The Virtual Success Show

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In this episode:

01:46 – Who is Janet Kafadar?

05:44 – Knowing when to hire a VA

08:48 – Dealing with quality issues

09:45 – Sometimes things just don’t work out

12:00 – How to deal with employees personal issues affecting their work

14:20 – The 3 biggest problems with having an offshore VA

17:30 – Recruiting the right VA for you and your business

19:00 – Working to your VAs strengths

22:46 – Helping your VA grow in their role

24:35 – Building your virtual team

27:43 – Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success show. I’m your host Barbara Turley, and I’m flying solo again today because my co-host, Matt Malouf, is off scaling businesses like mad, and taking on lots of consulting clients. We are getting back in the fold together in the next few weeks, but I’m flying solo for a few shows.

I don’t mind so much today, because the guest I have on is not only a very good friend of mine, but she’s a very good client of my company Virtual Angel Hub – Janet Kafadar. Janet is an online course creation expert, is how I would describe her, and she’s changing business for so many people out there who want to create their online courses, and really getting it out there. Janet, welcome to the show.

Janet:  Thanks so much, Barbara!

Barbara:  Did you like that intro?

Janet:  Yeah, it was really nice. I’m like a super star.

Barbara:  You are a super star. Course creation is a challenge for so many people. We know that online courses are the way to really scale businesses and get some passive income into your business, but it’s hard to get round to doing it, and then creating a course that people actually get traction with. To kick off, do you want to just tell me a little bit more about what you do, and tell our listeners a little bit about your business, how you started, and where you’re at now?

Who is Janet Kafadar?

Janet:  Sure, yeah, absolutely. As you said, I’m an online course design specialist, and I help my clients create online courses and information products. Before I used to do a lot of the coaching and mentoring side of things, but I realized that I couldn’t handle it. I really just wanted to get in there and just help them, and get it done for them, and help them move quicker, and help them move forward faster. That was the main issue that I kept seeing. After they would finish coaching and mentoring with me they would still be at that point where it still wasn’t launched, and I kept thinking, “What is it? Why are they not moving forward?” It’s really just the…

Barbara:  Doing.

Janet:  Implementation is what would just trip them up. Then life gets in the way and other things happen.

Barbara:  That’s a challenge.

Janet:  Yeah, it’s a challenge.

Barbara:  As you know that was the main problem I saw as a business coach as well, and why I launched Virtual Angel Hub, was because people really get stuck in their business with the doing. They learn what to do, they usually know what they want to do, but they just have no time to get it done.

Janet:  That’s right.

Barbara:  That’s fantastic that you’ve moved into … Obviously, your business would’ve seen huge growth because of you changing that focus and going into that done-for-you stuff.

Janet:  Yeah. Initially I was doing that. Oh god, it’s been a journey. It’s almost three years I’ve had my business. When I first started, I’ll start from the beginning, when I first started I was doing a bit of done-for-you work here and there, but wasn’t really concentrating on it, and I’d do one-off sessions with people to uncover where they were, and what they were stuck with, which was actually a really good learning process for me. Then I moved solidly into, I’m going to do done-for-you services, helping people hands-on create their online courses, and getting it all set up, getting the membership site set up, and all of that stuff.

Then that was all going okay, it was pretty good, pretty exhausting. I realized that I needed an assistant. I was trying to do it all myself like a crazy woman, two kids at the time. Then I fell pregnant with my son, with my third, and I thought great, I can’t do done-for-you anymore. Then I went back to doing coaching and mentoring, which is fine, and that worked really, really well.

Now I’ve had my son, he’s now five months old, and I’m moving back into what I did originally, so more of the done-for-you stuff, but being quite specific, and definitely creating more processes and systems and parameters around what it is I’m offering, what I’m not offering, what’s included, what isn’t included, timeframes, all of that stuff. I think it’s been a great journey for me to start where I did, and to obviously take me to where I am now, because I’ve learned a lot about the whole process, and what I need to do, and managing teams. Virtual teams, not just managing teams. I did that in my corporate days, but managing virtual teams is a whole…

Barbara:  That’s great, and there are so many things I can talk to you about here, but I want to take just a quick step back, and I want to go back to the word that you used, “exhausted.” You got a business that was going well, you had clients coming in the door, so when you moved to the done-for-you thing, all of a sudden your business model changed slightly, but that would’ve changed everything. Because when you were a coach, you’re just telling people how to do stuff and teaching. When you move into done-for-you, all of a sudden you need … There’s a lot of implementation going on, a lot of actual roll-the-sleeves-up work to be done. At that point, what was the point at which you thought, “Oh my god, I need to hire an assistant,” or, “I need help, and how do I do that?”

Knowing when to hire a VA

Janet:  The point at which I needed an assistant was, I realized that teeny-tiny things in my business … I was busy focusing on my clients, which is fine, because they bring in the revenue, but I realized that there were things on my plate, inside of my business, that just weren’t happening. I was then stuck. I then needed someone to help do that stuff for me, so I decided to bring someone on. Having assistants has been a journey. It’s been a real journey over the last three years. I think my current assistant, who I’ve had for a year now, is my fifth assistant…

Barbara:  Wow, in three years.

Janet:  In three years.

Barbara:  Probably in two years, really. Because you didn’t have one straight away.

Janet:  No, not at all. Oh my goodness, so I can talk about this, this is what I had. I had one at the very start when I decided, I’m going to have an online business, and I was still working a corporate job at that time, and I thought, “I’m going to hire someone,” and she was great. She helped me create social media posts and all of that stuff. For me at that time, I didn’t have her round all the time, it was just as and when I needed her, but I wasn’t really clear about my message, or who I was talking to, and all of that stuff, so it was still a little bit murky, murky waters. But she was great, she helped me set up my initial website, and that only changed, up until last year I still kept the website for ages. She was great.

Then I had another assistant, and she just didn’t have any … The attention to detail was lacking. I realized that I needed someone that could … I’m very good at giving instructions, “This is how it is, this is what I want, this is how it needs to be, this is how it needs to look at the end of it,” but she just managed to skip everything that I had said, and it was just a real back-and-forth situation of having to go back and say, “Can you read the instructions that I gave you, go back over them?” She just didn’t have it, god love her.

Barbara:  I want to pause there for one second, because one thing that, as you know, we talk about a lot, is creating detailed tasks, instructions step-by-steps and all that. I know you, that you’re quite a detailed person, so you did that quite well. Because there’s more to it than just the processes, and all that. There’s also the person, the recruiting, the type of individual, all that kind of thing.

Janet:  Yeah.

Barbara:  You had gone down the path of going, “I’ve created these processes, I’ve created step-by-step videos for my VA to follow, it should be fool-proof, and yet I know that this particular person is making lots of mistakes,” so the quality was very low. Which is a very common problem,, particularly offshore in the Philippines. You must have been thinking, loads of people will be out there listening and be thinking, “Yeah, that’s happened to me, I’m so frustrated, because I’ve done everything I was told to do, yet I’m still having quality issues.”

Janet:  Yes.

Dealing with quality issues

Barbara:  How did you deal with that? Did you just fire her straight away? Talk to me a little bit about how you dealt with that situation.

Janet:  I was prepared to give it, I gave it a few weeks, of anguish.

Barbara:  Frustration.

Janet:  Frustration. In the end, I was like, “This is not working.” Because I felt even more stressed. I was having to step back from doing my client work so that I could give her detailed instructions. It wasn’t that I didn’t know, I wasn’t prepared to invest the time to train her, and to get her up to speed, that was not the issue. I was prepared to do that. I knew what was involved. But I just thought, “Wait, this is the third time I’m going back on this really simple task. This is crazy. It’s taken us six hours, if I’m counting it, to get it resolved. It shouldn’t be this hard.” So I had to let her go.

Sometimes things just don’t work out

Barbara:  I think you know one of the things I want the listeners to pick up from this, that it’s okay, this happens. Because you’re dealing with people. They’re the steps that we take to get success with a VA, but there’s also the communication that we’ve got to be able to get right, and we also have to be able to recruit properly. Because sometimes people’s resumes can say one thing, but their performance says another.

Janet:  Totally

Barbara:  Nothing you can do about that, you’ve got to be able to have the difficult conversations, and then give feedback and then move on if you have to. That’s good that you were able to move on from that one. Then what happened next? Talk about your next one.

Janet:  Then I had another two VAs after that. The first one was really good, but there were some personal issues that came up for her, and so she was quite distracted as to when she was working with me, and it just wasn’t working. Which is a shame, because she was good. I really, really liked her.

Barbara:  Again, another common problem, particularly in the Philippines I’ve noticed, that sometimes we can have a fantastic VA that does have the skills, and you really like them, but family, particularly there, the family can really get in the way.

Janet:  Right, absolutely.

Barbara:  Because often they’re supporting whole families, or there’re whole families living together, and the drama that goes on starts to impact your business. It’s important, I guess, to understand again that just because you’ve got a really good person, and you’ve tried very hard to work with them through those problems, but their personal issues can really start to impact your business.

Janet:  Right, exactly.

Barbara:  And you’re running a business, not a charity.

Janet:  That’s it. I’ve found it hard to draw that line between …

Barbara:  That’s a hard one.

Janet:  “Oh my god, I totally get where you’re coming from, I understand it’s crazy pants, and there’s a whole lot of stuff going on, but at the end of the day I’ve got you helping me out in my business, and I need to generate revenue.”

Barbara:  You were also pregnant at the time, I think.

Janet:  Not when I had that assistant, no, but a little bit down the road.

Barbara:  You’ve had two kids, and you’ve got your own drama going on.

Janet:  I’d already had, yeah, two kids, under three at that time.

How to deal with employees personal issues affecting their work

Barbara:  From this area, those listening, and a lot of people are going through this, particularly with the Philippines. I’m a huge fan of the Philippines obviously, I have a whole business over there. It doesn’t happen with everyone, but it is something I hear a lot, with these sort of personal issues coming in all the time, and you feel guilty because you want to be supportive to them, and you know life is hard and all that, but you have to remember that you’re still running a business at the end of the day. If it’s impacting your business to a detrimental level, then you probably have to let that person go.

