourself or have somebody who is a project manager do it. And then make sure that everyone understands their role, there is a clear process, and they are … Basically, you enable them to get success. I think we talked about this on another show before. Setting your team up for success rather than failure.

Matt:  You know what? I think the team is quite chuffed when they see the end product getting out there into the market as well. They feel very proud. One thing to add to what Barbara was saying is that, I think if we had not leveraged ourselves out of the aspects of this show that we didn’t love, that we didn’t even like, I think we would just said, “Too hard basket,” and probably walked away from it because…

Barbara:  It would have failed. We would have ended up having months where shows didn’t go live.

Matt:  Yeah. Often that’s where ideas or even businesses can fail, is because the owner is so caught up in so many things that you sit there and go, “Well, something has to give and I’m going to get rid of the things I don’t like first.” But yet, they can be things that are so easily leveraged, so easily delegated to others and can enable you to move forward with lightning speed.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  So, literally now, we can come off the back of a 20 or 30-minute recording. That’s it. That’s our input to the show. Because of the hard work we’ve put in in that six-month period to build the system and then we plugged the great people into the system. It feels so simple; and it is, it really is. If you take the time … And the last thing I’ll say is you’ve got to be patient with your people. I could have easily…when any of the team wasn’t really getting it, gone, “You know, just come on.” Or fired

Barbara:  Or blamed them. Yeah…

Matt:  But the reality was it was just a matter of … It’s what I call growing pains. Takes a little bit of time and often … I’ll say this, I say 99% of the times in the coaching and consulting that I do, the bottleneck or the real quote/unquote “problem person” is the owner.

Barbara:  Oh, 100% … I’m just thinking to myself, 99% of the time I would say that the reason people fail with VAs, as long as they’ve got a good person who’s not doing the wrong thing, not showing up, and going AWOL and all of that … You’ve got a decent person with a couple of skills, it’s you. It’s you. It’s your process, it’s your system. I say this to clients all the time, “You can try and convince me that it’s the VA, but I’m telling you if I go in and fix it for you, the VA will be a rock star.”

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  As long as it’s a good person, right? So as long as you’ve got someone who’s half decent who’s got a bit of a brain behind them, and whatever. Yeah, 100%. We put in a lot of work and at no point in the process did we say, “Well, Vanessa’s kind of rubbish at that.” I mean, we were looking at it going, “Well, the transcript’s not great, but why is that not working out so well?” And at no point did we say, “Oh, well, it’s because she’s rubbish.” We said, “Well, no, that’s a skillset that is quite specialist. We’re asking somebody who doesn’t really have that skillset to do it. Of course it’s not going to work.”

Matt:  I think there was one time, though, that I said to myself, “Matt, you’re rubbish at writing blurbs.” I did…

Barbara:  Oh, yeah, yeah. We can be rubbish ourselves. There was plenty of times I said to my VA, “The reason you’re failing at this is because I’m not giving you what you need.”

Matt:  That’s right. That’s right.

The reason things work is because YOU make them work

Barbara:  That’s definitely a point to finish on. I want everyone to realise you make this work, but the reason you make it work is because you make it work. Don’t expect to hire a VA for peanuts in the Philippines and that they’re just going to come up with this strategy for you. Which I see a lot happen with our businesses, to be honest, with our clients. They’re hoping that the VAs going to come in and strategize it for them.

Wrapping things up

Matt:  So if I was just to summarise in all of this, first and foremost, remember “ready, fire, aim.” Come up with your ideas, and then get them into motion as quick as possible. Second thing, is you need to create a system within the current parameters that you have, with either the people that you have or the time that you have. Create the system, and then understand that it’s going to be development of that system over time, together with putting the right people in the right seats on the bus so that they can execute on the system. And lastly, it’s having the mindset that, “Okay, what are the things that I’m really good at and are essential that I do here and how can I get everything else done by somebody else?”

I truly believe that the key to this was that Barbara and I had the mindset that all we want to do … We were very clear with our intentions. We want to get on, we want to record, and that’s it. That’s all we want to do in this process and we knew that everything else could be done by a specialist, quote/unquote “in their genius.” So, someone that can take care of the sound editing. Someone that understands how to get these things onto iTunes. Someone that can do the snippets. Someone that can manage the transcription. Someone that can write the blurb. Et cetera, et cetera. Because when you go in with that mindset that, “This is my genius. This is the thing that I’m going to do and I need a process, system, technology, and people to take care of everything else,” it takes a little bit of time, but believe me, everything in your business is able to be done like this.

