The Virtual Success Show

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In this episode:

02:48 – Trying to do far too much?!

04:20 – The challenges

05:51 – Cheapest isn’t always best

07:58 – Commit to making it work

08:42 – Building teams of highly specialized people

11:28 – Prove the process can work for one small task

12:33 – Replicate the process

13:54 – Don’t rush through training up team members

15:45 – Complementary skill sets within the team

17:55 – Document your processes

19:58 – How can specialist team members add value?

24:09 – Growing the team

26:28 – Refining the process

28:46 – Spend the time to find the right people

29:31 – Project-based roles vs. Retainer-based roles

32:04 – Key selection criteria

32:27 – Nice-to-haves

33:19 – Absolute deal-breakers

34:03 – Trying to find your ‘silver bullet’

36:09 – Understanding the value of virtual teams

41:06 – Matthew’s three top tips when starting out

41:27 – One – Start off small

42:08 – Two – Strong selection criteria

42:49 – Three – “Treat people like people”

43:48 – Wrapping things up

Barbara: Hi everyone and welcome back to the Virtual Success Show podcast. The show where we give you the inside tips on outsourcing success for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. As always I’m joined by my fantastic co-host Matt Malouf. Matt, how are you?

Matt:   I’m well, how are you?

Barbara: I’m really good. Long week, good week, as always.

Matt: Excellent. Oh, that’s good. That’s good. Hey, tell me something interesting that’s happened to you this week.

Barbara: This week. Big lesson this week for me was refining processes, and I know we talk about this a lot on the show, but I’ve discovered that, you know, even when you have a great process you can still refine it, evolve it as little problems happen along the way. So I’ve been doing a lot of that this week. Big thing for me. How about you? What’s been happening?

Matt: I’ve got a little bit of a left-field, quick story to share. I was at home this evening before we’re coming in to do this recording and my eight year old son says to me, “Daddy what are you doing tonight?” And I said, “I will be doing the podcast and recording.” He goes, “Daddy, is that the one where you teach people how to get other people to do work for you?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “Can they do my homework?”

Barbara: Oh, he’s clever. (laughing) Tell him, “He doesn’t need homework, he’s clever.”

Matt: And he said to me, “I’ve got the money to pay them as well.” So I was just blown away.

Barbara: He’s clever and savvy.

Matt: Eight year old ready to leverage homework. I’m just like, “He’s an entrepreneur in the making, love it.”

Barbara: Yeah, that’s a fabulous story. That’s much better than my story. (laughing) Look, really excited about today’s show because we have a very special guest who’s going to talk to us about managing multiple types of virtual teams while also having a very high profile job with a massive global company.

Today we’re talking to Matthew Barby, who is the Global Head of Growth and SEO at HubSpot. He’s also an award winning blogger, an industry speaker, and a lecturer for the Digital Marketing Institute. So he knows a thing or two about this online world. Matthew, welcome to the show.

Matthew: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me guys.

Barbara: Just to kick off, I mean, one of the things I’m obviously really interested to know is, you know, you’ve got this full-time, full on job with a massive company like HubSpot, a very exciting place to work. But you’re also using, you know, effectively using virtual teams and virtual assistants, writers, etc. to help you manage multiple side projects, including your own website matthewbarby.com and some side businesses you’re involved with. Can you tell us a little bit about how effective is it having virtual teams to do all that?

Trying to do far too much?!

Matthew: Yeah, I mean, with myself I’m always kind of like, “I’ve got a lot of different plates spinning.” Having a lot of side projects on the go, managing, whether it’s my blog or a few other small businesses, I literally don’t think that it would be possible for me to do that alongside what I’m doing without having virtual teams. Now I think for over the past say four or five years that’s something that I very much learnt the hard way. Trying to do far too much. Trying to, in particular, manage large groups of very different skill sets of people to get tasks done. I think without having people within virtual teams, like if you try and do all of those skills by yourself you’re either one, going to just completely burn out; two, do an absolutely terrible job of everything.; or three, both of those. I think having those virtual teams in place is pretty much essential for me to be able to do anything outside of my current role anyway.

Barbara: Yeah, tell me about the beginnings of that. I mean, you started your website, matthewbarby.com, you’ve been doing this for quite a long time. Tell me about the early days where you had your first few virtual team members, be they virtual assistants or whatever, and what were the challenges to get started?

The challenges

Matthew: Yeah, I think that the first thing that I started realizing really was, I used to do little bits of consulting, I was looking to grow traffic through to my own personal website and one of the big things that was probably taking up a lot of my time when I was just trying to scale up the growth of my own site was content creation. I would spend a hell of a lot of time on content creation. One of the big things with my site in particular was that I would give very, very detailed advice and information. I think the average size of a blog post on my site was around about five thousand words. So I would produce smaller numbers of very large pieces of content.

What was happening is, I was creating all of this content and spending so much of my time, I mean, I was literally not sleeping sometimes, just going through the night creating content in any free hour that I had. Then when it came to the actual promotion side of things, I spent all this time creating the content and just didn’t have any time for promoting it myself. So I was finding all these hours I was spending were really becoming wasted. Now, I knew exactly how to promote the content. It was something that I’ve been doing for years now and would do for clients and within a lot of my own side projects. The main challenge was just time, like it always is.

Cheapest isn’t always best

So, the first thing that I started doing is working with, or attempting to work with, some freelancers to just work on some outreach. Getting in touch with relevant blogs and other industry influencers at the time to promote my content, get it in front of other people, drive traffic through to my site. I had some interesting challenges when that first started out. A lot of people that I was working with, I wasn’t really vetting them very well and was just trying to work with people based on cheapest possible price which was another massive mistake. Then eventually when I started improving and refining the process for finding the right types of people and realizing that working with multiple people could also really help out what I was trying to do I started to slowly and surely build out more rigid processes for working with people and actually getting some results.

I mean, as a result of just where it started out with my personal site and scaling up a lot of the content on there, I started realizing, “Hey, this is actually a really really valuable framework to use to build into some of the consultant gigs that I was working on as well. Slowly and surely, prior to my role at HubSpot, I was the Head of Digital at a big marketing agency back in the UK and we started using these virtual teams to scale up our processes both internally and for clients. We were working with some big public companies at the time and we were scaling virtual teams to help out with our own individual projects at the same time as well. So there was so many different uses and a lot of lessons learned along the way that came with it as well.

Commit to making it work

Barbara: You know what I love about that story actually is that, you know, the fact that you do say, “There were a lot of lessons along the way.” What we typically see happening with some clients that come to Virtual Angel Hub would say to us, “Oh I’ve worked with VAs before, it’s been a disaster.” They sort of just give up and walk away. You made a commitment to making it work because you could see how this could work and then all of a sudden you got exponential growth and success from this, not just in your own blog but in a consulting firm like that you were working with and working with big brands. Can you tell me a little bit about maybe where you went from…was there a moment where you decided, “This isn’t really working but I’m going to make it work.” And what did you do? What was the pivotal thing that you changed?

Building teams of highly specialized people

Matthew: Yeah. I remember it vividly. What the problem that I was making was that I really wasn’t tapping into the major benefit of having and working with virtual teams. One of the big assets of working with a virtual team is the fact that you can build out teams of multiple people that have very very specialized skill sets and use them on, kind of, small chunks of your projects to build out a very varied skill set of people that you can work with. Instead of taking that approach, I was thinking more about a traditional model. I was like, “Okay, right, I need to get someone who can promote the blog to industry influencers, I need someone who’s going to do relationship building with some press contacts I have. I need someone who’s going to be managing the social media, maybe some little design work.” I was going after just one person that I was expecting to be a jack-of-all-trades. Whilst sometimes those people exist and you can find them, the more things that one person is doing the more one-to-one management they need.

So, what you’ll end up finding that you’re doing is, instead of delegating out a wide variety of smaller level tasks to a wide variety of people, which a lot of people think, “Well, more people means more management.” You’re actually, kind of, having to do a lot more quality control. One of the things that I’ve found to work much better was, “Okay, let’s stop putting all my eggs in one basket. Let’s take someone who’s highly specialized in one area, and in particular, this was around building press contacts was the first thing that I did because that takes a hell of a lot of time and you need someone that has experience in doing that kind of relationship building, whether it’s directly with press or not, that’s a different matter. Then I can dedicate more of my time to just training them around this one specific skill.

Then when they become proficient in there I can bring in a couple more people and that person can manage the other people. You’re starting the kind of delegation process where you have virtual teams that are not only kind of being overseen by you but that are being managed by other virtual members. That’s where it’s almost kind of like ‘teach a man to fish’ situation of spending a lot of time one-on-one creating almost like a manager level person within your virtual teams that then can delegate smaller tasks within there.