Janet:  Yeah. I felt like it was a second layer of mommy guilt. I’ve already got mommy guilt with working anyway, with my kids around me, and all of that. Plus, I’ve got my team member as well, oh my god, the stress.

Barbara:  You will remember this, Matt and I did an entire show, actually a three-part series, on communication, and how to have those difficult conversations without the guilt. Anyone listening who’s suffering what Janet’s talking about here, go back and look at our three-part series on communication. The third show is about having the difficult conversation without guilt.

Janet:  Yeah, and I’ve learned to detach myself from that now. I don’t feel guilty any more.

Barbara:  Yeah, you have to just move on. Then next VA, after that, still no success.

Janet:  Still no success. The personal issues and the family dramas were even worse, but more so, she was MIA. She just would vanish. I would think, “Wait a minute. Hello, are you online?” It wasn’t that I would expect them to send me an email checking in, I really didn’t like that kind of stuff, and my assistant now doesn’t even do that. I just know that he’s there. But, days would go by, and then I would check my tasks, and think, “Did I put tasks in?” I’ll go back and check, and everything, no comments, no…

Barbara:  Nothing done.

Janet:  Nothing done. I’m like, “Wait a minute.” Then I just wouldn’t be able to get a hold of her. Skype, nothing, email, nothing, I’m like, oh my god.

Barbara:  You want to punch the computer by then.

Janet:  Yeah, chuck it out the window.

The 3 biggest problems with having an offshore VA

Barbara:  The interesting thing is that you’ve actually suffered, in those three VAs … This is why I wanted to get you on the show, because you’ve actually gone through the three biggest problems that people have with offshore VAs. Number one is quality, lack of attention to detail. Number two is family personal issues coming in, and number three is going MIA, for days and days and days. I know this because we have lots of clients that eventually come to us and say, “This VA thing is just not working for me, I don’t believe that you can do it better,” etcetera, etcetera. Then you came to Virtual Angel Hub after that, which I was very excited when you came to talk to us, and that we were able to actually turn this around for you and see your business really start to soar. You were quite skeptical at this point, thinking, “This is just not working.”

Janet:  Yeah, I was thinking, “This is not working. What am I going to do.” I was just like, “It can’t be that hard. I’ve already done my corporate work in teams, and managed teams. I can do this, so what is going on?”

Barbara:  Yeah, what’s going on here.

Janet:  I just couldn’t work it out, so I came to you and was like, “Please, help me! I’ve got so many projects coming out of my ears, and I don’t have the time to work on them!” I need someone to help me free up and do some of the daily tasks inside of my own business and just keep things moving, because I felt like it was just stagnant, it was just getting a bit stale almost. At that point I found out I was pregnant as well, with my third, and …

Barbara:  Panic!

Janet:  Panic stations, everyone! Everyone get to the panic stations! I was like, “Oh my god, what am I going to do?” Then I found my assistant that I have at the moment, Joseph, who is a godsend. It’s just like, oh my god, thank you. Then I couldn’t believe the amount of work we were getting through. It felt like we were on fire. We were just producing so much. I think I remember seeing somewhere, I think it was Denise Duffield Thomas once said, that having a baby makes you the best CEO of your business, or something like that. Which I totally believe. I really had to step up my game. Because it wasn’t so much about, I’m running a business and I’m doing all the work, but I need to create proper systems and processes and get those in place, so that when I do go…

Barbara:  And you need to make money.

Janet:  Yeah, exactly.

Barbara:  I’ve just had a baby as well, you and I just have had babies around the same time, and I will say the same thing. All of a sudden, shit gets real.

Janet:  Yeah, exactly.

Barbara:  Excuse my French, but it’s like you’ve got this hard deadline coming up that’s not going to move, and in fact the deadline could move closer. That’s the issue.

Janet:  Yes, exactly.

Barbara:  Out of nowhere it could just be tomorrow. You’re forced into a situation where you’re like, “I just need this thing to work.” Because you need to make money, and you need to support your family and all those sorts of things, and you need to be able to take time out.

Recruiting the right VA for you and your business

Obviously when you came along to us, I think one of the reasons people come to us is because we’re running training programs for our VAs, and making sure they know that you guys are building funnels, you’re building landing pages, we’re doing social media, we’ve got all our processes for that. Talk to me as well about, Joseph came to work with you, and you were doing all of the above. You had your social media, you’ve got quite a design bent on your business as well, and then you’re very good at creating … You’re creating funnels and automations and all that sort of thing as well. There were still challenges though. You and Joseph come together, nothing’s ever going to be perfect from day one, so talk to me about that journey of just even refining that to the point you guys are at now.

Janet:  It wasn’t smooth sailing, but he was the best out of all of the assistants that I’ve had to date. He has none of the issues of the past.

Barbara:  Our recruiting process, just for the listeners out there, recruiting is actually quite difficult. I’m going to do a whole show on that separately. Recruiting is very difficult, and our recruiting process is designed so that we actually filter out the three major problems that we just discussed. We very rarely have those problems these days. That ruled those problems out, so at least those problems were gone. But there are some issues.

Working to your VAs strengths

Janet:  That’s right. That was cool, so I didn’t have to deal with all of that stuff, which was excellent. He would go through tasks, and he would do everything great, and there wouldn’t be any problems, but I remember one thing that really clicked for me. I actually listened to one of your episodes on this show, where you were talking about, I think it was strengths, so finding out what your VA’s strengths are. I think it might have been with Annette.

Barbara:  I think it was Annette Lakovic’s show. I remember this.

Janet:  Yeah, that’s right. I was like, “Oh yeah.” There’s a book I have called Strength Finder, and I’ve read another book called Go Put Your Strengths To Work, and it’s like, “Yeah, let me go back to it.” Which I read when I was in my corporate days. I went to my assistant, I went to Joseph and I said, “What do you like doing? I want to work to your strengths, I want to work to where you work the best.” He said to me, because at that time we’d moved over from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign, and he said that he really enjoys the automation and segmentation and email marketing side of things. I was like, “Brilliant!”

Barbara:  Which is actually the hard stuff, right? That’s a whole other level. That’s hard stuff, so you’re lucky that you have someone who can really take that on.

Janet:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  The rules, and making the stuff work, making all the funnels work, and stuff talk to each other.

Janet:  That’s right. That’s it. I’m good with that, so when we moved over to active campaign I made sure that I understood it 100% before I then got him to do certain things, and slowly introduced him to it. And he just ran with it.

Barbara:  He loves it, yeah.

Janet:  He just understood, way better than I can. I try and do the segmenting stuff with the tags, and then it’s a whole hot mess when he goes in.

Barbara:  He’s actually fixing stuff, that’s brilliant.

Janet:  He does that, yeah.

Barbara:  That’s good for me to hear this as well, that he has really taken that on. Because as any of the listeners out there, if any of you guys are using more advanced systems than, say, MailChimp, like InfusionSoft , OntraPort, ActiveCampaign, where you’re doing segmentation of clients, it’s not easy. The tagging has to work, the journey of the customer has to work properly, the funnels need to work, so having someone on your team that loves to do that, and figure out where the little glitches are, is powerful. Especially in what you do.

Janet:  It’s really powerful, and what we’ve come down to now is, when I send out an email, or I set up a task, for my active campaign, I just have to tell him I want these to be sent to this person, or these group of people, exclude this group, exclude this group, but then after that I want another email sent, and he just gets it, and it just works. I don’t really have to go in there, which is brilliant. I realize that that’s one of his strengths. One of his lesser strengths is the social media, image-creative side of things, which is fine. I was like, “Okay, good.”

Barbara:  Because usually what we typically find is, it’s unusual to find someone who is brilliant at both those things, because they’re different. The creatives are more right-brained, I think it’s the right brain, and then the techies are more the left-brain logic sort of thing, so people are very rarely both. It’s really good that you did this work with him to figure out, where am I going to channel him? Because what I want to talk about now is, it’s interesting how your business is now growing in a way that you’re going to utilize that skill of his even more, to actually scale a part of your business. Talk to me about the next phase now in how you’re going to develop him out.

Helping your VA grow in their role

Janet:  The next phase of my business, and I really saw … Actually whilst I was on maternity leave, I was off for about four months. I had my baby, and then I went on holiday for six weeks with my family to Europe, back to Europe, so I left Joseph to run my business. I still made sales and all of that stuff, so that was great. I just checked in when I could, which was normally about 4 o’clock in the morning in Europe when I was up feeding my baby. The house I was in had terrible reception, and so I had to sit in one spot to get some service. Whilst I was away and had that break I realized, I kept seeing as a real gap between people, doing their courses … They would buy a course about sales funnels, let’s say, and then that’s it.

Barbara:  Yeah, they don’t do anything with it.

Janet:  No, they don’t do anything with it.

Barbara:  Your new program that’s coming out, I know, is more of a done-for-you membership site, like, “Just give it to us, we’ll build it,” type thing?

Janet:  Yeah.

Barbara:  Joseph’s going to be pivotal to you in delivering that kind of program, because he’s able to do a lot of the techy stuff that will be required in the background.

Janet:  That’s right, so he’ll be doing more of the techy membership side of things, and setting up all of those automations, emails, and all of that stuff. Then my plan is, for next year, to have someone on full-time that will work on the design side of that same client’s work. They’ll be two people that will be looking after projects as they come in, or jobs or however you want to phrase them.

Building your virtual team

Barbara:  This is amazing, because you’ve gone from having failed VA, failed VA, failed VA, to successful VA, to business growing, and now building a team. Your team is starting to develop out. You’ve started to get success in this area, which is what this whole show is about, is about interviewing people that have gotten success with this, and are seeing business growth and revenue from it. I just think it’s awesome – 2017’s going to be a big year for you.

Janet:  I think so, I think it will be. It’s funny, because you resist doing things for ages. I’ve had this on my mind for so long, probably two years or so. I was like, “No, I’m not going to do it.” People have just been literally coming out of the woodwork.

Barbara:  You know you can deliver it, whereas before when you were exhausted, we’ll just circle back to the interview, exhausted thinking, “I can’t take on any more clients, I can’t grow my business, I’m growing other people’s businesses, not my business.” Now you’re growing other people’s businesses and you’re scaling your business, because you’ve spent time to get this right, and to really really focus on making it work.