Barbara:  You know, I just want to make a point here for the listeners that are just them and  one VA and they’re probably like, “Oh, my God! I need a whole team for this!” You don’t. What I would say is that on another business that I have, I have another podcast called Wealth Unplugged. I do that with one VA, but she doesn’t … We’ve got an editor for the show, but it doesn’t … The costs don’t escalate, because editing one show is pretty cheap, right? Then she uses Rev.com which is pretty cheap. But what she does is she manages that and those are external people that we just bring in. Then she does the snippets and she puts the … We don’t do a blurb for the show; we just put the transcript up there. If you’re feeling like your resources are a bit tight, don’t not do it. Just use what you’ve got and then … Use Rev.com, get an editor, and then allow your VA to manage that process for you. As mistakes happen along the way, look at the process first.

Matt:  Fantastic.

Barbara:  Yeah. Well, there you go guys!

Matt:  Yeah!

Barbara:  I think that’s a good road map.

Matt:  I think it is. I think it is. Listen, if this has been helpful for you, we’d love to see and hear from you. Please add your comments underneath here and also join the Virtual Success Facebook page and join our community. We’d love for you to share these shows with others that you believe this could be helpful to. And until next time, Barbara, have a wonderful, wonderful week and I’ll talk to you soon.

Barbara:  Great! Thanks, Matt. Thanks, guys.

Matt:  Thanks, everyone

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

Some of the areas covered include:

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

In this episode:

03:02 – Think expansion rather than contraction

06:05 – You have to plan strategically

06:54 – Taking yourself out of processes

10:22 – Allow time to smooth out the new process, once handed over

13:22 – Refining your processes

15:40 – Empowering your team

17:28 – Believe in your people

18:26 – Support your team’s decisions

22:09 – Give yourself time to fine-tune the processes

25:15 – My key people are now more engaged in my business

27:04 – Wrapping things up

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

Matt:  Hey Barb, I’m well, and yourself?

Barbara:  I’m really good thank you, really good. I’m … As we’re about to talk about today, I’m in the throes of motherhood. So it’s been a lovely journey, but obviously a challenging one in terms of running your business, and setting things up so you can do a podcast recording like this, et cetera. So, a unique experience.

Matt:  Absolutely, absolutely.

Barbara:  Which brings me onto today’s show. So obviously we’re going to talk about how to fire yourself from any business, I guess. And what we’re going to focus on guys, for the listeners, we’re going to focus on actually my experience of having a baby. Because you know, as a woman when you’re pregnant, you’ve got this kind of deadline looming, that doesn’t move, and it’s not going to change. In fact, it might even move closer. So you become … You’re under a lot of pressure all of a sudden to fire yourself from your business if you’re running your own business. But as Matt and I were talking about earlier before the show, this would apply to any sort of life event, or if you just want to, you want to work more on your business or have a business that runs itself with a team. So it really doesn’t matter if you’re not pregnant, or if you’re a guy, or if you’ve got a wife having a baby, I guess. This can apply to anything. I mean Matt, you’ve done this in a couple of businesses too, haven’t you?

Matt:  Yeah I have, yes. And just to add to what Barb was saying, if you really want to enhance and grow your business faster, what we’re going to talk about today is essential to fast growing businesses.

Barbara:  Yeah, so although we’re talking about it, I’m really going to focus on my experience of doing this, because the trigger for me was pregnancy, but the trigger for you could be something … It doesn’t matter what your trigger is, what your reason is, but the steps that I’m going to talk to you about here would apply to anybody. But I guess there will be a few women with their ears pricked up all of a sudden wondering how they can get their business to actually grow bigger rather than grow smaller while they have a baby. That’s the key thing here.

So, I guess to kick off, you know what I would say is, Matt, you were asking sort of what’s the key points I want to cover here. Well I think, the first one definitely, I’m going to focus on the women thing, I guess. But I see a lot of women, when they decide they want to have a baby, or they find out they’re pregnant, they start to contract rather than expand in terms of business.