Prove the process can work for one small task

Matthew: What I found worked really well for me to turn things around in the early days was just go, “Right, okay, right now I just need to take one small task. I need to dedicate some time up front to it. I need to make the expectations of what I want from the person who’s going to be focused on this task very clear. They need to have written documentation of all of the processes.” Which took me a little bit of time but that kind of thing only needs to be done once. “Then I need to have regular check-ins with this person. A lot at the start of the project and then that can peter out to less regular check-ins as we move forward.” What I wanted to get to was, “Prove that this process works for one small task.” When I found that that started working and I started to get a ton of results I realized, “Actually now, now this is kind of running on semi-autopilot, I can start dedicating my time to doing the exact same thing for something else.”

Replicate the process

Matthew: Which at the time was managing social media engagement and just publishing my content across all of my different social media sites, making sure that people were engaging with the content. I started again but using the exact same framework that I was using before. In places I was able to reuse some of my training material and all of these kind of similar themes. Eventually getting to the point where I had a larger but more varied skilled team that all had someone within the team that they could go to to actually ask for advice and ask for training. And to be honest, when it came from a budget point of view, they were still probably working in the same kind of hours split among three people for example, as I would have had a jack-of-all-trades person that was working all themselves. Maybe like I spent a small extra amount on bringing a few extra people in but it was way, way worth it because I was able to diagnose problems and fix them way quicker.

Matt: Matthew, how long from that initial training to being able to move on to the next piece, generally?

Don’t rush through training up team members

Matthew: Yeah, I think this question is a question that I actually get asked quite a lot when it comes to speaking with, in particular, marketing agencies who seem to be using virtual teams more and more. The reality is this varies depending on the actual skill sets and the tasks that they’re working on. Instead of thinking about this in a timeframe I tend to think about this on a more, I suppose like an understanding level. Before I move on to the next task I want to have spent, realistically, you’ll want to have spent at least a month of solid, intensive time with your virtual team to build out a solid understanding of expectations. Like what you would do if you were bringing in an employee into your business and you’re taking them through all of their induction training, all of their expectation management training, going through everything that they need to be doing as part of their daily job. Until they get to the point where they feel proficient in delivering what you want to do but may still need some check-ins and guidance here and there.

When you get to the point where it’s like, okay, we’re past the just knowledge absorbing stage and we’re getting to the point where we’re having check-ins that are more focused around ‘What are the results? What’s going right? What’s going wrong? Do we need to pivot? Do we need to change something? Do you need a bit of one-to-one time on something else that can help you perform in your role better?’, that’s when I feel like I’m comfortable to say, “Okay, this person has a good ground knowledge and understands what I expect, now we can start moving to spending a larger amount of my time building out the next stage in the process.

Complementary skill sets within the team

A bonus that can come in with this is if the next task that you’re doing and building out another team complements the prior task, so in the example of reaching out to the press and building relationships with influencers within the media, the next person you bring in is all focused around building out your social media presence, building your brand. They tie hand-in-hand. What starts happening is, the individual people that are responsible for managing these tasks then need to have regular check-ins with each other. How can they help each other? How can they learn from each other? Slowly and surely you start to see this domino effect of all of the things that you’re teaching one person being passed on by proxy to another member of your virtual team. Then people can start getting past the stage of just learning and actually start suggesting ways that things can be improved.

Barbara: You know, what I love about that Matthew is that although you said that, “You actually spend time recruiting people who were perhaps more specialist in a specific thing.” Yet you’ve invested so much time, of your own time, training them anyway in your process because you’ve actually designed the process the way you want things run. Although you delegate control, you actually maintain control because of that.

Matthew: Yeah, because I think, at the end of the day, you’re bringing someone in, into a virtual team, and this holds for whether it’s a virtual team or you’re bringing someone in as a physical located member of staff in your office, people have different skill sets. People may be really proficient in one area but, at the end of the day, you want them to do something that you’re asking them. If you haven’t outlined specifically what you’re asking of them and how they can do that efficiently and also what your expectations are when they’re finished carrying out that task then they’re not going to be well equipped to do any kind of job for you.

Document your processes

So putting together and spending some time really outlining exactly what you would do for this task into some kind of document and then spending some one-on-one time helps you one, be able to actually arm your staff with what they need to do. And two, the other good thing that I’ve found is, I spend a large proportion of my time with virtual teams actually documenting the things that I need them to do. I’ll create full training documents, full process documents, and then spend one-to-one time once they’ve walked through these documents. The good thing about that is if this happens with any kind of person that you end up working with, people move on or you need to work with someone else, the relationship didn’t quite work out, the good thing that you have is you have all of these process documents. You have all of the training material so that all you need to do now is spend some one-on-one time helping that person understand those things.

You get some economies of scale here where the more that you’ve put in upfront the easier it becomes as you move forward and scale the team or scale up the relationships with people that you’re working with.

Barbara: Yep, that’s of course making a commitment to that as well, to going this route and making it work, like I said before. I’m interested to talk to you about, you know, content creation obviously is an area so many people are trying to do. We’re all doing it quite badly really, you know? A lot of people are pumping out content in blogs, etc. and as you say, “If you’re not promoting it properly it’s sort of a bit of a waste of time.” I’m interested to talk to you about using, I know you’ve got a lot of bloggers, writers, etc. that do various work for you. How do you manage all of those? Or do you have like a core project manager virtual person who manages all of them for you, bringing in all the content and the process around that?

How can specialist team members add value?

Matthew: Yeah, the content side of things is actually the area where I find that having a virtual team is of most value to me. I would say it’s the area where I most frequently use virtual teams. As you said quite rightly, “There is a lot of content out there and a lot of people aren’t doing it very well.” I mean, I saw a statistic the other day that there’s roughly 2.5 million blog posts published online every single day. I’m pretty sure that the large majority of those blog posts are terrible.

So, one of the things that people end up doing, and often make a mistake with, in my opinion, with content, is they say, “Right. Okay. I’ve got some ideas about some content that we create but my goal is I want to drive,” say, for example, the most common one, “drive traffic to those piece of content from the search engine. I’m just going to go do a ton of keyword research, I’m going to find a load of keywords that people are searching for. Then I’m just going to get some writer to produce this content for me.” Let’s say they’re in the fashion industry, for example, or the health industry. They just go to a one fits all copywriter that’s going to pretty much just take their idea, create a piece of content, and then the relationship finishes.

One of the areas that I’ve used virtual teams the most in the past is, instead of just doing this, is try and think about one, how you can work with writers that can add a lot more value than just creating words for you. Two, how you can actually work with people when you’re in the content creation process that can actually give an insight into what your audience wants, have background experience in the industry before, can really do a lot more than just pretty much follow your orders from a content point of view. Coming back to the first point where I was talking about writers that can do more than just create words for you, the big value that I find with working with industry specialist bloggers and writers, and I’m coming to that process in a bit, is not only can they create content for you but they have existing networks where they can work on the promotion side of things as well.

I’ll give you a scenario. In a project of mine that I run we work with a lot of fashion writers to produce content for our fashion e-commerce store. One of the first ports of calls that I focused on is not just, “Oh, how good a writer is this person?” The first thing I’ll be looking at is “Right, I’m going to go to every publication online where I want our brand to appear. I’m going to find all the top blogs where I would love to have our brand mentioned online and then I go and find who’s writing for these publications and these blogs.”

I’ll get a big long list of all these individual writers and then I’ll go right, “How big are their networks?” I’ll find their Twitter accounts. I’ll find their Pinterest accounts, their Instagram and any other social network that’s relevant. I’ll start drilling down on the number of followers they have, how engaged their following is. Then I’ll look at maybe if they published the email subscribers of their blog. So I can get a really well-rounded view of their overall network and then I’ll be saying, “Okay, right, this person, day-by-day, one of the big focuses for them is writing fashion content. The kind of content that I want to be creating on my site. Number two, this person has a huge network that if they did create content for us, they could go through and start pushing it through to their social following, we could tap in and do some co-promotions on their blog with their email subscribers because we’ll have an existing relationship with them. And they can actually give me really good advice from experience they’ve had on what actually works for the type of audience that we’re targeting.

Growing the team

So once I started trailing out this kind of approach the first time a number of years ago I started building out large teams of writers. I was getting great results. I had this ongoing growth engine for promoting the content as well as creating it. The processes became really lean and everything was working really well. Then I started to realize the more I scaled things up the more my email inbox was getting absolutely insane. It was like, “Right, we need to try and use better project management tools to manage this. We used things like Trello, Basecamp, Asana, all of these different tools. We’re like, “Well still a lot of my time is spent taking in invoices from these writers, managing what day they’re going to publish stuff, just taking that content and uploading it into the CMS. There’s like, “Okay I have all these great writers at my disposal but it’s taking me like ten hours a week of my time, which I don’t really have, to just do all the admin that comes in with it.”