Janet:  That’s right.

Barbara:  Which is the key.

Janet:  It’s so key. I think it’s the same thing with anything in life. People think about, “Oh, yes, magic bullet solution, and I’m just going to do this and it’s going to work! Yay!” You’ve got to put in the work. I’ve spent, even whilst I was pregnant, so many nights, up until 2 o’clock in the morning, my husband thought I was crazy. He’s like, “Crazy lady.” I was like, “I’ve got to do this. What else am I going to do? I’m not going to do it once I have the babies, so I’ve got to set up this task list now …”

Barbara:  Your processes, and get that all working.

Janet:  Processes, all that stuff.

Barbara:  A combination of the right person, recruiting the right person, who has the right skills, and then utilizing those skills properly, creating systems in your business, and processes and communication channels that are clear, has seen you really start to fly now.

Janet:  Yeah, really have. I’m quite surprised and pleased and happy about how things are going, and as things change. Now I’m developing this new membership package where I set up and create people’s online courses for them, and I still have some systems and processes I need to set up myself still, but …

Barbara:  You always will though, it’s an evolution.

Janet:  So overwhelmed. A little.

Barbara:  For the listeners, by the way, we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. It’s to your service for that in the show notes for anyone, because I’m sure there’s people clamouring, going, “I need that!” The other thing I would say to the listeners is, Janet, I know you listen to this show. You’re great, you’re such a supporter of the show, and you listen to us religiously, and I know that you’ve learned a lot from just listening to the show and implementing.

Janet:  Absolutely.

Wrapping things up

Barbara:  I even learn a lot from doing the show, to be honest, with implementing myself. For those listening out there, subscribe to the show, and make sure that you follow what we’re talking about here, because people are getting success with this. Janet, I’m going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much for your time, and it’s just amazing to showcase your success on the show. Obviously if people want to connect with you there’s a link in the show notes, but they go to JanetKafadar.com?

Janet:  That’s right, JanetKafadar.com, and you can connect with me there. Absolutely.

Barbara:  Lovely. Thank you so much for your time. Listen everyone, remember to subscribe to the show on iTunes, and give us a rating and review, and let us know if there’s any show that you’d like us to cover, any topic that you’d like us to cover. Because we’re always looking on new topics to cover on the show, and give you guys some virtual success. Until next time, thanks very much, and we’ll see you again.

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:

02:06 – How Foundr Magazine came to life

06:00 – What to keep in mind when building a virtual team

06:40 – How to delegate

07:28 – SOP – Standard Operating Procedure

08:03 – Tracking your time

09:08 – Be specific in your instructions

10:12 – Creating your list

11:54 – Creating videos for each task

16:35 – Building a virtual team

20:02 – Communication with your team

22:54 – There needs to be a leader of the project

24:22 – Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Hey, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Virtual Success. I’m your host, Barbara Turley today, and I’m not joined today by my co-host Matt Malouf who’s normally on the show with me, but given I’ve just had a baby and Matt has taken on a whole raft of new clients and businesses, and as business goes, schedules are very hard to line up, so I’m doing the show solo today. I’m quite excited because somebody that I have been following online for quite a long time is Nathan Chan, who is the founder of Foundr Magazine, an absolute, amazing magazine for entrepreneur, with a huge Instagram following, and actually where I found Nathan was on Instagram. I’m very excited today to have Nathan on the show to talk about how he’s using virtual teams in his business and has been using them to really scale a fantastic platform, both digitally and internally as well. Nathan, welcome to the show.

Nathan:  Thank you so much for having me, Barbara. I also just realized, we have a mutual friend, Yaro Starak.

Barbara:  Oh, Yaro. We’ll have to get Yaro on the show actually. Yes, Yaro and I are really good friends, yes. It’s a small world in digital land.

Nathan:  Yeah, it is. He’s a great guy.

Barbara:  He is, indeed. He is, indeed. Nathan,  I found you probably, I think it was in the early days of when Foundr Magazine kind of first launched, and I did find you on Instagram because you had, you do have an amazing Instagram strategy and it’s something I know that you talk a lot about. Can you tell me a little bit first, just let’s start off with your sort of entrepreneurial journey, the quick two minutes on your background and how did Foundr Magazine come about?

How Foundr Magazine came to life

Nathan:  Yeah, sure thing. I started it March 2013 while I was working my day job just as a side hustle, passion project. I never thought it would be this big media start-up or any platform or anything of the sorts.

Barbara:  Did you just, I love that, so you just started as a sort of a hobby sort of thing and had no plan for this big platform that it’s become.

Nathan:  No, not at all.

Barbara:  Wow.

Nathan:  I launched it while I was working my day job. I was looking for a job in marketing. I even took the first issue of the magazine from my iPad to some job interviews, but no one would hire me.

Barbara:  I see. That was a stroke of luck, in hindsight.

Nathan:  Yeah. Long story short, I just, I started this magazine. I identified that there wasn’t really a publication in this space that spoke to aspiring and novice entrepreneurs and also young entrepreneurs. We didn’t go print. We went digital, so in the App Store and the Google Play Store, purely because I felt that print was a dying trade – still is to a certain extent, but we’re launching a big project that’s coming out soon. But that’s kind of how we got started. Now, three years down the track, we have at least a million plus people consuming our content every month, and I feel like we’re only really just scratching the surface.

Barbara:  Yeah, well, 2013, and we’re in 2016 now, and that’s an incredible growth trajectory over that time. Oh, look, I could talk to you forever about so many aspects of what you’ve just said, but obviously to keep on topic, we’re here talking about virtual teams, so had you had an, I mean, were you one of those people who had read Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week book and thought, “Well, I’ll give this VA thing a whirl,” or how did it start with the virtual team thing for you or virtual assistants?

Nathan:  Yeah, definitely it was reading Tim’s book that was a real game changer not around just virtual teams but also around the ability of the internet to change the game that you could get so much leverage, and that’s why I wanted to even start a business was actually because of Tim’s book. That’s how it came about for me. You’re familiar with this online space. That’s something that a lot of people talk about, getting VAs, using virtual teams, using a service like Upwork or your service. There’s other, like there’s a lot of talk about this new way of working.

Barbara:  Yeah. In terms of, did you, your first VA, did you decide, “Okay, I’m going to do this,” or were you doing a lot of the work yourself in the beginning? At what point did you say, “I now need to get a VA.”

Nathan:  Yeah. We’ve always used virtual teams and we’ve always just added people, virtual team members to the company as time has gone on. The first person that I worked with virtually was actually when I first started the magazine three and a half years ago. His name is James Currand. He actually is just based out of India and he’s our graphic designer. I’ve even been to his wedding.

Barbara:  Oh, wow. I love that.

Nathan:  We met online. Yeah, he’s been designing the magazine and been doing our brand identity ever since, still to this day.  And then as time went on, I hired a few more people. These were people locally here in Melbourne. Then it was time also for us to hire a VA, and that person was from the Philippines. Now, we did have a part-time VA, and this person was recommended to me, and she, we just managed her through E-lance. What was cool about that is like it was just, she filled out her time sheet, and yeah, she just did all sort of administrative tasks for us.

What to keep in mind when building a virtual team

I think one of the biggest things that I’d love people to take away around building a virtual team and utilizing VAs is when you’re first starting out in your business or at any point in time, you have a list of things that you hate doing, and then you have a list of things that you shouldn’t be doing. That was actually some advice that a friend gave me, Chris Ducker, that was that you should write a list of the things that you should be doing, the things you shouldn’t be doing, and the things you hate doing. All those things that you don’t like doing or shouldn’t be doing; they’re the kind of things that you need to look to find leverage with.

How to delegate

What we started doing was every single one of those things that I shouldn’t be doing or didn’t enjoy doing, I started to delegate them. The way I would delegate them was just I’d use a tool like SweetProcess which is just a great little, I guess, little, I don’t even know what you call it, like a repository.

Barbara:  I know, yeah, like a step, to create step-by-step processes for you, like a little …

Nathan:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It lets you create SOPs. I would just record. I would just record a video. I’d get that VA to actually, before she’d even do the actual task, I’d get her to watch the video, break it down, and create an SOP out of it in SweetProcess, and then from there, that’s, I went through my list, and then that’s how I started. Now we have two full-time VAs.

SOP – Standard Operating Procedure

Barbara:  Yeah. I just want to focus a little bit on this SOP, standard operating procedure thing, because what we find is a lot of clients come in and they sort of, they want to hire a VA that can use their own initiative to come up with this stuff themselves, which, of course is setting yourself up for complete failure from day one. What you’re saying there is you used to, so you created a video. I mean, the first step though there is that you need to know what it is that you want done and how it’s to be done. Would that be fair to say, so that you can create the video that they can then create the operating process?

Tracking your time

Nathan:  Yeah. I think the biggest thing is, is really challenging yourself to really look inside what you do every single day, so you should be tracking your time. There’s a tool you can use called RescueTime which is a great tool where you can track your time and see where your time is being spent. It’s just a little thing that you install on your computer and you can track your time.

Yeah, the first thing you need to do is reclaim and understand what it is you’re doing on a day-to-day basis, and this is what’s going to give you more leverage. Then from that list, and work out what you’re doing, there’ll be certain things that you do as an owner that you probably shouldn’t be doing or things that can be outsourced or handed over to someone else. Once you have that list, you just do it as if you would normally do it. Just record yourself and break it down, but you write it in the sense that I think there are a lot of people that are very naïve, that they think they get a virtual assistant or somebody virtually that they can just take all their problems away, just going to wave a magical wand.

Be specific in your instructions

But this is something that’s a really big takeaway I had in the early day is you have to be extremely specific. When you work with virtual teams, especially virtual assistants in the Philippines, you have to be so specific. You cannot expect anyone to, like any of those guys to work things out unless you showed them because it’s just, it’s a cultural thing too. It’s all about clear instructions. Don’t leave anything to chance.

Barbara:  Well, I think I’ve seen a few people as well, because sometimes I look at, I look through task listswhen there’s problems and stuff, and I see things like assumptions they made, and clients would say things like, “Well, I assumed they would know I was talking about X.” And I would say, “Well, that might seem clear to you but to someone else, it may not be, because they’re not in your business or they’re not, until they’re working with you a long time, people don’t know your style, they don’t know how you think.” I think the mind-reading thing is a huge problem with people in this space.