Think expansion rather than contraction

Now this can be in their corporate career, or in running their own business, or whatever they’re doing. But what I would say is the first thing you have to achieve here, is to think in an expansionary mode rather than a contraction mode. Because fear makes you contract, and as a business owner you start to think, well if I start to kind of close it down a bit, so that it’s safe to take time off, nobody’s going to need me. Well, then you’re just going to contract your income and your business can stall. Whereas if you think expansionary, and you think well how can I grow, continue to grow my business, and hit my goals without me being there? That’s a mindset shift that you absolutely have to get into, and you’ve got to get into it pretty quickly. So you’re the king of mindsets, Matt, so I’m sure you got a point to make here.

Matt:  I do. Well, I’ve actually got a question. So, when you found out that you were pregnant Barbara, was it easy for you to have that expansion mindset, or did fear come up for you?

Barbara:  No, but I would naturally have … My personality type is more the expansionary, so all I was thinking was – I did have fear, but my fear was this. My fear was, oh my God, if I don’t grow this thing bigger, and make more money, and have it pumping more, I’m going to have so much stress and chaos when this baby arrives. So I knew that for me, the fear was that I wouldn’t grow it bigger, and I wouldn’t delegate enough and that I wouldn’t have enough. You know, I wouldn’t do the things that I was trying to do. And there was never a question for me that going smaller was the right way to go, or the safer way to go.

Matt:  And I love that mindset. The fear of if I don’t grow it bigger, it’s actually going to be more stressful.

Barbara:  Yeah, because if you have a business … Even if you try and close it down a bit, I think that would be more stressful, because it’s still a business. You can’t just walk away unless you close it completely, and then you got to start all over again when you’re exhausted with motherhood. So definitely for me, you have to think in an expansionary mode straight away. How can I get bigger?

Matt:  And to add to that, is that when you grow your business, there’s more free cash flow to invest back into good people. Whereas if you contract it, you normally have to get rid of the good people in order to afford the business to continue. And so I think it’s a really important point that Barbara makes, and I think all the listeners should really to hone in on this, is that expanding your business, whilst in the short term may seem a little bit more stressful, in the long term, is actually easier.

Barbara:  Definitely.

Matt:  That’s what holds a lot of people back.

Barbara:  And look, you know, if you do go contractionary, the issue is you may think, oh I’ll just do that for a few months. The reality is with anything, having to … Going small and trying to start up again, God, man that is very tiring. I mean I really wouldn’t recommend anybody go that route regardless of what you’re trying to do. Even if you want to take six months off and travel the world, plan it and go bigger before you go smaller, don’t go smaller.

Matt:  Excellent.

Barbara:  So that’s key point number one.

Matt:  And what was next Barb?

You have to plan strategically

Barbara:  So number two. The next thing for me was, you know now, it was a little bit different for me, because I had already, I was planning pregnancy. So I wasn’t just … I just didn’t wake up one morning and find out accidentally I was pregnant. So I had a bit more time. But my second point is you’ve got to strategically plan for this. So if you’re planning to have a baby, or whatever you’re planning to do, or if you just find out that you’re pregnant right, you have to immediately go into strategy mode. You cannot bury your head. You’ve got to plan this thing, it’s going to take you … I mean look, I would say six months, it’s going to take you six months to do this. You could do it in three if you were very onto it. But you know, if I take the pregnancy experience, I probably could have done it in three months. But I was quite tired, and the sickness and stuff in pregnancy, there’s all these other challenges that you face.

Taking yourself out of processes

So I went heavily into strategy mode. I looked at my business from all the different angles of like what are the different areas that need to be covered, and I focused heavily on the stuff that I was doing first. And I thought to myself, how do I take myself slowly out of every single process, and then the final one for me was sales. Because I was doing sales, as you know. So I planned the exit from the smallest process first, and then right up to where I was exiting from the sales process, about three months before the baby was due. Because what happens if the baby comes early? You know you need to plan this, you can’t plan for this to work the day before the due date. Because if that happens, and your baby comes six weeks early, you’re in worlds of pain. So you need to pretend that it’s six weeks beforehand, or two months, or whatever.