That’s where I would be like, “Right, okay, I need someone to be bolted in to this virtual team that’s like a writer liaison.” So, we have someone who we would send through the editorial calendar, they would manage any suggestions coming in from the writers, what each writer was working on, how much they were charging us, making sure we stuck within budget, because when you’re in a rush and you’re just signing off tons and tons of invoices very quickly you realize you’ve spent three times your monthly budget and now you’ve got no budget for the next two months. Which is not the best position to be in when you’re trying to run a business.

All of those sort of things we would plant someone within the middle of those teams to just scale up this process. Yeah, it takes a bit of time and investment. If you think that you’re just going to bring someone in, not tell them how to do anything, and they’re just going to manage everything then you’re in for a very big surprise. But once this gets going you’ve pretty much built out a whole virtual team that’s not just a few freelance writers. You’ve got a content marketing team.

Barbara: A machine. Yeah, a machine.

Refining the process

Matthew: Absolutely. The thing that I’ve found is, I started doing this for a few smaller projects, especially when we’re working on the consultative level and we’re bringing in a lot of clients within the tech industry at the time. This was about three or four years ago I would say. I built out one of my first teams like this and we had some really solid tech writers and we were opening up a lot of relationships with publications who would share our content as well. The audiences of all of these writers combined way, way outperformed our brand following. What I then realized is, “Okay, well, why don’t we go after some more clients within this industry and we can just pretty much plant this exact same content team that we know is proven to work for delivering results for businesses similar to this and scale up campaigns around it.”

We started doing this and the results we were getting were incredible. The amount of time we were spending at the start of the campaign setting these things up was reduced to almost like a few hours. It was just taking this model and planting it onto another project. Slowly and surely what I started to realize is that it added a lot of value to just take and build these freelance, kind of like, content teams with a manager in the middle of them for as many industries as I was going to be working in as possible and growing out this list of people so that whenever I was working with new businesses and new projects I’d be able to just go, “Okay, right, this team is going to be the best suited for this particular project.” Then just plant them into the middle of it. Then if there were any other areas around there that I needed to boost things out I could go and build out some more people but I had my core, kind of, engine working in the middle of it all.

Barbara: That’s absolutely super. I’ve been thinking about this content area as well and how to use virtual teams for this and, you know, even how to bring virtual assistants into it to manage some of the writers and some of the processes around that. Fantastic insight there into how you can really get exponential growth there.

Spend the time to find the right people

Matthew: Yeah, I think it’s one of those where, at the start when you’re building out, it can sometimes be a bit of a painful process but it’s well worth spending that time to get the right people in. Spending some time training and working with them, managing their expectations because not only are they going to do a better job for you but you’re actually going to build longer lasting relationships with these people and you’re not just treating them on like a transactional level. They’ll be coming to you with ideas, you can say, “Okay, look, we’ve got this other project.” They’ll be like, “Absolutely, I loved working with you before, let’s carry on and keep working on this.” You’re probably going to end up getting better rates from people like that and so on and so on.

Project-based roles vs. Retainer-based roles

Matt: Matthew, another question, around what’s the criteria for yourself in choosing whether this is going to be a project-based role on a project-to-project basis versus someone that you bring in a specific role that you may have on a retainer or like a staff member? What’s the criteria for you deciding between the two?

Matthew: Typically I would say the people that I would have that would be more on a retained level would be people that are managing and ensuring the quality of the processes are maintained. A typical passing example that I’ve given just previously would be the person who’s managing like the content creator liaison. That’s like a retainer level person that cannot just do this for one project. If I’ve got multiple projects on the go this person can be managing multiple ones of those. The more different people that they’re working with, the better they’re getting at their job anyway. So they’re the kind of people that I’m like, “I need these people to really be sticking with me because they are absolutely critical to ensuring that I’m getting the most out of the writers that I’m working with.”

On the more project-based things, I would say, the typical differentiator in skill set would be that they have some sector or audience specific knowledge that’s really hyper-relevant to the project that I’m working with. In the example of the fashion writers, they have a deep ingrained knowledge of the fashion industry, they understand what audiences like, they understand what content works within the industry. They’re the types of people where I say, “I need you on my project team and here’s an intro to the person that’s going to be actually managing all of the process in here who’s like on a retainer level.” They can even be managing the training aspect after a period of time as well, obviously with your guidance and touching in at points. That would be my main differentiator. I would say the project side of things, they offer very specific tangible value within the environment of the project that you’re working on but when taken out of that project maybe their value decreases. Whereas the more retained level person, the more projects that you bring them into and out of, probably their value increases.

Key selection criteria

Matt: Excellent. Great distinction, I like that. You mentioned earlier too about focusing on selecting the right people. Can you run us through some of the key selection processes or criteria that are essential for you choosing people to join your team?

Nice-to-haves

Matthew: Yeah, I think, so I’d break this up into two parts. The first part will be the project-specific skills. Do they have existing skills to be able to perform the tasks that I need them to perform? Do they have a clear understanding of what I want them to do or are they able to learn at a relatively quick pace what I need them to do? I would say that’s more just kind of the, if someone’s going to be doing press liaison have they got good written English skills? Do they use email quite a lot? Have they done any previous experience with like blogger outreach in the past? Have they done anything on a PR level? Those are the kind of things that I would say are the nice-to-haves.

Absolute deal-breakers

Now on the other side, what I would class like the absolute deal-breakers. I don’t care how good someone is at doing something, if they have bad communication they just cannot be in my team. I would say of anything the communication skills and being actually motivated are the most important things. I’ve worked with some really great people, in particular some of the fantastic writers I’ve worked with, but if I have a piece of editorial that needs to go out in ten days and they don’t get in touch with me for three weeks, they’re absolutely useless to me. That is just so important.

Trying to find your ‘silver bullet’

The other bit of advice that I would probably give when it comes to the skill sets you’re looking for, “Don’t try and find kind of like, a silver bullet. If someone isn’t the complete, finished, polished person that you want them to be that’s going to just, you say, ‘Go tomorrow.’ And they just start going at things. Don’t worry. It’s going to be very difficult to find that, let alone in a virtual team anyway. What you need to be thinking about is, ‘Is this person actually interested in what you’re going to be asking them to do? Do they have the basic core competencies? If you spent an allocation of time with them to train them around this do you genuinely believe that they will one, take the training seriously? And two, come back to you and dedicate their own time to actually learning what you need them to learn?’ I think if you can go with someone that’s willing to learn, has good communication, and has some basic core competencies, no matter what you’ll be able to get them to where you need them to be.” I don’t think I’ve ever worked with anyone on a virtual team that I’ve built out that has actually been the finished product before I’ve even started briefing them in on the things I need them to develop their skill set in more.

Barbara: You know, Matthew, I’m really glad you said that because, in my experience of placing and hiring VAs at Virtual Angel Hub now, one of the things I’ve noticed as well is we’ve often had some amazing VAs come in for interview with amazing skills etc. and they don’t always turn out to be the best hires actually for us. We have found that some of the best hires that we’ve had and the most successful VAs are actually those that maybe didn’t have all the skills but they had the smarts, the enthusiasm, the willingness to learn, and the interest in what we were doing. And those are the ones that work out the best for us as well because they’re very coachable.

Understanding the value of virtual teams

Matthew: Definitely and that’s something that’s so undervalued. I think a lot of time people have a bad perception around virtual teams because they don’t really understand the value of them. A lot of people, I think you mentioned this previously Barbara where you said, “A lot of people say, ‘I worked with a VA before and it just didn’t work out.’” Nine times out of ten it’s you that’s the problem and not the VA. The problem is that people come in and they try to work with virtual teams in a way that is more as if they’ve just hired a digital agency or consultancy to go and implement a task to them as opposed to they’re bringing in a new employee into their business. Like if you hired someone, on the first day of them coming into your business you wouldn’t be saying to them, “Right, where are we at? What targets have you hit? How are you going to do this by the next week that we’ve already started working. I’ve started paying you so I want to see results.” If you do do that then I think managing a virtual team is the least of your worries.

The thing that you need to be thinking about here is to always treat people as employees. People don’t just get told something once and then that’s ingrained into their memory, they learn it, and then all of a sudden they’re superstars at whatever you just told them. You need to train people. These are human beings. If someone’s motivated and they actually want to listen to what you say and they’ll come back to you, they’ll learn, they’ll ask questions. Even questions that are deemed to be stupid questions, if people are coming back to me and asking me that, that’s like the most comforting thing ever.