Creating your list

How long did it take you, do you think, to create your list? Because I think one of the issues is that people come to me and they say, “I need a VA yesterday. I’m desperate. I need a VA yesterday.” And I think, “Well, that’s probably not going to solve the problem because you’re now taking on a new task of a person when you haven’t created all this other stuff that you need in order to get success.” So how long do you think it took you to decipher your list, forgetting the videos yet?

Nathan:  Yeah, yeah. The list of things that I get that VA to do probably took me about a couple of days, no more than a couple of days. I think if you’re feeling overwhelmed right now, I think it’s always good to throw your hat over the fence in a situation like this where that would be, use a recruitment service or use a service like yours, Barbara, and be like, “Okay, well, I know I’m overwhelmed. I know I can get more help. I know utilizing a virtual system would cost me anywhere between let’s say $500 to $2,000 a month. I can afford that. Let’s just use a service like Barbara’s. I don’t even know what I need yet or don’t.” Just the fact that you’re throwing your head over the fence, committing, putting some money down, using that recruitment service, or whatever, and then that’s going to force you to create that list pretty quickly.

Barbara:  Yeah. We actually give people a list because we’ve found that it’s so difficult for them to create it, that we have created one for them, but I do love that idea of RescueTime. I think that’s very effective to also spot the other things that might be specific to your business that we may not pick up or whatever, because every business has its own different nuances.

Creating videos for each task

Then, with the video, so, you know, I love that you spent this time doing this, so you create your list and then you created a video for each task on that list of how you like things to be done, so it means you maintain control then over how things are done in your business.

Nathan:  Yeah, and I think with VAs, it always has to be that way. You’ll find that VAs tend to, I guess, they just do this, they work really, really well with processes and they feel more comfortable …

Barbara:  Yeah, they do, yeah.

Nathan:  … from a cultural standpoint as well. They feel more comfortable if they can see, they have proper training to do what needs to be done. I think that’s really, really key and important.

Fine tuning your processes

Barbara:  What about, so obviously the next step then, I mean, for me, would be, you create processes, and then you sort of have to test-drive that process, because often, I mean, I wonder, did you find this, when you give a process to someone and a mistake happens, there can be holes in your process that you didn’t realize. How do you… have your processes evolved as you’ve worked with your virtual teams?

Nathan:  Yes.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Nathan:  Of course, of course. I was lucky enough, though, that at my job, before I went full-time on Foundr, I was tasked with doing a lot of processes.

Barbara:  Yeah, I think you obviously had a background in this, because a lot of people find it very difficult. You found it easy, and actually, so do I, but I have noticed the majority of people out there find this quite challenging. It sounds easy, but it’s quite challenging to do it.

Nathan:  Yeah. I think the most challenging thing for me is I don’t enjoy it, so it’s not fun. It just has to get done. I had a boss that just, like just absolutely hammered it into me, that the processes have to be so clear, so like to the point that there’s no room for interpretation, that literally, do X, screenshot, with an arrow pointing to it, writing, and do Y, and do Z, and put in a video as well so people can watch the whole video as well of a screen share of you doing it and talking that person through it.

Barbara:  Oh, I just, yeah, love that.

Nathan:  Yeah. Because it’s marginally, there’s no room for error, and if there is, it’s generally the process’s fault, yeah.

Barbara:  Oh, I love that you said that. What I want to ask is, your old boss, were there any offshore staff in that business, or was it local staff?

Nathan:  I’ve only ever had two full-time jobs in corporate. The first one that really drove it into me, there was no offshore staff, but the second job that I had, the last job I had where I left to go full-time on Foundr, there was offshore staff. Yes, there was heaps.

Barbara:  Okay, because the point I would like to highlight for the listeners here is that, yes, we’re talking about virtual assistants, virtual teams, but this applies to, it doesn’t actually matter, because some people think that we just have to be this diligent because people are in the Philippines or in India or whatever, but my view is that if you’re running a business, you need to be that descriptive anyway with your internal processes so that you can literally promote people and plug a new person in straight away pretty simply to your business.

Nathan:  Yeah, a hundred percent. This is how you scale, Barbara.

Barbara:  Yeah. This is how you scale, yeah.

Nathan:  Yeah, yeah. This is how you scale. If you don’t do this stuff, you will struggle. I want to make, I want to be very clear, we are no, our business, because we move quite fast, we are growing at a reasonably good rate, sometimes it is difficult to keep on top of this and our, like Foundr, within the business, it’s not perfect. Our business is definitely not a business packaged up in a box that could be sold tomorrow, but there is, seventy-five percent of the work is there and it’s done.

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s a great point. I think that’s one of the key things I want people to understand, because we see people blaming the VA all the time. Now, obviously, you can get, you’ve got to get a quality person on your team, but if the person is a good person and they’re trying their best and whatever, usually, the process is where the problem lies, or in the iterations of the process, in understanding that process.

Moving on from there, so your first VA, so have you still got virtual, you’ve gone from having a virtual assistant to having two, and I believe now you’ve sort of built a virtual team as opposed to just VAs. Talk to me about the growth from there.

Building a virtual team

Nathan:  Yeah. Pretty much, as time has gone on, we’ve always used a lot of contractors ever since I started Foundr. Now some of those contractors and also other contractors, we actually have these full-time team members, but they work remotely. We have someone in Canada. We have someone in the States. We have, we’re always pooling resources, so we have a very remote kind of team. We have the core team, the HQ here in Melbourne, but, yeah, we’re using all sorts of people from all around the world to do all sorts of different things.

Now, there’s a few different ways that I look at it. The first way is we pool talent and resources for certain key projects. I mentioned to you before that one of our biggest folks is at the, that we’re bringing a lot of attention towards as a whole team and a company is this Kickstarter book that we’re launching, so it’s like the past three and a half years of interviews, like Richard Branson and Arianna Huffington, Seth Goddn, you name it, all compiled, thousands and thousands of content, into this physical coffee table that we’re going to crowdfund over Kickstarter.

Barbara:  Great.

Nathan:  We’ve pooled resources and contractors and some people in the internal team here to this project, and we manage that all through Trello.

Barbara:  Yeah, yeah.

Nathan:  That project can be specific to certain people that might be virtual, that might be contractors. We’ve got a landing person who does the landing pages. We’ve got the video team. We’ve got a project manager that’s a contractor that is in Sydney. We’ve got all these different people. That’s how we manage that piece.

Then the other side of our business is business as usual, where I can call it business as usual stuff, where the weekly podcast, the weekly blogs, the monthly magazine issue. That’s our core team deliverables. These are the promises that we make as a brand to our customers and anyone that’s in our community. We have processes and systems in place to make sure that that’s a well-oiled machine, continually run. I don’t have to be there. It’s just happening. We already know it’s happening. The tools that we use there are either Trello or GetFlow, which is a great tool. We use Slack for communication or Skype. Then we use SOPs, SweetProcessfor SOPs. Then, pretty much, that’s about it, Barbara.

Barbara:  Yeah, well, that’s the thing. When you don’t need a lot of different tools, you need a couple of key things, so Trello, a big project management tool that works well. We use Asana, but there’s multiple different ones out there. Trello is great for this sort of thing. Slack, obviously, for communication. Most of the people we’ve had on this show are using Slack for good team communication. What I love about the, you used the term “well-oiled machine” for the business as usual stuff, so then you can use your time to be going off and running, being involved in these bigger projects of the book you’re about to release which sounds fantastic, the Kickstarter campaign. I mean, that’s going to require a lot of your time, I would imagine, and that’s the stuff that you want to be doing. You know that the magazine runs well, with your team, and you can go and do these things.

Communication with your team

Now, just a quick, I want to touch on before we wrap up, the communication, because obviously there’s having your processes, systems, team, delegation, leadership, all that stuff, but what about communication in between? Are you running daily huddles, weekly? How do you and your team, in two areas, the business as usual stuff and the project stuff, how do you all communicate together and keep it tight?

Nathan:  I love this question. It’s something that’s never been asked and I wish …

Barbara:  It’s so key.

Nathan:  Yeah, it’s so key. No one talks about this stuff.

Barbara:  No. Well, I know because, I mean, just from my own perspective. We’ve worked with a lot of clients on their processes and getting all the other stuff we’ve just talked about right, and then we noticed that some clients were still failing. It’s communication. I just can’t even stress it enough, how important this is.

Nathan:  Yeah. I agree, a hundred percent. I had to just pretty much ask people flat-out myself to find out these answers. We have a few things going on. We do a Monday, and this is with the core team only. We do a Monday. This is a long kind of daily huddle, and it goes for about thirty minutes, and everyone dials in. That’s really important because it gives everyone in the team just an understanding of what’s going on, what’s planned for the week, what we’re working towards, what’s happening in the business, and that’s a way for us to alleviate, everyone to go around to each person and say, “What are you working on and is there anything holding you back?” That’s where we alleviate any problems that anyone has, and that usually goes for about thirty minutes, between seven to eight people.

Barbara:  Yeah, so it’s quick, it’s round the grounds, quick three points, yeah, yeah.

Nathan:  A hundred percent. Then we were doing daily, after that, but we just took it back because I thought it was too much. We only do daily stand-ups for the core business as usual team three times a week, Monday, Tuesday, and Friday.

Barbara:  Yeah, those are good days. Yeah, Friday is to wrap up the week, yeah.

Nathan:  Then for projects, like this Kickstarter book, for example, we have one weekly catch-up, and that’s anyone involved in the project, and we work through  the Trello board and we do sprints. That’s called the Scrum Agile method.

Barbara:  Yeah, I love that, yeah.

Nathan:  Yup, so that’s how we manage, and we have many projects going on at one time, and there’s always going to be a team leader of that project, and that’s kind of like the owner. So for this Kickstarter book project, we have an actual dedicated project manager who’s a contractor that’s the owner of this project, so she is responsible, and then the rest of us are just getting stuff done.