Matt:  It’s interesting too. In the Stop Doing List system that I teach, you got to shave off those easy tasks. And what that does, is it builds your teams’ confidence, but it builds your confidence in delegating also. So you … Often I think what happens in delegation and letting go, is that number one we do it too fast, but number two is we don’t have the right mindset associated with that. So what happens is we start delegating, and often times we actually abdicate rather than delegate, and what that leads to is the tasks, or projects, or areas of the business boomeranging back to you, and it keeps coming back. And then we hear those words in our head, we might say them out loud, but often in our head, it’s easier if I do it. I’ll never find somebody that can do it as good as I can, et cetera et cetera. And so I like, you got very clear on all the aspects of the business that you’re involved with Barbara, and then you started with the smallest, working up to the big, that big rock, and it’s part of what you’re excellent at. And your genius is that selling process. And so, but you gave yourself enough time. And I remember having discussions with you about this as you were going through, and you were saying, “My goal is to have every aspect of the business delegated, and somebody else doing it with three months prior to the baby’s due date.” I think from memory, you’re about a week off that?

Barbara:  Well I was just thinking as you were saying that. I probably … That blew out to about a month. I was probably a month late, but that’s okay, because it was still two months before. Now I wasn’t sitting up doing nothing in the two months then, I still had loads of work to do, right up until … I had about a week, it was about a week before she was born, I kind of managed to wind down, but it was more tidying up other stuff. So the strategic planning thing, I think when you were talking there Matt, I was thinking it would be very easy during this second step to just think, oh my God this is so overwhelming, I’m just going to run back to the fear thing again. I’m just going to contract rather than expand. And each of your processes, you start with the easiest one, and you have to say to yourself, or even hang this on your computer, how can I remove myself from this process? And start with the little one, and just move strategically through each one.

Allow time to smooth out the new process, once handed over

And that brings me to point number three. We talk about this is irrelevant, pregnancy is irrelevant really in this one, it suits everyone. Go back through all your processes, and I had to redo, even though I’m great at processes, I had to redefine them. And I had to redefine them without me. I had to confide in my team, there were a couple of people on my team that I told them quite early that I was pregnant. And it wasn’t to put pressure on them because you can’t do that. I said to them, “I’m pregnant, I’m going to go through this process, and I just need you to help me to get this right. But we’re going to work on it together.” So the third point basically though is that there is a period where the handover of the process fully, and the extraction of you, there will probably be mistakes.

There will be misunderstandings. I had one of my most experienced people on my team mess something up because it was a slight misunderstanding in the process. When I looked at it, I thought, well obviously, I see where she was going with that. There’s a period of time where you have to let them do it, and then watch for the mistakes, and communicate each week, each day in your little huddles, your daily or weekly huddle meeting, to evolve the process. Because it’s probably not a clean one. It needs to be very clean, and very clear.

Matt:  And I think to add to your point here Barb, I think you gave yourself enough time-

Barbara:  To do that.

Matt:  To do this. So because you got onto it straight away, and you had the plan, you’ve done the strategic plan. You’ve given yourself enough time to allow others to start taking over the tasks, in which case you were around.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  You were around to refine, to pick up the mistakes, and train them.

Barbara:  Let them make mistakes, and don’t go wild at them, and be like, “I’m pregnant, you’re putting me under pressure.” Don’t lose it. I did lose it a few times, but it wasn’t really at that particular … You cannot lose it in this particular thing. And actually, something just came into my head there. I remember listening to a podcast with Evan Pagan once. It was about marketing. So it wasn’t about this topic. He said something like, “Stop expecting marketing to work, because the majority of time it won’t. But when you hit on the thing that works, then you’ll explode. Everything will explode for you.” It’s the same with this. Stop expecting it to work on day one, expect it to fail. Expect your processes to have holes in them, and watch out for them. Expect them to be inefficient, and then work together with your team to refine them, and get feedback from your team on the holes they see in the process. Or the difficulties they have with their process. So my third point is kind of this evolution of process thing. Allow time for mistakes, and refining the process.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  So I guess the fourth point I would make, and this took a while. So I’m talking by the time I did those first three things, you’re talking three, four, five months there.

Matt:  Yeah.