The worst situations for me is when I’ve spent loads of time on all of this training, I’ve started coaching someone through it and I get to the end of a session and I say, “Right, what questions do you have for me?” And they’re like, “No, that was all pretty clear.” For me, that’s them just either, one, being too afraid to ask a stupid question which is just going to cost both of us time and money. Two, it’s actually that they’re not engaged here. They’re not listening. They’re not that passionate about what they’re doing. So being able to suss that out in the early stages of when you’re speaking to someone, whether they’re actually passionate, they’re listening to what you’re saying, and above all else they’re asking questions. That’s the most valuable thing that you can ever do.

Matt: Barbara, I don’t know about you but I am jumping up and down with excitement with what Matthew just said.

Barbara: Yes, absolutely. It’s like I wish I had that at the beginning of the show. I’m going to make sure that everybody listens to the whole show just to get to that bit, because it’s so important, that advice you’ve just given everyone.

Matt: Absolutely. Just to reiterate, you know, when dealing with people regardless of where they are geographically, regardless of whether they’re sitting in the same room as you or on the other side of the world talking through a computer, they’re people. We’re dealing with people. Everything that Matthew said is just spectacular. I’m lost for words, I really am.

Barbara: Matt knows this and Matthew I’ll just share this little story with you but we actually do get the odd client, it doesn’t happen as much anymore because we’re training clients a lot better these days in all of this stuff, but we actually have had clients send in complaints on day two of working with a VA. You know, and the most ridiculous complaints ever. Like that whole thing of almost like they have hired a digital agency and that’s what they’re expecting from a VA, you know? Even though, as you know, we do extensive training programs and everything at Virtual Angel Hub but still people struggle in this area a lot. This advice is absolutely brilliant. Your content virtual team strategy earlier I was taking furious notes there. I was thinking, “I could use that one a million times over.” Fantastic advice. I could talk to you all day about this whole topic. Matt, do you have any more questions?

Matthew’s three top tips when starting out

Matt: Yeah, I’ve got one last question. Matthew, knowing what you now know, having worked with virtual teams for quite some time, if you were starting out from scratch, what would be the three key pieces of information you’d give to anybody starting out with a virtual team for the first time?

One – Start off small

Matthew: Yeah, I think the first thing I would say is to start off small. Get one thing done really well as opposed to trying to solve all of your problems immediately. If you had a problem before you started working on a virtual team that problem’s still going to be there in kind of the next few weeks time if you try and overload someone with things to do or just get them to focus on one thing at a time anyway. Start small, prove a process to work out, and then work your way up.

Two – Strong selection criteria

The second thing and this ties in really into the selection criteria, make sure that you’re working and sourcing people based on if they’re a right fit for you as much as the task. Do they understand your expectations from a communication point of view? Do they understand why you expect certain things of you? Are they going to be actually passionate about what they’re doing because if someone’s doing something and they’re not at least a little bit passionate about it they’re not going to be motivated to go above and beyond.

Three – “Treat people like people”

The third thing which kind of encapsulates the root cause of why most virtual teams go wrong is like what we were just saying before, “Treat people like people.” You wouldn’t bring someone in for a performance review on their second day of work. That would probably result in a lawsuit, never mind you actually having to get rid of that member of staff. So, when you’re working with virtual teams, be realistic. These people are starting a task from fresh. They’re working with you when they’ve never worked with you before. This is a new employee and a part of your business. Treat them with respect, actually keep them motivated, and be realistic. If you couldn’t solve the problem in a day then why should you expect your virtual team to be able to solve that in a day? I think that’s kind of my three points that I would say are the most important parts.

Wrapping things up

Matt: Absolute words of wisdom. Thank you Matthew.

Barbara: Thank you so much Matthew for your time. Lots of tips and great advice in there. I’ve even been taking a few myself. Look, as always everyone, share the show. Make sure that you give us some comments below. Tell us what you think of the show. Also remember to join us on our Facebook group. We’ve got the Virtual Success Facebook Group where you can continue the conversation and where we share tips and quotes from people that we have on the show. You can get all the tips there as well. Until next week, thanks everyone, thanks Matt for joining me again.

Matt: Thank you, Barbara, and thanks Matthew.

Barbara: We’ll see you soon.

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

In this episode, we hear from Taki Moore, one of Australia’s leading ‘coaches to coaches’ on the benefits of using virtual teams to grow your business and how, if done correctly, will allow you to play to your strengths and live in your ‘genius’.

This episode is packed full of useful tips and insights from Taki on how to leverage your virtual team to allow you to make more money, have more fun and help more people.

Some of the areas he covers are:

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:

02:56 – Taki’s 60-sec elevator pitch

04:33 – It started with a book…

06:42 – Breaking down your tasks

09:00 – “But no one can do it as well as I can”

09:51 – Delegating to get ahead

11:51 – Finding your ‘genius’

14:29 – Allowing others to play in their genius

15:24 – The ‘Super VA’ myth

18:14 – A communication rhythm

20:34 – ‘Check-ins’ time frames

21:50 – Daily check-ins

23:16 – Weekly, monthly & quarterly check-ins

27:09 – The importance of sticking to your comms plan

29:51 – Create a meeting structure

30:51 – What Taki would do differently next time…

36:27 – Return on Investment

38:32 – Wrapping things up

Tools & resources mentioned in this episode:

Tribal Council Blog

The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss

Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What you must do to increase the value of your growing firm by Verne Harnish

Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…about Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business by Patrick Lencioni

Matt: Good morning everyone! Matt Malouf here for another exciting show of the Virtual Success Show and as always I’m joined by my co-host, Barbara Turley. Good morning Barbara!

Barbara: Morning Matt! How are you?

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

Barbara: I’m good you know I have had an interesting week. I’ve sort of had an evolving week in my business and I wanted to share a quick quote that I saw this morning just sums up completely the week I’ve had. It was by Ben Chestnut who’s the CEO of Mail Chimp – ‘As it grows, your business will go through several stages and each stage requires a different kind of leader’ – and I’m definitely feeling that in my business this week. I’m sort of moving to another level and feeling that sense of needing to be a different kind of leader as I go forward.

Matt: Fantastic! What a great quote, as your business grows, you need to become a different kind of leader. That’s amazing, that’s great! We’ll make sure we get that posted as an attachment to this. I think it’ a really good start!

Barbara: I’ll organize that!

Matt: So Barbara, I’m super super excited about today’s podcast. I’ve got a dear friend and mentor of mine, Taki Moore joining us. Taki Moore was one of my very early business coach and mentors when I became a coach and we’ve been friends for many many years and we actually met in my former life as a personal trainer. We’ve stayed in touch over the years and Taki has been responsible for an amazing amount of learning that I’ve had over the years, both in the area of virtual assistants, he was responsible for introducing me to the world of virtual assistants, but together in helping me in growing my coaching business and also many life lessons. So I would love to introduce and welcome to the show Taki Moore from Coach Marketing Machine. Welcome, Taki!

Taki: Hey Matt, thank you so much for having me! Barbara great to be here! I think we first met when I was in much worse physical shape than I am right now and I remember having to do leg press’ and stuff like that with you Matt a long, long, long time ago. And look how far we’ve both come.

Matt: I was in much better physical condition back then too, Taki.

Taki: Well yeah, exactly, I’ve gone the other way. Looking at you business-wise and mentally, I think you’re in tip-top shape.

Matt: (laugh) Thank you. Barbara sorry, you were going to say?

Barbara: I was saying, how are your legs looking now Taki?

Taki: Pretty good, I’m crossfitting 3 to 4 times a week and down the beach twice a day so I’m pretty healthy and I’m kind of in love with life right now!

Barbara: Good, that’s nice!

Matt: Taki can you do your 60-second elevator pitch on who you are and your company, just so that everyone is super clear on that side before we get in to the depths of today’s show?

Taki’s 60-sec elevator pitch

Taki: Yeah! Totally can, which I’ll answer in 3 ways, who I help, what their problem is and how I help them. I help coaches and consultants, the problems that they have either number 1 – they don’t have enough clients and not making enough money; or number two – most of my work is spent with coaches who are already pretty successful, well above break even, you’re successful and trying to scale but get to the point where it’s getting a little bit hard so they kind of hit a plateau because the way that attract and convert and deliver is kind of holding them back. So my job is to help them get more clients, to get more leads, to turn their one-on-one coaching into a group coaching leverage program where they can you know make more money, have more fun, help more people. So that’s what I do.