There needs to be a leader of the project

Barbara:  You need to have, I mean, the key point there I want listeners to understand is that you do need one, there needs to be a leader of the project. Now, if you were a small business and there’s just you and your VA, this still applies because then you are the leader of the project, or you could potentially get your VA to be the leader, but then you’ve got to empower them to be that way, but there always has to be a leader of the project who drives the others and reporting structures for the communication channels back. Would that be fair to say, Nathan?

Nathan:  Yup.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Nathan:  A hundred percent. You can get Scrum masters on like an Upwork, and you can get them for like ten hours a week. It’s really cost-affordable. You can get Scrum masters.

Barbara:  Wow.

Nathan:  That’s not a problem.

Barbara:  Scrum master. I’m going to look into that. Scrum masters. Yeah.

Nathan:  Yeah, yeah. Something to think about. Yeah, that’s kind of our communication channels, plus we have Slack. We have Slack and we do Skype, and if we need anything, we’re all, we’re a team, we’ll help each other out. For the most part, that’s how we manage everything.

Barbara:  Yeah. That’s great. That’s fantastic. I mean, just good insights. We’re hearing the same thing from, pretty much the same stuff from everybody, every guest that we have on the show. For the listeners, you’re hearing this over and over again. This is the formula for success. Anyone who’s, if you’re struggling with your virtual team or your VA, just even one VA, it’s likely that there are holes in some of these areas for you.

Wrapping things up

Nathan, just to wrap up, give us the quick few minutes on your upcoming book and the Kickstarter campaign, and how can we, how can the listeners get involved?

Nathan:  Yeah, sure thing. As you mentioned, Barbara, we’ve been around for about three and a half years, and we’ve been lucky enough to interview and feature and pick the brains of some of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation. I mentioned a few. There are so many more. Gary V, Richard Branson, Barbara Corcoran, Aaron Hopkin, so many more. We’ve never done a print project. This is a really fun project, so we’re creating this coffee table, hybrid coffee table book, kind of magazine. It’s going to be a die cut front cover, beautifully designed, and just full of actionable stuff. No fluff.

Barbara:  Oh, good, so there’s steps in there, yeah.

Nathan:  A little bit of story, a little bit of background, but mainly actionable stuff, and we’ve broken it down into sections, like team building, hiring, marketing, social media, idea validation, you name it. It’s for any kind of entrepreneur, seasoned, aspiring, novice, you name it. We’re going to crowdfund it and pre-sell it through Kickstarter. If you want to find out more, you can go to FoundrMag, F-O-U-N-D-R-M-A-G, dot, com, forward-slash book, and the campaign goes live November 15th and it finishes December 15th.

Barbara:  Great. We’ve got it. We’ll pull the link in the show notes here. Nathan, thank you so much for your time and your insights, and just the amazing story of Foundr. I’ve actually realized I’ve been a follower of you since way back, it must be from the very beginning, because I’ve probably found you on Instagram back then. Great to see, I could talk to you forever about so many different topics, but we’ll wrap up this particular show today.

So everyone, get involved in Nathan’s new book and the Kickstarter campaign, and remember to come back next week for more Virtual Success. Give us a rating if you enjoyed this show. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, and give us a rating. Tell us what you think of the show and anything that you’d like us to cover. We’re all open to ideas. Thanks, Nathan.

Nathan:  Thank you so much, Barbara. Absolute pleasure.

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

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

In this episode:

02:37- Key problems

03:55 – Maintaining an open channel of communication

04:59 – Positive communication channels

09:50 – Blocked communication channels

12:26 – Cultural challenges

14:10 – Empowering your VA

17:33 – Constructive vs. destructive feedback

21:44 – Having a good support system

24:20 – Celebrating Success

26:30 – Staying connected with your VA

30:20 – Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Hey, everyone and welcome back to another show of the Virtual Success Show where I’m joined by my fantastic co-host who gives us insights every week into virtual success, Matt Malouf. How are you, Matt?

Matt:  I’m well, Barb. How are you?

Barbara:  I’m great, thank you. Great, thank you. I’m quite excited about today’s show because we’re taking a little bit of a different tact today. We’ve decided that on these shows, we often talk about what Matt and I are doing with clients or with our own businesses. We interview people who have big teams offshore and around the world and how they manage things. We thought today would be very interesting to actually bring one of our superstar VAs onto the podcast and interview him around what it’s like from the other side. Let’s hear from the virtual assistant’s side and some of the challenges that you might, as listeners, you may not realize is happening in the background.

Today, we’ve brought on Ram Sta. Maria from our team and Ram is … look, he’s one of our superstars I have to say and he is one of our success coaches inside Virtual Angel Hub. He has a very unique insight because not only does he work with one of our fantastic clients, but he also coaches a lot of our new VAs that come on to work with some new clients. In the first few months, he will be coaching them and guiding them and just helping them in those initial few months to get success with their new client or clients. So Ram, welcome to the show.

Ram:  Hi. Thank you, Barb. Thank you, Matt. I’m very honoured to be here.

Barbara:  We’re delighted to have you. Matt, you would have some insights here as well. You’re probably excited to get some questions in for Ram, too.

Matt:  Very much so, very much so. I’m really, really excited about the show today because it’s going to give everyone an amazing insight into, let’s call it, the other side.

Barbara:  Yeah, which you often don’t hear because as we know, we often don’t hear enough from the other side. It’s very hard to, and especially with Filipino culture as we’ve been chatting about off air, it’s hard to the real insight and the truth from the other side.

Key Problems

Ram, obviously in your role, look, you started out with us with working with one of our clients and I say you were quite lucky because that went quite well. She was a great client, but I also think it was because you’re a great VA and you’ve a great ability to communicate. Then, you moved on to working with some of our newer people coming in. So I’d love to hear, what are your insights into the main, the key problems that you see happening for new VAs or VAs that are not getting success with clients?

Ram:  I’ve been in the success coach post for quite a while now and I get to talk with these new VAs and they always raise these, and I listed down three main points or main challenges that they encounter. The first one would be maintaining an open channel of communication between them, the VAs and their clients. Number two would be the VAs being empowered or the VAs recognizing that they can speak up.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Ram:  Lastly is providing consistent support between the client and their VAs.

Maintaining an open channel of communication

Barbara:  Yeah. I know that you and I have had discussions about these areas before when we see these issues happening. Let’s dive in and I want to dissect each point here so that for the listeners, we make it really clear what we actually mean. Let’s talk about some live examples because we’ve got lots of stories for each of these points and I’m sure, Matt, you’ve got a couple of stories you can throw in here, too, yeah.

The first one, maintaining an open channel of communication. Now, we’ve just come through, Matt and I, a three-part series on communication, effective communication from the client side. But I know and you would know, Ram, from our experience that communication is a two-way street. No matter how much the client practices their side, we also have issues of the communication on the VA side as well. Can you give us an insight into maybe an example of a positive communication channel and the outcome of that for a VA and then, a more negative one or something that wasn’t really working from a communication point of view?

Positive communication channels

Ram:  Sure, sure. I remember a few months ago, I was working with an amazing client. She’s pretty much great when it comes to communication and we were migrating her contents from one program to another and as we all know, migration is such a very strenuous and laborious job. Going in, she was able to relay to me everything that she wants me to do in a very short, concise, and clear manner. She was able to lay out all of her expectations from me. In turn, the migration process went well. It actually went smoother than I expected and we were both happy with the results.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Ram:  The migration could’ve taken more than a couple of weeks, but because of her, because of the open channel of communication that we established, we were able to do it in I think less than a couple of weeks or a week. That saves us time and that saves us money.

Barbara:  Absolutely, yeah. Now, I love that you said there that not only was she clear on what she wanted done, but she was very clear on her expectations. We did a show on expectations management for the clients as well and that … Do you feel like the steps are one thing, but the expectations of what success looks like, how important is that to making the difference for you?

Ram:  I think when the client knows your limitations, she knows what to expect from you, she would know what kind of job to delegate to you. If she knows if you’re very good at this particular job or at this particular task, she might focus the tasks she gives to you on those particular tasks or your strengths and if she knows what your weaknesses are, she might just focus some of the tasks on herself rather than giving it to you. That saves both of you time. You get most of the things done. You accomplish things better. Yeah, it’s a win-winsituation for the both of you.

Barbara:  Matt, go on.

Matt:  Yeah, Ram, just out of curiosity, had this client ever done something like this before?

Ram:  I think it’s her first time migrating her contents from one platform to another, but the good thing about her is that she researched well before doing so and she was able to transfer all of the things that she researched about to me and that made both of our jobs easier when it comes to the migration.

Matt:  I think that’s a really important point because here, you’ve got a scenario where it’s first time for the client and because they’re prepared and have clarity on what success here looks like, the communication can actually happen a lot more effectively. Whereas, and I think this is too often where things can break down is because a client or somebody doesn’t have clarity on what success looks like. And so as they’re running and gunning in the day to day, that’s where I think the expectation misalignment comes up.

Barbara:  Yeah, and also an interesting point you’ve made, Ram, which I’d like to highlight is that this client also took responsibility for … she was migrating and I know this particular situation, migrating from one platform to another, it was actually a membership site migration so, it was a very big job. There was a lot of tasks involved, but she didn’t just say, “Here’s what I want. I want to migrate from X to Y, off you go.” She actually researched herself on the complexity of that and whether it was the right move and what the outcome she wanted. Yes, that created a bit of work for her, but I think … and could you delegate that to your VA to research it in the beginning? Of course, you could, but you definitely want to have communication there around … There is oversight that you have to do there because if you just throw it at your VA and expect it all to go great, you can really end up in holes there because there’s no communication between the two of you.

Matt:  Absolutely, absolutely.

Barbara:  Ram, what about now, a situation where let’s say a VA is trying their best, but the communication channels are blocked between … We’ve seen this a lot. The channels are somehow blocked between the client and the VA for whatever reason. Can you give an example of that scenario that’s happened?

Blocked Communication Channels

Ram:  Yeah, as a success coach, I always encourage the VAs to let me know if they have issues with their clients or if they have anything that they want to be raised or discussed. Sometimes, there are situations when the client and the VA are not able to maintain an open channel of communication. Say, for example, a client who refuses to use the email or other means of online communication. Instead, the client prefers to talk on the phone. The problem is the client isn’t exactly a native English speaker so there’s already the language barrier there.