Refining your processes

Barbara:  Of stuff, so you need at least three, four, five months for this. So then after that, the fourth point I would make would be … So you’ve got to refine your processes. You need to empower your team to take it over, right? There needs to be a handover time where you say, “Okay, now you’re going to do this, and I’m going to support your decision making.” When there’re decisions involved, where it’s not … Like some processes have decision making involved, and you have to start saying, “I’m going to start supporting your ability to make a decision here.” Because they may make different decisions to you. Which could be a problem for you. For example, I’ll give you the example. With Virtual Angel Hub, one of the areas that I was most worried about, was that sometimes when we have a problem, let’s say a customer is not happy, or something happens with the VA, or there’s a major problem that happens, I used to step in.

So with the major problems, thankfully we didn’t have many of them, but I would step in in those situations and I would jump on a call with the client. I was thinking, I can’t really do that anymore. How am I going to empower my team, and my team are all in the Philippines. How am I going to trust them and empower them to feel like they can get on a call with a client, and be the face of the business and solve the problem with the client. And you know the very interesting thing that happened? You’ll love this. We had way more success when I started taking myself out of that role, because they were less emotional about it than I was. So I used to get quite emotional with the clients, I would probably give up too much, and they were very personable, and the clients loved them. They felt supported. But it was less emotional because it wasn’t their business. So that was a very big learning for me.

Matt:  And I think, just on this point here in supporting their decisions and alike, it was something you actually said before the show, which we haven’t mentioned yet. Which was your intention in all of this was to ensure that you could enjoy motherhood.

Barbara:  Absolutely. I didn’t want them to have to call me. I mean they could, I said to them, “If something major blows up, absolutely you can call me. Of course.” But I wanted to let go. I wanted the business to keep growing, but I wanted to let go and enjoy motherhood.

Empowering your team

Matt:  And unless you support decision making, and teach them how to make decisions. Allow them to observe your decisions, understand why you went this way instead of that way. But also, too, empowering them to step into their role, it will always fall on your shoulders, and you’ll never leverage. You’ll never let go. You’ll never have somebody else be able to replace aspects of the business that you do.

Barbara:  Yeah. I think … So then the sort of fifth one for me, the final one. There is a point … I mean obviously having a baby as I said, is kind of an immovable, it’s something that’s going to happen. But I remember getting all the team together, and we had many discussions like this through the six month period that I spent doing this. I got them all together, and I was like, “Guys, you know I’m so proud of you guys, and I really feel supported, and I hope you guys all feel like at this point you kind of know what you’re doing.”

What I said to them then was, I said, “Look, stuff is going to go wrong. Stuff’s going to happen. Hopefully nothing major happens, but if we do have a major scenario, and I’m in hospital for example, and you can’t call me, you guys need to know that you’re capable of dealing with it. And what you have to do is come together and support each other, have a little huddle together and discuss what you think you should do, and I will support whatever happens and whatever decisions you guys make. Regardless of whether it was a disaster, or you’ve got this, and I will support whatever you decide to do.”

And I gave them the confidence to say, I’m not going to come back and go, “Why did you do it that way? I told you not to do that!” Like I wasn’t going to come back and go mad, I was going to come back and go, “Okay I see why you made that decision, and you did what you had to do at the time.”

Believe in your people

Matt:  And so if we just read between the lines here listeners, a couple of things. Number one is belief. Having the belief in your people, but expressing that you believe in them. And the only way you can do that is by ensuring you have the right people on your team. Barb would you agree with me that if you didn’t have the right people in the right seats, that conversation at that time would have been a lot more challenging?

Barbara:  Definitely, and there was one person on the team, I’ll be honest, that was sort of hit and miss. And this is a different conversation, but I probably left that person in place for too long, et cetera. But it worked out fine while I was away, but that person is now no longer on the team, put it that way. And nothing went wrong, it just became very apparent to me that I couldn’t really trust that that person would keep the ship moving. They were hit and miss with the work, and their KPI’s were always off, so I always had this in the back of my head that I was a bit fearful, and I probably should have let that person go at the beginning of this process.