Matt: Excellent, fantastic! And that’s actually where we started working together in a commercial sense was through the black belt program and we were mentioning, actually only this morning, that there were 12 of us in the room.

Taki: Totally and I was like, ‘this is so awesome, 12 people!’ and now I look back and go ‘Oh 12, that’s so small … I am always really proud of what I’m doing and I looked back and say, ‘Geez! I had no idea back then.’ And it’s just a good sign that you’re growing and learning and becoming more, it’s cool!

Matt: So Taki tell us about your beginning with virtual assistants and how that started and how’s its evolved over the years?

It started with a book…

Taki: So it started with a book, Tim Ferriss wrote a book called The Four Hour Work Week a few years ago and I read it and completely shifted my ideas about what was possible. One line in that just changed my world and it said, ‘Amazing things happen when you can…I think at the time he was living in Argentina, and he had his teams, employees and virtual teams in India and obviously he’s a U.S. guy… amazing things happen when you can get paid in Dollars, you live on Pesos and you pay your team in Rupees and that sentence just kind of shook me and I thought ‘oh my goodness’, because I was a bit stretched. I didn’t know, you know we were growing and I didn’t know how to handle the growth, but I also didn’t quite have enough money, I didn’t think, to hire somebody, you know, on Australian rates and all of a sudden this kind of new world of possibility opened up maybe and you know, maybe that’s the solution! And 2 weeks after I read that book, I hired Ash who’s been with me 7 and ½ years now so I guess that how long ago I read the book. And life changing, you know, at the time I didn’t know ‘can I afford it’ and that was followed by ‘Dude, I don’t think I can even keep this person busy’, followed by, ‘Holy crap! Can we hire a second one?’, because once you get some momentum around this stuff, its just incredibly liberating! So how it started was being inspired by The Four Hour Work Week and really wanting to, you know, I don’t think I probably would have leveraged it quite as proactively as this, but I wanted to play to my strengths and live in my genius, I probably would have said ‘I’m drowning on stuff that I’m not very good at and I hate’.

Matt: So from that point Taki, I think we started working together not long after that, what was inspiring when we first started working together in that context was that you were working on average about 12 hours a week, is that correct?

Taki: Yeah! That sound about right.

Matt: Yet your business was growing at an exponential rate?

Breaking down your tasks

Taki: Yeah! I think that sounds like a good thing. I think the thing is this, if you break down your tasks, like everything you do each day or each week or each month and you kind of grade them, obviously you can filter a couple of ways, you can filter by frequency you know what happens daily and weekly and monthly and quarterly and other. You can also rank things in a way that Dan Sullivan in Strategic Coach talks about which is every task falls into one of four buckets. It’s either the area of incompetence for you, so frankly you suck at it and you do a terrible job and it takes a long time, so it’s incompetence. There’s competence, like a bare pass. There’s excellence, which everyone kind of strives for, but excellence is you’ve got superior skill, people notice that you’re good at it but it’s learnt not natural and it doesn’t give you energy, right? And then fourth, I call genius, which is your superior skill, people notice that you’re great at it, you’re fascinated by it, you could happily do it and learn more about it forever and never get bored and it came sort of hard wide, factory installed so you didn’t have to learn it.

And so if you rank all your tasks into one of those four buckets, pretty soon you’ll probably realize like I did that I’m doing a whole bunch of stuff that I’m actually really crap at and don’t enjoy. And if you draw those four containers like rings on a bull’s eye, the genius in the middle and incompetence on the outside, then competence, excellence and genius then what we’re going to do is peel off, what I tried to do was kind of peel off layers from the outside and start on getting off the stuff that I’m just awful at.

So I think when I first hired Ash, I was, the two things that I was terrible at was email and I was phobic to voicemail and calendars. You know it’s kind of embarrassing, even right now like today I have read only access on my calendar, I’m not allowed to put anything in because I screw it up all the time and last year the one time that I did around the calendar, I triple booked myself at three different conferences to speak on the same day in three different countries, which is quite an achievement.

Matt: That’s special!

Taki: Yeah so if you kind of rank things – I am very special! I don’t recommend that to anyone, so I need all the help that I can get.

“But no one can do it as well as I can”

Barbara: Taki I’m interested there, I’m interested in your thoughts on you know you talked about the things you’re not very good at and the things you’re a genius zone. But one thing I’ve seen with a clients coming in to Virtual Angel Hub and particularly women, and I can say this because I’m a woman, but you know sometimes you know we run our own businesses, there are our baby, we do everything our way to our level of perfection and sometimes we’re doing a lot of things that we actually quite like and we’re very good at but it’s not bringing any revenue in so its stopping us from growing our business and to hand that over and I feel a lot of people really struggle there because they’re just bathing in the belief that nobody can do it as well as I can. And probably a VA, maybe can’t do it as you well as you can but that’s not the point if you want to grow a business. How do you deal with that?

Delegating to get ahead

Taki: Yeah, I think there’s two sides to it. So firstly, lets believe the assumption that they can’t do it as well as you can because I think that’s an assumption and it may be false. In my business, the guys who are doing my stuff are all based in the Philippines, a virtual team. Not only can they do it as well as me but they can do most of the things better than me. The only things where I’m clearly stronger is the things that kind of like language, they can’t talk like me as well I can talk like me because I’ve been talking like me since I was a kid. But let’s just say, you know, I believe in the assumption that they can’t do it as well as you. Maybe that’s true but you bring up the point, Barbara, that even though you can do it better than they can it’s not bringing in the bucks and frankly, if it’s taking a lot of time and it’s not bringing in the bucks and something else that I’m sure you could get just as excited about does bring in the bucks, if I had to choose like if I could say, ‘Hey Barbara I’m in control of your life, I can either have you spend 10 hours a week doing your manual labor grunt work, or 10 hours a week doing stuff that you’re great at, that you really like Barb, that people will pay you for and happily pay you for, I’d rather you have 10 hours doing that because I know that in 10 hours of you in your genius, you’ll make enough money to hire probably 5 to 10 people in areas of your incompetence or competence or even excellence.’ But I just say start with the activities which are incompetent because they are the easiest ones for people to get quick wins with so you’ll realize, ‘You know what, I don’t love that, I’m not very good at it’, and kind of move on from there. Does that make sense?

Barbara: Yeah, that’s good advice! For people to get started, I guess, to just start with the things that you hate doing or are crap at, you know get rid of those first, get some confidence and maybe hand over things as you grow.

Finding your ‘genius’

Taki: Later on as you get confidence about it, so if you think about that bull’s eye, that incompetence to competence to excellence to genius, there are two things in my world that I’m excellent at. One of, you know I don’t want this to come across as boasting, I’m probably in the top few people in the world at these two things, okay? But I don’t love them, and they don’t give me energy but over the years I’ve hung onto building my own slide decks and building the work books for my black belt events. My workbooks are stunning, my slides look incredible and I’m kind of known for having really good looking stuff. But I knew that there were excellent activities not genius activities. And so now, we were chatting just before we hit record, my workflow right now is at that I have a big fat role of brown paper that sits on the right hand side of my desk on the floor, I now sketch, take a photo, send it off to Mike, who happens to be better than me on both two things. It took a long time for me to let go of excellence but it was easy to get rid of incompetence and then competence and kind of work my way in so now I’m at the point where I only do the stuff that I’m loving. So I think that’s probably the …

Barbara: I like that strategy, that’s really a good advice because people try to get rid of everything all at the one time and then throw their hands in the air and say, ‘Oh it doesn’t work for me.’ but maybe just going in stages like that is better.

Taki: Yeah, exactly right!

Matt: Taki, Mike doing your slides and workbooks, is that his genius or excellence?

Taki: It’s probably his excellence, to be honest.

Matt: Yep!

Taki: Yep, but this conversation is all about me so…

Matt: Yeah, yeah, but the reason I asked that question is because after, I think in handing those tasks over, we may hand over what we deem as incompetence, competence or excellence but it’s actually they’re genius.

Taki: Yeah, completely! Well Mike is world-class at it. He’s got a design eye and he’s got a, whether it’s hard wired or it’s kind of trained, he’s got a real knack for designing information and I think it’s just a ridiculous skill. Now, in his perfect world would he spend all his time doing these slides and workbooks? No he wouldn’t, he’s got other stuff that we’re working together, for him it’s excellence but frankly for me it’s being able to go one layer deeper so now I’m just in genius is worth it. And I’m happy to spend, you know Mike’s not a virtual assistant in the Philippines, he’s a guy in Melbourne and he costs a fortune and he’s worth every cent.