Barbara:  This is in the case where potentially the client isn’t a native English speaker.

Ram:  Yeah.

Barbara:  Yeah, that can cause a lot of issues, yeah, yeah.

Ram:  So there is misunderstanding that’s already there. There are instructions that are not clearly understood. Then consequentially, there is frustration that happens between the client and the VA. The VA gets frustrated. The client gets frustrated because things are not getting done. With frustration comes sometimes, if it’s happening for a long time, there’s some sort of resentment going on between the client and the VA, and we all don’t want that.

Barbara:  That can escalate out of control. I understand that because I see that. The client gets frustrated, then resentful and then, almost blood boiling and then they want to complain to someone or whatever, which is understandable. How does the VA feel? What’s the emotion the VAs start to feel?

Ram:  Feels defeated because most of the VAs that we take in, we train them very well. So, I feel like they feel defeated because they know they can do the job. It’s just that either the client cannot communicate or they cannot communicate well to the client. So the frustration really brings a lot of defeated attitude to the VA, which is not very healthy to the VA and to The Hub.

Cultural challenges

Barbara:  Yes, yeah. What about, we did talk off air a little bit about the cultural challenges? I think it’s worth mentioning, just discussing here a bit of the … Particularly in the Philippines, we’re talking about the Filipino VAs here. What are the cultural challenges when it comes to communication, particularly with people in other countries?

Ram:  Yes, I think it’s because as Filipinos, it’s part of our culture to be very accommodating to people from foreign lands. We always see or look at ourselves as subordinate to them to an extent. So VAs are not exactly empowered when it comes to that area.

Barbara:  Of communication so, they would find it difficult to speak up.

Ram:  They find it very difficult to speak up. I have, not even to people from foreign lands, even to us, their success coaches, sometimes they feel afraid to speak up because they think they might be ridiculed for what they have to say. I think it’s part of our job to empower these VAs to speak up …

Barbara:  Yeah.

Ram:  …it’s okay.

Barbara:  Actually, just for the listeners’ benefit, we talked about this off air and actually, the topic of the cultural differences became so huge in our off-air conversation that we’ve actually decided we’re going to do an entire show with Ram actually later on the cultural aspect of this. Look out for that show later. We decided it was a topic we’d actually take out from here.

Empowering your VA

Ram, where you’ve ended there on that point actually leads us into point two. Point two is your VA needing to feel empowered. Let’s talk about and dissect that a little bit for a second. As a business owner and sometimes, we hire people and we’re really busy, right. I’ve said this to you guys, the client is so busy. They’re not really thinking about or don’t feel they’ve got time to invest in mentoring and empowering and training their people, even though we advise them to do that. How can a client … ? What are the simple things a client can do to make their VA feel more empowered, especially when it comes to communicating and speaking up?

Ram:  Based on my experience, I was encouraged to speak up when … My client treats me as a very essential part of the team. To an extent, he or she treats me as an equal so I feel empowered. I feel like my opinions matter to her. I feel like my suggestions matter to her. You don’t have to do whatever your VA suggests you to do, just hear them out. I think when you let your VA feel that she or he is an essential part of the team, he feels empowered and he feels like, “You know what? It’s okay to speak up. It’s okay to let my voice be heard.”

Barbara:  That’s a really powerful point. Matt, I’m sure you’ve got a couple of comments here.

Matt:  I do and I guess it probably leads onto… because I think a lot of that point there of encouraging ideas, being treated as an equal, I think that’s so critically important and I think often because we can’t see or physically are in the same room, that can be a bit challenging for people. How can, Ram in your experience, your client provide feedback in an empowering way?

Ram:  My client makes sure that she repeats the suggestions that I give her. I think she wants me to know that she listens to me. She sometimes discusses the suggestions that I have, that I make. Also, she gives me an opportunity to speak up. She actually asks me if I have any suggestions, if I have questions, if I have anything that I think can help further her brand or her company, which I feel is very empowering to me as a VA.

Matt:  If there’s a situation where say something hasn’t gone to plan and … Because I see often in organizations, whether they’re using VAs or internal staff, that the providing of feedback can be very disempowering for people, very discouraging. They don’t like it because it’s not delivered in a very constructive way. What’s the best way in your opinion, particularly with dealing with the Filipino culture, what’s the best way to provide feedback so that the VA still feels empowered?

Constructive vs. destructive feedback

Ram:  I think more than anything, you have to be clear as to what your feedback is because again, you have to maintain an open channel of communication between your VA and yourself. Make it clear, make it concise. I think it doesn’t have to be sugar coated. It has to be constructive though because there is a huge difference between a constructive criticism and a destructive criticism. Make it constructive. Compose it in a way that doesn’t make the VA feel that she did or he did something wrong. Because in our culture, we’re not very keen on criticism. So make sure that it’s constructive.

I like how my client constructs it. She always says that, “It would be better next time if we do this. I think it would be great if we go do this.” That’s how she constructs her criticisms when she gives them to me.

Barbara:  That’s brilliant, focusing on the moving forward, rather than going on about the mistakes or going on about how it was done in the past because it’s almost yeah, it can be destructive to do it that way.

Matt:  Absolutely. Moving forward, it would be better to do it this way. That’s such a great positioning, fantastic positioning.

Barbara:  Yeah, and I just wanted to ask, just on this point as well, often feedback I get from clients and, Ram, you’ve heard this one as well from me chatting with you about how we get around this, clients will often say, “Oh, yeah, they’re just not proactive enough.” I would say to the client, “First of all, define what you mean for you by being proactive? Second of all, have you had that conversation with your VA? Have you empowered them to know what you mean by proactive and how … ” Because I think sometimes, VAs feel like, “the client knows exactly what they’re doing so I don’t want to step in and give my opinion because they’re above me or they might think that I’m above myself,” or something like that. I know, Ram, you would have some of our VAs that would feel that way. Ram, are you still there?

Ram:  Yes. I think when it comes to criticism, us as VAs would have to be open when it comes to it. You have to look at it as a thing where you learn from, not a thing that’s there to destroy you or to defeat you. It has to be something that you learn from.

Barbara:  Yeah, if as a client, you want your VA to be more proactive, I would suggest that you have the conversation with your VA to say a bit like what you were talking about, Ram, telling them that, “I really value your opinion and I’d love to hear more about what you think,” and that can take time to work on together, but the outcomes can be great when you empower your VA with that sort of communication.

Ram:  Yes. I think if I were the client, I make sure that I encourage the VA or I let them know that they have a huge role in the company, that they are actually an essential part of the team. That way they’re empowered to be proactive. That way they feel like if I do this, this can actually help the brand. If I research on this and present this to my client, it’s going to actually further the company. If you give them feedback like, “Hey, it’s a good suggestion. Hey this is a good point,” the VA feels empowered that the client actually considers her opinions or his opinions and in turn, that would make the VA more productive as time goes by.

Having a good support system

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s fantastic. I really love that point. Then, that leads us on to point three. Point three was having a good support system. I know, Matt, you’ve got a couple of comments to make on this, too. Ram, first of all, what is it? Having a good support system, what do you mean by that? Maybe give an example of how you see that happening.

Ram:  From our side, the VAs, it’s amazing how in The Hub, we actually have support. If we have something that we don’t understand, if we encounter a snag along the way, all we have to do is go into The Hub and ask for help. Considering how collaborative the culture of The Hub is, asking for help and getting help is very, very easy

Barbara:  That’s good because I’ve set it up that way. I’m very happy that you mentioned that, yeah, because I do know, I know how important with teams, and this is not just with Filipino teams or offshore teams. The idea of collaboration, support systems, etc., is really, really important. Matt, what about when it’s just you and your VA and you’re run off your feet and the VA is really busy, how do you create support systems in that situation?

Matt:  Yeah, I think and I was mentioning in prep for today that my first VA that I started working with, Ivy, we started working together on a part-time basis, 20-hours a week and it was just her and I in the business. That was it. That was our team.

I was very mindful that she needed my support. If she gets stuck that she needed my support and it was just making a little bit of time. We used to have a 10-minute chat every single day with ‘Where are you stuck? How can I help?’  And she felt really supported, I think because when it is only you and your VA, you need to work through the challenges together because it’s only the two of you and I think you need to also celebrate the wins together as well because I remember at that time, that was when I was just starting my coaching business and so there was a lot going on and we were working on projects. And whilst I’ve got friends and family to be able to celebrate with here, Ivy was part of my team and so I needed to work out ways that we could celebrate with her being in the Philippines and me being in Sydney. We found a way. I believe it was very empowering for her.

Celebrating success

Barbara:  What was the way, Matt? Did you go out, each of you go out for a pizza with your laptop and get on Skype and have a wine together or what did you do? That’s an interesting one.

Matt:  It was dependent upon what the success was. For instance, I remember at one point, we were launching an online membership site, a new program. I remember setting it up that if we achieve this and got this result, then I was going to buy her a new laptop. That’s how we celebrated success. There was one condition on me buying a laptop for her, which was that she took a photo and sent it to me of her buying a new laptop so that I could experience that as well. Do you know what I mean?

Barbara:  That’s lovely, yeah. You could see the smile on her face and how she felt in that moment of getting …

Matt:  100 per cent. And that came about by me understanding that that was a goal of hers. She wanted to upgrade her machine and its understanding your people, but that was one way. I’ve done coffee dates with my VAs before where they get a coffee and I’ll get … I’ll pay for the coffee, but they go out and buy a coffee for themselves and I do it and we share a coffee.

Barbara:  I love that idea. They can go to a café. Yeah, that’s a fantastic idea. Have a coffee date, yeah.

Matt:  Absolutely. A lot of this I think is just thinking outside the square and understanding ‘what am I trying to achieve here?’ If someone was sitting next to me, what would I do? We’d go, grab a coffee and have a chat. How can we do that virtually? The technology enables us to do that now

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  We’ve got these beautiful things called smart phones so that we could be connected wherever we go in the world these days. It’s just really understanding that. But I think back to the point of support, I think that you’re hearing from Ram, everybody, that what’s critically important to a VA, is feeling supported, is feeling like they can ask questions, is feeling like they have somebody that they can collaborate with when they’ve got their challenges. If it’s just you and them, and you don’t provide that for them, then in my opinion, you’re setting yourself and them up to fail.