Support your team’s decisions

Matt:  And then your second point was, support their decisions. And you’ve said that a number of times, and it’s so important, because if they’re fearful of making a decision because they’re fearing you’re going to yell at them, or reprimand them, or it may not be what you did. They’ll never make a decision, and hence they can’t take over.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  But I think also too, one thing in this letting go, and you mentioned it in your point three. And I know this firsthand, is your business has amazing systems and processes, and so that enables your people to make decisions, and believe in themselves, because for the majority of circumstances, there’s a system process or a reference point for them to go to, to find the answers.

Barbara:  Yeah, I think you know, what I realised in doing this actually, is yes I had a lot of processes already, and they were very good. They were watertight all that, but I was still kind of in there on a lot of them. And I thought wow, I’m sort of still fingering the pie of everything in this business. And having a baby for me really highlighted that. But if you’re in the business everyday, it’s too easy to be part of everything. So sometimes, go on a trip for four months, and head off around the world or something, and set your business up to run while you’re away, and see how much your finger is in everything. And I basically took my fingers out of everything through this process. And on the decision-making, I want to just make a key point here. It’s key to allow them to start making the decisions way before they need to.

So don’t do this the day before the baby comes right, here Matt hey now off you go and make decisions. So I allowed them to start making decisions from like I don’t know, like probably five months before, so that I could say … I’d say, “What did you do there?” And they’d say, “I did this, and because of this.” And I would say, “Well you know in my experience,” because I know the client’s mindset, right. Very deeply. In my business the client mindset is key. And I was doing the sales calls so I kind of typically knew the type of people that were coming in, and I knew what was going on. And I’d say, “Well this person is probably thinking this.” And they’d go, Oh. So it took me months to kind of teach them how to think like the client. But by doing that everyday, and they’d go “I see what you mean.” And I’d say, “See she was probably thinking, as you said X, what’s going through her head is Y.” And that was pivotal to them being able to make confident decisions later.

Because they felt that they, they just felt that they understood the mindset of the client. Now this is very specific to my particular business, but now today … I mean I’m back on deck now, and I don’t do any of this. I didn’t go back. Now all I work on is this podcast, a little bit of marketing. I don’t even do sales. I still kept my sales guy, because he was doing such a good job. Now on the sales point though, those of you out there who have sales as part of the business, handing over sales is tricky if you do it yourselves. You need a sales script. I’ll say it very slowly, it took me about two months to write the sales script. Painstaking, I hated doing it, but it worked a dream because he got an opportunity to speak. All the points were covered, he knew what to say, all that sort of thing was clear. So it worked really well for us.

Matt:  Fantastic, and a way to even potentially fast track that is to get some recording on your calls, and actually get them transcribed. And you’ll actually see the common things you’re saying, and then you’ll be able to piece your script together.Give yourself time to fine-tune the processes

But I think to Barb’s point, you’ve got to take the time to actually work on the most important pieces, and get clear on where could this process, or where could this function of the business fall down. Where is it that I’m propping it up? Where are the things that I’m constantly having to … What are the fires I’ve got to constantly put out, or the conversations I’m constantly having, and then get clear on how you can script that, systemize that, train that. I think it’s critically important.

Barbara:  Yeah. You know, I was thinking as you were talking there Matt, you know this was a six month process for me. Now I’m good at systems and processes, and I’m very good at delegation, and this still took me six months, even though I had a business already that was quite well oiled. It took me six months to create this. Now then the baby came, and I’m thinking to myself, if you’re a business owner listening this, and you’re thinking I would love a more lifestyle type business, or I would love to be able to work more on my business and write books, and do all that stuff, right. Whatever it is that you’re trying to do, sit down and say to yourself, okay over the next six months, even 12 months, I’m going to focus my entire attention on my operations.

My business … The operations of your business is huge, right! When you nail the operations in the back end, you can go marketing all day, all day, all day, and you know that the back end of your business can cope with whatever is coming through the door. So that means you can scale it. It doesn’t matter about the baby thing, this was my experience with having a baby. But the results of me having a baby is I have scalable business, and we’re now about to scale this massively because it’s ready. I don’t think I would have been, I think if the baby, if Ruby hadn’t come along, even me who’s good at this stuff, I still think it would have taken longer. Because I would have dithered with things, you know?