Allowing others to play in their genius

Matt: Yes, yeah! So I guess the point of the question is to show the listeners that as you start to let go of these things, what you’re actually doing is you’re letting go of your incompetence, competence and excellence to allow someone else to play in their genius. If you do it properly, often that’s what’s happening.

Taki: Yep! That’s exactly what happens. So when we hire VAs, they go through a screening process and a group interview and that usually take a Kolbe test, which is like a profile, and we’re looking for what could this person be amazing at and how are they naturally wired so what can they do, but what will they do, given every possible option and what are they drawn to. So I want my whole team to be playing to their strengths because there’s nothing more fun than going to work and getting to rock hard every day doing stuff that you, that juices you, you know!

Matt: Absolutely!

The ‘Super VA’ myth

Barbara:: I love that you said that, Taki, actually because one of the things I’ve noticed as well and this is a common problem, I know Chris Docker talks about this as well with people who are hiring VAs, it’s that whole thing of the myth of the super VA and I know we seek clients a lot hiring one person and getting sort of shocked when they realize that this person can’t code a website, they can do a lot of things but they’re expecting them to do everything from video editing right through to web coding and they’re like, they get confused when they realize this person has limitations…

Taki: It’s hilarious because you need to hire someone in your home country to do everything. Like, ‘I want you to make my coffee, code my website, look after accounts, design this.’ Like you’d never in a million years assume that but for some reason we think that because they’re the person on the other side of the world that can, it’s ridiculous! I’ve totally fallen into that trap and I think when they’re getting started with a couple of options, who do you hire first. You can either hire, I guess the closest thing to the super VA if you know somebody who is a little bit all around who can just take a load often and like I certainly with Ash didn’t hire super strategically. I went to the company and said, ‘Here’s what I want and one of my requirements was that they use a MAC.’ And out of all of the candidates they have, they had one who had a MAC and I hired her. So I wasn’t super strategic with Ash, she turned out to be amazing and her role has shrunk down as has mine, you know. But it kind of started off with you ‘you look after as much of everything as you can’ and then we’ve kind of got, yeah as I’ve got hip to the fact that business is more fun when you do what you’re great at, I’ve tried to, we’ve tried to make that same for all of our team.

Barbara: It sounds to me though that you, it sounds to me that you worked quite a lot with her. So when she first started she was kind of a ‘jack of all trades’, doing everything, helping to take the load off you but as your business grows, you’re getting strategic about her position, her genius and then mentoring her, I would imagine, into the new set of roles as she grows with you, was that sort of how it happened?

Taki: I would like it to sound as strategic as that, I’m actually a really bad manager and so about a year and a half ago we made a good decision, my wife and I, that I ran, like if you imagine that our business is like a theatre, that I run that stage and she runs the theater, so everything that is client facing so the workshops, the events, the training, the marketing, the sales, that’s me and all of the behind the scenes including running the team is her and that way, now that they’re being lead properly rather than mislead as it would be if it was just me.

Barbara: I mean that’s the key point though, that they need to be led properly. So even rock stars and great people on your team need guidance and leadership and someone for this to work.

A communication rhythm

Taki: Yep and so they need, they need context on what the role is really about, they need clarity about here’s what we want to done and they need, frankly, you need a communication rhythm. A set of rhythms in your business, even if it’s just you and a VA, but like in a perfect world we’ve got some kind of quick daily check-in, like a daily huddle, we’ve got a weekly meeting, we’ve got a monthly strategic meeting, we’ve got quarterly off-site like our team are in Philippines, twice a year we fly to the Philippines and we spend four days together on an island and we get more done in those three of four days than we used to in six months.

Barbara: I like the communication rhythm thing because you know I’ve actually seen clients fall into the trap of sort of giving their VAs a task list and then not communicating with them maybe for 2 or 3 weeks and really, and then getting sort of annoyed and saying things are not working but really I’d love to know your view on that. I mean there’s one thing to empower people to work alone but there’s another thing to have no check-ins or no leadership there in terms of communication.

Taki: Yeah! Well most things left unattended don’t do well.

Barbara: That’s a good quote!

Taki: Yeah like if you leave your garden it’s going to go messy, I’ve got 6 kids and if I left them unattended, ‘Okay kids there’s breakfast over there and here’s Netflix, I’ll be back in 3 weeks.’ Yeah I might have one of them still alive when I get back. So if it doesn’t work with gardens or kids, the chance of it working with teams is pretty low and like, I completely did that. I was like ‘well I’ve hired you, so I don’t have to think about it, good luck’, it didn’t work so great. And so part of the reason for Karen rerunning the team is because she’s on it like white on ice. She does a really good job and now the team are getting the kind of frequency and interaction and speed of getting help. I used to be the biggest bottle neck in the business and most of the people listening to this probably are. If every decision has to come through you, then you are the bottle neck. So you want to get out of the way as quickly as you can.

Barbara: Yeah, that’s very good advice!

Matt: Taki, just on the communication rhythm you were talking about, the daily, weekly, etc. can you just give us, just going the next layer down on each of those? Give us the idea around the daily, that would be great.

‘Check-ins’ time frames

Taki: Yeah, cool! So, big believer in attribution – give credit where credits due – I first read about this in a book called The Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish and there’s another book, if you want to learn how to do it really well, there’s a book called Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni, which I think is fantastic. If you imagine four timeframes, daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly – here are the four and then we will go as deep as we need, okay? So there’s daily, there’s a check-in, it’s a 10-minute stand up meeting. Weekly, there’s a tactical meeting, which we will talk about the agenda for in a second if you like. Monthly, there’s a strategic and then quarterly there’s an off-site or a planner, like my team in the Philippines, it costs, it’s a fair commitment of time and money to fly us all to an island and do stuff together but frankly it’s good fun! We could do the same virtually, in fact we do twice a year on an island, we call it tribal council – nobody gets voted off the island and so far everyone is still alive – and then in between, so 90 days after each of those we do a vibral counsel which is the same process done virtually. So we just start daily and we’ll go from there, yeah?

Matt: Yeah great!

Daily check-ins

Taki: Okay, so daily check-in – it’s just a way to kind of get everyone on the same page, calibrated and excited about what you’re doing and so it’s 10 minutes tops, it’s usually at a weird time of a day so like 10:10 or 11:11 or just some random time. It’s called stand up so ideally we’re standing up and not sitting down and energy would be better and we just go around the, around the group – even if just you and one assistant, I still recommend it and you answer 3 questions – what did you get done yesterday? What are you working on today? And where are you stuck?

Barbara: That’s fantastic! I’m taking that idea straightaway.

Taki: Yeah, it’s fantastic right? So we have the 6-week virtual assistant on-ramp program and in week 3 we, one of the things we do is we setup the internal rhythms and rituals and one of this is daily check-in and the rule is kind of got to be quick, right?! I first witnessed this at a clients’ office up in Brisbane, Rob Nixon and they had, I think, 17 or 18 staff, you know people on the team and they did this stand up and it was over in 10 minutes. And so if you can get 18 people through 3 questions in 10 minutes, that will give you a sense of kind of the cadence and pace that we want and if it starts to dribble, then it loses energy and it’s not the place to solve problems and if someone goes ‘I’m stuck on this’ and so you say ‘great, lets book in a time straight after this and we’ll fix it’.

Matt: And you’re on that each day?

Taki: No! I’m only on the monthly and the quarterly now.

Matt: Okay!

Weekly, monthly & quarterly check-ins

Taki: I used to be, right now Karen does the daily’s and the weekly’s, I’m on the monthly and the quarterly and I’m in Slack which is our team chat app, which might be helpful to chat about as well at some stage. So daily check-in – there’s a weekly tactical meeting which is 3 big things on your plate right now, what does the scoreboard say? What are the numbers? How are we tracking? Let’s get an agenda together, what do we need to discuss? That either comes from what’s going on for you or what are you working on or score boards, so we get a list of things to discuss. Some of them are going to be really great topics that are going to be too big for the scope of this meeting like big decisions, like should we do this, or should we do that? A bit more strategically or if they do that we just park them on to the strategic list to talk about monthly, so we can deal with little tactical stuff each week, right? Then we’ll get into action plans, we’ll work through the agenda one by one and we’ll work on who does what by when. And then there’s a communication plan – who do we need to talk to? What do we need to say? And that might be talk to Taki, it could be talk to a supplier, it could be talk to clients, yeah so that’s the weekly tactical. Tuesdays is our meeting day so all of these things happen on Tuesdays. Anything that gets parked, it’s a really big topic, let’s talk about it separately, goes to the monthly meeting. We call it the monthly strategic – we use Zoom, it’s like Go-To meeting. We use Zoom so we can see everybody’s face and we do wins so what progress we made in the last month, which is good because you find out about stuff that you didn’t even know happened, that your team has done and most of the time so busy kind of working hard, chasing the next thing that we forget to pause and go wow, we’ve actually done really, really well. So we start of with what are the wins and why do they matter and then we go ok, so what’s not working right now? And anything that got parked as strategic topic will come and we’ll have a list of stuff that’s broken – I’m not a goal setter but I’m a big problem solver – so we just pick 2 topics and I spend an hour or an hour and a half ripping them apart, figuring out a plan and that’s the monthly strategic. And then the quarterly – we do tribal council, or vibal council, it has a bit of an agenda and there’s a fair bit to it but it’s kind of epic. Mostly evolves around swimming and eating tacos and stuff.