Staying connected with your VA

Barbara:  Yeah. Look, on that I just want to add a point here because we did have an issue the other day that came up where yes, your VA needs to be able to ask you questions, but I think there’s also a little process you can set up around that, too. Ram, I’d love to know your thoughts on this idea.

Sometimes, clients are very busy and they don’t really have time for a question every 10 minutes on Skype. You know, the ones that don’t want to be pinged on Skype all day, but setting up little processes like … I love your 10-minute phone call idea, Matt. You could say in the early stages of working with a VA or in the early stages of a project, you might do a 10-minute phone call that has a very clear agenda so, it’s a quick like those three questions that you approached. Where are you stuck? How can I help? It’s not just a chat. It’s actually very structured.

Maybe you need two or three of those in the day so that there might be a morning one and there might be a lunch time quick check in and then, there might be an afternoon if you have a full time person for example. Ram, from your perspective, would that clear up a lot of the issues that some of our VAs are having if we had a little process like that for clients, the 10-minute phone call?

Ram:  Absolutely. I think it’s an amazing way of eliminating confusion between the client and the VA. You’d actually think that you’re spending too much time, but you’re actually saving time, saving yourself from the dangers of having your task messed up.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Ram:  Yeah, I think that’s actually an amazing way of just keeping yourself up to date with your VA. A concrete example would be my experience with another client of mine when we’d have phone calls almost every day. I worked with this client within a very limited amount of time so, I told her that we can’t have phone calls every day, but I think it would be great if we can have phone calls every Monday and then, emails during the rest of the week. She thought that it’s a helpful tip. She went and run away with it and now, I think we have a better client-VA communication or better client-VA relationship because of that.

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s great, yeah.

Ram:  We established a good process or a good working process by doing so, by me speaking up and telling her that I think this is what we need to do and she entertaining that idea and actually implementing the idea. Now we have a better client-VA relationship.

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s fantastic. Those insights are great. Matt, what do you think? Getting the other side here is really powerful.

Matt:  Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that we know the shows we’ve done thus far, like you opened this, Barb, that we’ve given it from the business owner or entrepreneur’s perspective or we’ve interviewed people that have had success with VAs, but hearing it from Ram’s perspective is just outstanding.

Barbara:  Yeah, because, Ram, you’ve had a lot of success with your clients. You’re a very good communicator, but you’ve been exceptionally good in our team helping those VAs that maybe are not feeling so empowered or the client’s not communicating properly. Sometimes, you’ve managed to help turn situations around without us even having to get on a call with the client because you’re mentoring. A lot of our VAs get mentored in the background by some of our success coach team on how to communicate better and how to feel more empowered. Yeah, like I say people who are not members of Virtual Angel Hub don’t obviously get that so you need to be able to provide that by yourself. The tips we’ve given today will help everyone with that.

Matt:  Absolutely, absolutely.

Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Now as always, everyone, if you find this show helpful, particularly today’s show, please do share it with your network. We’re committed here to helping people get success with outsourcing and with virtual teams. It is absolutely possible. Regardless of what business that you’re in, industry that you’re in, country that you’re in, it can be successful for everyone.

We’re about to share lots more stuff coming up. As I said, we’ve got a massive show coming up on Filipino culture where we’ll get Ram back in again to chat to us about how to deal with those cultural differences. Obviously, if anyone has anything to add, we’d love to hear your thoughts. You can either comment below the show here or pop on over to our Facebook group, Virtual Success Show on Facebook and you can continue the conversation with us there. Any suggestions for shows you’d like us to do, pop it in there and we’d happily do a show.

Matt:  Excellent. Ram, I’d like to say a big thank you for your insights and your time today. It’s been wonderful. I can certainly attest for myself, it’s been very insightful and always a learning experience. So thank you, Ram.

Barbara:  Yeah, thanks, Ram.

Ram:  Thank you, Barb. Thank you, Matt. It’s an honour to be here. I’ve enjoyed my time here. Thank you very much.

Barbara:  Great. Everyone, we’ll see you next time.

Matt:  Thanks. See you. See you, Barb.

Barbara:  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.

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In this episode:

01:58- Steps for success in setting up a small project

03:47 – Be clear on what you want

06:27 – Clear communication is key

10:18 – Case Study – sourcing notebooks for an event

14:03 – A sense of control

15:06 – “You can only expect what you inspect”

15:40 – Overcoming project roadblocks

17:35 – Having check-ins is not ‘micromanaging’

18:28 – Wrapping things up

Matt: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another show of the Virtual Success Show. I’m joined with my wonderful co-host, Barbara Turley. Good morning, Barbara.

Barbara: Hey, Matt. How are you?

Matt: I’m well and yourself?

Barbara: I’m really well. Thank you, thoroughly enjoying these shows that we’re doing.

Matt: They’re lots of fun, aren’t they?

Barbara: Yeah, they are, lots of insights.

Matt: Had a good week?

Barbara: Yes, a bit of a crazy week for me. I’m mentoring new staff members. I’m actually putting some of our key people into more leadership positions at the moment, so there’s obviously that transition from me directing them to them directing me, which is very interesting to do, actually. I’ve been enjoying it, but it takes time.

Matt: Excellent. I’m really excited about today’s show. Today is going to be part one of a two part series that Barbara and I were talking about in how to set up a project. As we were discussing just before the recording, we were saying that there’s probably two distinct learnings here. One is around setting up a day-to-day task or a smaller task or project, and then there’s the methodology behind setting up a larger project. What we want to do today in part one of this is just go through a framework and methodology on how to set up one of those day-to-day or smaller tasks or projects.

Steps for success in setting up a small project

Where this came from, just over the last few weeks, I’ve just noticed a lot of our clients that are working with VAs are having some challenges in like, “Well, I’m not sure if this VA thing is working for me.” A lot of it is that they’re not communicating effectively enough upfront on what success looks like and how the VA needs to, effectively tick the boxes, in order to get the projects done. We thought it would be extremely valuable today to actually step you through the methodologies that Barbara and I use and that we encourage and teach, as part of today’s show.

Barbara: Yeah, I think Matt, I see that a lot with our clients, too. It’s sometimes to get the simple things right. With hiring VAs, we often talk about the more complex things of how to get success with teams and various things, but the actual getting the simple bits right in the beginning, like what we’re going to talk about today, can actually make or break your experience with a VA. All the other stuff then can augment that experience later, but if you get this stuff right in the beginning, it just makes all the difference.

Matt: It does. I think it was a Winston Churchill quote. “If I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I’d spend seven hours sharpening my axe.” I really just want everyone to understand, It’s the sharpening of the axe piece that’s critical for today.

Barbara: Yes.

Matt: What Barbara and I did in preparing for today’s show is we came up with some steps, and we’re going to take you through these steps. Also, I’m going to take you through a real-life example in how it works, and the steps for success in setting up a project.

Be clear on what you want

The first step that we both agreed was vitally important is you have to get clear in your head what the task or project is and what success looks like. One of the ways I do this is, I’m very kinaesthetic. I’m always writing or drawing or mind mapping. What I’ll do is I’ll often get up onto the whiteboard, and I’ll get out of my head onto the whiteboard what I actually need the VA to do. Then I’ll actually just create a little audio recording using voice recorder or DropVox. Then I’ll actually take a photo of the whiteboard with the audio, and I’ll send it through to the VA. That will often be how I communicate the initial parts of the project to them.

Barbara: I love that idea. You know what I find interesting about that step actually, Matt, as well, and I’ve done this, as well, is that often I find what people do is they don’t do this as the first step. The first step they do is they get on a call with their VA and say, “Hey, this is what I want to do.” Rather than first doing what you suggested there, make sure that you’re clear in your own head first of all what you’re trying to achieve and the steps that need to be involved to get there, because often when I do that, I find I’m actually not clear myself. I thought I was in my head, but when I try to map it out, I think, “Oh, I didn’t think of that bit.” There’s all these little pieces of the puzzle that you haven’t thought about, and that causes terrible problems later when you just throw the task at a VA and expect them to figure that out.

Matt: Absolutely. Listeners, I want you to keep in mind, it’s not about spoon-feeding your people. What you need to do is set them up for success, so if they can understand how you’re thinking and what you’re looking for in this project, you’re going to set them up for greater success. It will help with speed of execution, as well.

Barbara: Absolutely. Now Matt, with the audio, I think there, if people are comfortable doing video … I know I’m comfortable with video, so for me I was thinking a whiteboard and quick, whip my iPhone out and do a quick video. I’m actually pointing at the steps, and it’s connecting the thing together. If anyone’s keen to do video instead, I think that would work very well as well for a VA to visually see how you’re going through the steps and your body language and all that sort of thing along the way.

Matt: Absolutely, and another tool that I’ve used as well is where I might use Jing or Camtasia to do a quick little screen video as well, so that could work as well.

Barbara: Great.

Clear communication is key

Matt: The next step, obviously, is to send this to the VA, and you need to send it to them with a deadline for them to set the task up in Asana or whatever project management tool you’re using. What you want them to then do is take that audio, that video and set up the project in Asana. Obviously, you’ve gone through it step-by-step. What you want them to do is when they’ve completed that part is to notify you that the project has been set up in Asana, and it’s ready for you to review. Now, I think this is vitally important.

Then step number four in this is for you to then review the project in Asana. Look at the steps that your VA has included, and ask yourself “Is that how I set this project up? Is there anything missing? Does this make logical sense? Is this going to get them to the outcome that we desire?”

Barbara: Yeah, I agree. I think, as well, one thing that you said there that I’d like to highlight. You said, send this to your VA, and then set a deadline for when it needs to be set up in the project management system, so we’re not even talking deadline yet on when the project is to be complete. We’re talking about the VA needs to organize this project in our project management system and get all this information in there so that I can have a quick review, just an oversight thing. Again, we’re not saying that you need to go in and micromanage everything your VA is doing, but you do have to have a level of oversight so that you feel comfortable. I just jump in and have a quick look and go, “Yeah, great. Let’s go. We’re ready to go.”