Matt:  So a little thing I’ve done with some clients in the past, which can be helpful to all of you, is to write your termination letter to yourself on your current role in the business, and set a date on when you’re going to terminate yourself. And that’s the beauty about what Barbara had here, was it was a definitive date in which all of this had to be done. Otherwise, you can be in your business one, two, three, five years, still be doing the same things, telling yourself I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it. Because everything we’re talking about is important and not urgent until either something goes wrong, or until you have a definitive deadline. And so create that definitive deadline for yourself, and believe me, it’s amazing. I’m happy for you to write, email me your letter, and I will post it to you, terminating you from your position in your business. And I have done that before. Because otherwise, you don’t do it.

Barbara:  That’s a great idea.

Matt:  And effectively, that’s what was forced upon you, which is exciting. I’m actually very very jealous.

My key people are now more engaged in my business

Barbara:  Yeah, you know I was thinking actually as well, you know funny thing, sort of a side thing happened from this whole process that I didn’t even think about. My key people are way more engaged and excited about this business than they ever were before, because they took ownership of it. Like I didn’t anticipate that being an outcome, but that has been a huge outcome for me. And they’re now having … There’s stuff going on. Sometimes I’m like, “What are you guys doing?” And they’re like, “Oh we just had this meeting, and we’ve created this whole thing that we want to do.” And I’m thinking wow, I used to have to drive all that, but I don’t have to do that anymore, and that was a side benefit that happened.

Matt:  And a part of this goes to part of what Tony Robbins teaches about his six human needs, and you’re fulfilling their need for growth and contribution beyond themselves. So the fact that they’re connected, they’re aligned to you and the company, and they’ve been given the opportunity to grow and contribute beyond themselves will lead to a more fulfilling role that they have for themselves in the business.

Barbara:  Yeah, it totally, and that surprised me a lot. It lit me up actually, because I was like wow, I’ve seen them shine. They’ve just emerged from tasks … They were never task takers, but I suppose there was a lot of that, but I’ve developed their strategic thinking, by accident. Which is amazing for me. But yeah, it’s worth it. I can’t stress enough how worth it it is to put that work in, even if it takes you 12 months, but don’t let it go on longer than that, because otherwise you’re just dragging it on. It’s a six month project, is my honest view.

Matt:  I agree, 100%.

Barbara:  Yeah, so you have to go and have a baby Matt.

Wrapping things up

Matt:  I’ve got three little babies at home. But look, I think what Barbara’s shared today, is just so important, and I think that if you take nothing else from this show, I just want to reiterate Barbara’s first point, which was to expand your mindset, and you’ve got to actually not be thinking about contracting your business, but expanding it. Knowing that that will actually be less stressful in the long run than contracting. And then follow the process, the other four steps. The strategic planning, redefining processes, getting clear on what was it, I’m just trying to-

Barbara:  I think four was, allow for handing over the decision making.

Matt:  Empowering them to make decisions, and then letting go. And you know, it’s having the faith and belief in your people, and remembering that you choose the people that you put on your team. And so if you choose well, and you invest time and money into them, and also believing in them, it will make a huge difference, and you can achieve exactly what Barbara’s achieved.

Barbara:  Yeah, 100%. It’s something I’m going to talk more about, especially in the women’s sort of space in the next year, so I really feel passionately … I know a lot of women, and this is a generalisation, but they tend to contract rather than expand in this particular situation of pregnancy. It’s a natural fear I guess, because you want to protect yourself, but actually you’re setting yourself up – you’re putting risk onto yourself a lot by doing that.

Matt:  Yeah, I agree, I agree.

Barbara:  Great, so this was such a close show to my heart, I really wanted to do this one, so thanks Matt for facilitating the discussion on this.

Matt:  No worries, and thank you for sharing. If you found this useful, we’d love to hear your comments. Please share the show with others, and also write to us on the Virtual Success Show Facebook group, and let us know your thoughts. And maybe even share some of your own experiences around what you’ve done with your business, if you’ve fallen pregnant, or if you’ve leveraged yourself out of the business in a very short period of time. And I’d love to say thanks to Barbara for being so open and sharing your own experience with us.

Barbara:  Yeah, it wasn’t all highs, there were a couple of lows. But you expect that too I guess, that’s part of that. Accept the lows.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  Thanks Matt, thanks everyone.

Matt:  Thanks everyone.

Barbara:  Bye.

Matt:  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.