Matt: So Taki, I think you did a blog on your Coach Marketing Machine blog that I’ll connect everybody to that talks about your tribal council, so I’ll put that into the notes of the show and connect people with that.

Taki: That would be great, I think that would be helpful. There’s 5 or 6 things we do in there, so yeah, if you do check that out I would give you a really good snap shot of how to run a… I think you don’t have to go to an island to do it. At some stage, you know, meeting your virtual team face-to-face is amazing and it will change your world but we run the same thing twice a year as a one day virtual. I think actually probably doing it as two half-days is where we’ll go because one day is a lot of time to be talking to people at a computer, you know.

Matt: Absolutely!

Barbara: Taki, I’m interested to know, this is something I’m guilty of this myself because, you know, the quote I sort of said at the beginning of this show about the leadership thing, I all of a sudden have a lot more people on my team in the last 5 months, it doubled and all of a sudden as you know when you’re managing more people and more people are reporting to you, it becomes a new challenge and I’ve been trying to put huddles in place and meetings. How non-negotiable are the meetings in your diary? Because obviously as business owners we get busy and the tendency is to go, ‘Oh let’s cancel that meeting and do it next week.’ What’s your view on being strict with yourself and that has to happen?

The importance of sticking to your comms plan

Taki: It’s an awesome question, so if my wife was standing here and you were talking to her because, you know, she runs the theater, remember, and I run the stage. It’s really funny, every Tuesday at about 11 o’clock, she seems to get this text from one of the guys in the team saying, ‘Is the weekly meeting on?’ and I sent him a voicemail on Tuesday going, ‘Please never ask this question ever again. Every time you ask we always tell you that its on, the meetings on. Never ask it again, just be there!’ so that’s done. So the meeting must, must, must, must, must, must happen and it’s important that meeting is led but you don’t have to be the person that leading the meeting, in fact it’s probably best if you’re not.

Barbara: But you have to be there? I think maybe not daily but I think—

Taki: I’m not there, I just want to be completely transparent. I hate meetings with a passion, I find them a complete waste of my time and I’m not interested. What I am interested in is moving things forward. I setup the structure and how I want the daily and weekly’s to run, the team run those and Karen and I are resources, like we come in the meeting but we don’t lead it, we’re just participants like everybody else. It’s really important that unless you’ve got somebody who’s like your 2IC, like your project manager person who can run it for you, I think you should totally be there.

Barbara: Yeah I think even for listeners that are just one person and their VA as well. I think it’s really important for people to realize that you as the business owner and the leader, and that’s something I’m really focusing on myself in my business right now, is that meeting has to happen and you can’t be the person to cancel it.

Taki: You can’t be the person to cancel but I also found, I can’t be the person to instigate it.

Barbara: Yeah, the structure has to be there but it has to go ahead.

Taki: Yeah completely! So I just have it like, we pick the time that worked for me and it was inconvenient for some of the people on the team but I had – this is when I was on the daily’s and the weekly’s so this is the time that’s going to work, ‘You’re going to put it in my diary, you’re going to get everybody in the meeting, a few minutes before hand you’re going to call my phone and I’m going to answer and I’m going to do the thing but I’m not, kind of like, I’m not going to drive!’ Exactly, because I can’t rely on myself to drive because frankly if there’s something else that I’d rather do that comes up, I do that instead or if the beach is good I’ll shoot down there and neither of those are great for the team.

Barbara: Yeah, that’s what I know! I fall into that trap as well and I know a lot of clients do too so it’s a New Year’s resolution of mine to just focus on making sure that the meeting happens. That’s really valuable information, thank you!

Create a meeting structure

Taki: I think the secret is to, you decide what you want, you make it up, you build a structure for it that makes it real and then you have somebody else in charge who – I’m quoting Dan Sullivan again – someone who makes it happen, makes it recur, right?

Barbara: And the key point there is that you set the structure though, it’s like creating systems in your business. It’s the same process, it’s another process for the meeting.

Taki: Yeah, exactly right!

Matt: So Taki I really could spend all day with you because this has been just so amazing. I’ve got one last question I’d love to ask.

Taki: Sure, by the way I’m not in a rush so do whatever you need to do, I want this to be great for your listeners.

Matt: Awesome! So knowing what you now know, it’s the question that obviously Brian Tracey asked – Zero-based thinking – knowing what you now know , you’ve been using VAs for 7 and ½ years, you had that pivotal moment after reading The Four Hour Work Week, if you were starting over again with the knowledge that you have, what would you do differently?

What Taki would do differently next time…

Taki: I’d probably do three things differently. The first thing I’d do is I would have hired my first person way sooner. The arguments against that are, ‘I don’t know if I can keep them busy’ and ‘I don’t have the cash’. Don’t have the cash is pretty easily handles by the fact that if they are overseas, like in the Philippines for example, or offshore, that the wages are completely different and even if you hire someone part-time like which I did with Ash, 20 hours a week, it was just a fear thing you know, so do it faster. Somebody once said ‘what if you can’t keep him busy?’, yeah but I’m paying $5 an hour, if they sit there for five hours twiddling their thumbs, it’s only 25 bucks it’s not that big deal, right? So that’s the first thing – hire faster.

Number two, I would have hired a project manager sooner and in our team there’s two people who play an important role that work with me directly, and they are called project managers. I have a project manager for my marketing and a project manager for making our black belt program better, right? So every quarter how it works is, every quarter I come up with three new projects that I want to do marketing wise and three new projects that I want to make the program better. I sit down with my project managers with a sheet which kind of maps out exactly what I want and how it’s going to look, what’s its stake if we get it right, what’s the cost if we get it wrong. And if we do it, and do it well, it looks like this. And I brief the project manager at the start of the quarter and then they go away that week and they turn it into a project plan that we will talk about the next Tuesday and I just feed the project’s weekly. So I would’ve hired a project manager sooner because it allows me to create. I think about my role a little bit like the first time 100m in a 4 x 100 meter sprint. My job is to pick up the baton, have an idea, run a hundred meters and give it to somebody else and then let go and having a project manager makes that work. So that’s the second thing I would change.

And the third thing I would probably do is work with a project-based team sooner. So, Barbara we spoke earlier about the myth of the super VA, I think the alternative to that is to have a one point of contact person who has a team of specialists around them, so the VA company that we use has a project manager called Harvey – it’s not their actual name but its what the service is called – email the task to Harvey and Harvey grabs it and then he or she has 5 teams around them that they can call on. So there’s people who do design, WordPress and tech, automation, Social Media, admin and the 6th team is media you know anything video, podcasts, audios etc. and so it allows you to get a ton of stuff done but still only having to manage one relationship which I think is really, really nice way to do it!

Matt: Love it, love it! That is gold, that is absolute gold! And just for the listeners you know just to reiterate, so number one – hire a person sooner and I think in one of the earlier shows Taki I talked about, and I can’t remember if it was you and I that had this discussion when I hired my first VA, but I’ll put little post-it note on my computer, anytime I’ve got a new staff member, which is ‘what could I get *enter name* to do now?’ and its just staring at me in my face, day in, day out. And if you’ve got that in front of you, all of a sudden as you’re getting into your workflow, this is staring at you day in, day out and before you know it, they’ll be full.

Taki: 100% before you know it, they’ll be full.

Matt: Yeah! Secondly I like the having a project manager and to reiterate your point ‘it’s like running a hundred meter relay’ and your role in that team is to you know, the firing gun goes off, you sprint that first 100 meters as fast as you can but then you’re handing the baton over.