Matt: I think there’s two parts to that, too. If you jump in and you look, and the recipe for success is there for them to achieve this project, then you sign off. “Good to go. Let’s go.” If it’s not, if something’s missing, my thought at this point is jumping on a quick call with your VA can really speed things along. I’ve tried in the past doing additional audios and videos and the like, but often it can be a three to five minute conversation that will just fill the gaps in.

Barbara: Yeah, a video at this point is too time consuming, I think. It’s just, get on the call. Of course, there is the question of if there’s just steps that were very obvious missed, that’s a whole different issue and conversation for another show, with your VA. There may just have been some confusions or something in what you said or whatever, and you can sort that out very quickly on a call.

Matt: Yeah or you forgot a step, a step that you do unconsciously without even thinking. That’s what you’ve got to remember. There’s a lot of these steps that are just habit for you that aren’t habit for your VA yet, so you’ve really got to step through. It’s getting into the step-by-step of this.

Once sign-off has occurred, then there needs to be a clear deadline for the project, together with then milestone dates for check-in. Keeping in mind for this example today, we’re talking about a shorter project, and so it could be something that you’re setting up that needs to be done by tomorrow, in which case there might be an end-of-the-day check-in just to let you know where things are at and that they’re on track. It could be certain parts of the project that you just need to sign off on in order to keep things moving forward for it.

I thought what I’ll quickly do here is just let me give a real-life example of something that’s going on for us at the moment, just to bring it to this point. Then I’ll talk about the milestone check-ins.

Case Study – sourcing notebooks for an event

We’re doing an event in a few weeks, and I want some A4 spiral notebooks that are branded for our event. It’s a relatively simple project, but again the VA hasn’t done this before, so what did I do? I got up on the whiteboard, and I’m like, “Okay, what we need to do is, here’s the budget that I want to spend. My budget is $500. This is what we’re looking for, A4 spiral notebooks with our branding on the front. You need to use these logos. I’m looking for this color on this one. There’s two different types,” so I’m giving them almost a design brief. I specify that we’ve not done this before, so I recommend getting three quotes. Don’t put a quote in front of me that is over the budget. If you don’t get any quotes that come within the budget, let me know. I was very clear that say if you got three quotes initially that were over budget, give me a call, and we’ll discuss. We may need to up the budget. I was very clear on the timelines for this. I was very clear on where they needed to be delivered to, and that then all got sent off.

That got put into Asana. I then, once I got that, reviewed it. There was nothing missing, and there was nothing I could think of at that point of time that needed to be added to the project. What we then quickly said is, “Okay, I need this done in the next two weeks. Please give me an update every second day, so I know that it’s getting done.” I know that with a project like this, that if we don’t hit the deadline, we won’t get it delivered in time, so it’s critical that I’m kept aware every second day, just with a quick update. We actually do it in Asana, so that message is coming through.

That project has now been completed. We had to increase the budget because on what we wanted, we couldn’t find a supplier that could get it to us in the timeframe. We’ve actually got a supplier that’s going to do it for us moving forward with a longer lead time. And so what’s great is we’ve now got a systemized process for this moving forward, and we’ve got a preferred supplier that we’re going to use.

Barbara: You know, Matt, there’s a couple of things I want to point out there, just in listening to you talk through this. I cannot stress enough, and I know you’ll agree with me, the importance of the milestone check-in points along the way because what could happen with a project like this is VA looks at the deadline and goes, “Okay, deadline in two week’s time. Cool. I’ve got two weeks to do that. Let’s go over here and do something else.” They’re prioritizing something else that they’ve got on their list or whatever and not realizing that we might not find somebody who comes in under the budget. Oh, no. What are we going to do then? We’ve got to have a discussion, increase the budget.

If they were to just leave that and try and think they could do it all in the last week, you may end up in a situation where you’ve got no suppliers. We haven’t moved forward on anything. So the check-in points are really important so that you can keep a project. Your job as business owner or the visionary or whatever is to keep a project. It’s just like the oversight part of the project. No matter how much we delegate, I always feel like saying to clients, “You can delegate so much stuff, but your job at the end of the day is the oversight piece, which should only be about 10% of the job, 5% maybe, but the oversight is the bit that gives you the feeling that everything is in flow, and milestones do that.”

A sense of control

Matt: And it gives you a sense of control. If you’re anything like me, you know I like to control everything. Letting go is one of the biggest challenges that I think as entrepreneurs I see a lot of us having, so the milestone check-ins give you that feeling of control in knowing what’s going on, without having to do the doing.

Barbara: I agree completely, Matt, because I will openly admit that I am the classic control freak when it comes to my business. Some people don’t understand. I’ve come to a point now where I’m doing very little of the doing every day at Virtual Angel Hub. People say to me, “How do you let go? You’re so good at letting go.” I go, “Well, I don’t really.” I let go within a structure so that my people have all their processes, and we have worked together on refining them, refining them, refining them to the point where they feel empowered to get success with it, and I feel at ease in letting it go to them, because I know I’m controlling the process. That’s key…and milestones.

“You can only expect what you inspect”

Matt: It just brings me to another point. One of my very early business mentors said to me, “Matt, you can only expect what you inspect, when it comes to business,” so the milestones are your opportunity to inspect. I get often some resistance. “Oh, that’s micromanaging.” You know what? It’s not. A milestone check-in doesn’t need to take you more than three minutes. I get a notification in Asana telling me that there’s a message for me, and it just keeps things moving forward.

Overcoming project roadblocks

What it enables you to do, too, and the example I gave, not all of the projects that we do have an every second-day milestone check-in. It depends on what it is, and I want to make that point clear, but what it enables you to do is anticipate where things could go. This was a first time project. We’d never done this before. We didn’t have any preferred suppliers, any of that, so by having shorter check-in points, we can actually make decisions quickly together.

I say together because I didn’t just want it me tell the VA what to do. I want them to think. We bring our people on to think, not so that we have to do all the thinking. What was great was you can move with speed. We didn’t get caught up. We weren’t caught out with, “Oh, my God. We can’t find anyone within budget,” because otherwise, they could have just kept looking and looking and looking for two weeks and say to me, “No one’s come within budget.” Whereas, I think it was four days, we identified that we weren’t going to come in within budget. I can’t remember the exact number. I think it was five or six quotes, something like that. We just needed to tweak the budget in order to get the project done.

Barbara: You spotted a fairly major issue early on.

Matt: Correct.

Barbara: Which could have derailed the entire project. You know, Matt, I think it’s good to point out here, yes, we’re talking about working with VAs and virtual teams here, but I have held very high positions in big corporate institutions, banks and things like that before, and we still had check-in points. Like we would have to update the CEO on milestones of projects, where we’re at with stuff. Not every day, but at a minimum weekly, and as your position grows and you go up to Director and that sort of thing, you’re updating the CEO every couple of days, sometimes every day.

Matt: Absolutely.

Having check-ins is not ‘micromanaging’

Barbara: I want people to realize that this check-in stuff is not about micromanaging a VA that’s just an assistant-type person. This happens at the highest levels in every corporate institution, where big teams are relying on each other to get projects moving. The last thing you want to hear from a CEO is, “Why was I not made aware of this?” That’s like the death knell for somebody at that role. Something goes wrong, the CEO is like, “Excuse me. Why was I not aware of this?”

Matt: You don’t want to know what the next conversation is.

Barbara: You don’t want to be in that situation.

Matt: That’s right.

Barbara: Yeah, I just wanted to make that point here, because some people do feel like, “Oh, I just don’t have time for all this micromanaging.” This is not micromanaging. This is about working as team structures together and leading your business, even if it’s just you and one VA.

Matt: Correct.

Barbara: That’s my little two cents on that one.

Wrapping things up

Matt: So if I was just to recap on all of this, let’s just quickly run through the steps. Number one, you need to get clarity in your head and communicate that effectively through to your VA, whether it’s through a photo of a whiteboard, a video, an audio, something that gives clear instruction and really shows that you’ve thought about how this needs to play out and what could potentially go wrong. You then need to send that to them with a clear deadline on when they need to get that into your project management system.

Once that comes back, then you need to review how they’ve set the project up in the project management system. If it’s been set up the way you believe is going to be successful, sign off on that, and allow them to move forward. If it hasn’t, if there’s some steps missing, or they’ve misinterpreted some things, or you’ve thought of other things, jump on a quick call with them, and go through those last few things to get it set up.

Then make sure then you have milestone check-in points. They will vary from project to project, but make sure that they’re very clear and you’ve given some thought that how often do I need to be communicated with on this project to enable it to move with speed and to be successful. Then, the last point there is holding your people accountable to those deadlines and those dates.

Barbara: Yeah, but you know what, Matt? If you set a project up this way, that’s such an easy conversation.

Matt: It really is.

Barbara: Why was I not made aware of this, as we discussed, conversation, and there’s no excuse. You can’t hide anywhere in that then. There’s no, “I forgot or I got delayed,” or anything like that because you’ve already set this thing up the way it should be done.

Matt: Exactly. I hope that’s helpful for everybody. One last thing is just to take some time, and think about the framework that we’ve created here for you today. Work out what’s the framework for you. Is it the identical one that we’ve proposed, or are you doing something slightly different? If you’re doing something that works that’s slightly different, I’d love for you to be able to share that below or in our Virtual Success Show Facebook Group. That would be fantastic. As always, we ask if this is helpful, please share this with those in your community because we’re really dedicated to helping entrepreneurs all around the world succeed with their virtual teams.

Barbara: It is a tricky thing. As you and I both know, Matt, we have seen a lot of people fail with it, so it’s not as easy as people think, when you don’t know how. When you do know how, and you apply these things, it is so useful, and it can be explosively successful for your business. We’re imparting this every couple of weeks on the podcast. We’ll put the steps in the show notes as well. Just the step-by-step framework, you’ll see that below the show, so you can just take that if it works for you. Yeah, I’d love to hear from you if you’ve got some other suggestions about what you’re doing that’s getting success.

Matt: Until next time, Barbara, have a wonderful week.

Barbara: You, too, Matt.

Matt: We’ll join you all shortly on Virtual Success.

Barbara: Thanks, bye.

Matt: 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.