Taki: Legitimately it is 400 meters, you know, the 100 meters is making it up. You know that’s my job and I’ll figure out what I want. The second hundred meters is with the project manager and if I make it up, they make it real, so their job is to take my idea and make it happen and they’ve got 90 days to do that. The third hundred meters is to make it recur and that’s usually, project people typically get bored with the doing the same repetitive jobs again, and again, and again, so you want someone who’s good at that. And so project manager invents the new thing and then pass it you know systemize it and pass to somebody else who can do the same task again and again and again and again and then the project manager comes back to you ready for the next hundred meters right? So it’s ‘Get up, make it real, make it recur and then the fourth piece is to make it better which is the team does a debrief about the systems, you know any time something breaks, and you know, how do we make this better?’

Matt: Love it, love it! And then the third point was to have these people, have a centre person that they can have specialists around them to get those pieces done.

Taki: Otherwise you end up having to manage five people and like, a) It costs more, and b) it’s a pain. You don’t have to pay for all of the five people full-time because you know you don’t have like a media editing or an automation job all the time but if you can pay the equivalent of one full-time staff who’s your project manager and team, and the team is shared amongst a few other people I think it’s kind of a great way to really get stuff done.

Return on Investment

Matt: Absolutely! One last thing I’m going to add to the conversation – in one of our earlier shows we talked about the mindset, the critical mindsets that must be adopted when bringing on virtual teams and what we talked about in that show, Taki, was just viewing the remuneration of your people as an investment as opposed to an expense. The reality is when you’ve got the right people and you leverage through them, the payback is 10x or more.

Taki: Yeah it is and I think for me I get paid two ways, the return on investment comes in two ways. The first return, the immediate one you’ll get no matter what is I never have to do that crappy job that I hated ever, ever, ever again, right? And that’s an immediate payoff, like if I never have to check another email, if I never have to look at something in my calendar, if I never have to book my own flights ever again, if I don’t have to negotiate with venues and Karen will give the calendar to people, get quotes to the places, book the venue, book all the AV, if I never have to do that, that is life changingly good! So that’s the first way I get paid, in the relief that comes from never having to do stuff that you’re incompetent at ever again. And the second way you get paid is if we can get an extra, like with my clients one of the very first exercises we do is this thing called the extra work day advantage, so how do we get you an extra one day a week to work on stuff that actually matters, right? And so if we can free up 10 hours a week from the stuff you hated doing so instead of having a drain, it’s giving you energy and instead of it be a drain, we can spend even if we spend, even if we flitter half of it away at the movies, right, and we used five hours a week on something that is high leverage that’s in your genius zone, that you’re great at and gives you energy and it brings in the bucks, dude five hours of you and your genius is worth 50 hours of you in incompetence and it will snowball really, really quickly!

Wrapping things up

Matt: Absolutely love it, absolutely love it! Well Barbara, was there anything before we wrap up the show, was there anything else, any other questions you have for Taki?

Barbara: No not at this stage, it has been absolutely fab! I’ve been taking lots of tips myself and I’m going to be implementing as soon as possible in my own business. Thank you so much for that Taki, lots of great insights!

Taki: Total pleasure! It was fun and keep up the good work.

Matt: Taki thank you so much. I highly recommend if you want to learn more about Taki and his teachings, coachmarketingmachine.com is where Taki regularly blogs, he’s also got a couple of podcasts, haven’t you Taki?

Taki: Yeah actually salesmarketingprofit.com is where unpack case study interviews of clients, stories of good works that clients are doing and there’s a new podcast about to start, tentative title, million dollar coaches, which is conversations with Adam my head coach and I and also interviews with clients and maybe the occasional mentor as well, so look out for that in the future but right now coachmarketingmachine.com is where to go and there are links everything else from there.

Matt: Okay fantastic! Taki thank you so much, been an absolute pleasure! I think the listeners got millions of dollars’ worth of value out of this show and mate we’ll have to catch up for a burger sooner or later.

Taki: I’d love to! That would be awesome.

Barbara: Thanks, Taki!

Taki: Thanks Barbara, ciao! See you guys.

Matt: Everyone just stay tuned for more and more shows of the Virtual Success Show. Please be sure to add any comments below or we’d love for you to share this podcast with others so that we can continue to build the Virtual Success Show community. Til next show Barbara, have a wonderful week and we’ll chat soon!

Barbara: Yeah! Thanks guys.

Taki: Thank you!

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

Some of the areas covered are:

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:

04:00 – Tough conversations are never easy

06:16 – Client case study – shying away from the ‘tough’ conversation

08:38 – The “tough guy syndrome”

09:19 – Candour

11:18 – Becoming masterful with your language and communication style

13:56 – Setting up for those tough conversations

14:12 – Set up a meeting with an agenda

15:52 – Present the facts as they are

17:28 – Use video communication channels

18:58 – Conversation hurdles

19:47 – Conquering those hurdles

24:03 – How to respond if the meeting doesn’t go to plan

28:29 – Reducing the number of tough conversations

30:21 – Wrapping things up

Barbara: Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Virtual Success Show. I am joined by my co-cost Matt Malouf. Hey Matt, how’s it going?

Matt: I’m well. I’m joined by the magnificent, wonderful, bright, positive, Barbara Turley.

Barbara: I was thinking we already said … I was chuckling in the background, and I thought, “I shouldn’t assume he’s going to talk about me.” Thank you for that great accolade. A lot to live up to on this episode.

Matt: How have you been?

Barbara: I have been well. I’ve been really, actually…the last little while I’ve been thinking back on the episodes we’ve been doing, actually, about communication. It’s something that I’ve had to grow into myself as a business owner and entrepreneur as well.

Some of the tips you’ve been giving on these shows have really actually helped me a lot in my communications with my teams and thinking about how I’m communicating and the language I’m using. Am I being too nice? You know? Wanting them to like me and not attacking the difficult conversations and the effective feedback and stuff like that. It’s been excellent. How about you? Are you communicating more effectively with your wife and your children?

Matt: Well, I’m doing my best (*laughs).

For me too, I think each one of these episodes that we do, there’s so many learnings that we’re trying to share, but I think we end up walking away, and after every episode we say, “Wow, that was … we took so much from it as well.” It’s certainly inspiring for me. What it does too, I think these episodes for me, not only with my own teams but in the coaching that I do, it just enables me to enhance the experience for everybody and really uncover and help people keep moving forward.

Barbara: You know, I think it’s an important point actually that we’ve just discussed this because I want the listeners to understand that we are literally, you and I are literally growing our businesses based on some of these conversations that we’re having on the podcast together. We’re learning and using the tips and strategies, so for the listeners, please do listen to what we’re saying because we’re actively doing this every day in our own businesses and seeing results, so if you do the same.

This is episode three in our three-part series on communication. Today we’re going to tackle tough conversations, which is the emotionally challenging conversations that you have to have when things are really … you’ve tried everything else and you’re sort of staring down the barrel of where are we going with this? Are we removing this person, or how are we going to get this really working?

In episode 1, for those of you who may not have listened to the other episodes, it’s worth going back and listening because in episode 1, we actually tackled how to set yourself up for success from a communication perspective from the beginning. It’s really worth going back and actually seeing, can you implement some of that now.

Then, in episode 2 we talked about giving effective feedback. Often we find people shy away from the feedback conversation because they see it as a negative thing, but it can be a huge growth experience and can actually deepen your relationship with your VA massively if you do it correctly.

Today, we’re going to talk about a difficult one where, you know, you may have done all those things, and it’s now time to have the tough conversation. So Matt, have you had some of these conversations with your team in the past?

Matt: Many.

Barbara: Yeah.

Tough conversations are never easy

Matt: I just want to preface that these conversations, no matter who you are, they’re never easy.

Barbara: No.

Matt: They’re never easy because we’re dealing with humans, and we all have an emotional side to us. You know, you can read all the books, and you can listen to all the people, and you know, the people that advise on this, you need to understand that there is a human element to it. And so, what we’re going to share with you today is our experience and how we believe these conversations need to be handled.

But understand, I know for me, before … I had to have a tough conversation just a week ago. For me, I still … my guts are in knots, and I’m not sure. Then, I just have to pucker up and, you know, do it. Every time I do it, it has a positive outcome. It’s either a positive for the team, it’s a positive for the person, it’s a positive for the business, and it’s a positive for me. What I tend to find is that the internal conversation that I had going on in my head, prior to that, is never actually how it ended up playing out. It’s never as bad as I think it was going to be.

Barbara: Yeah, but I would like to add though, you’re obviously quite good at this. We want to delve into how you get that outcome. I will openly admit that I’m getting better at them, and I’ve been trying different styles, and I naturally shy away from them because I would suffer from the “I want people to like me” syndrome, so sometimes that can make you less direct than you need to be.

I definitely get the knots in my stomach beforehand and the tough conversations I’m having these days definitely go well, and we get positive outcomes, but in the past I’ve had situations where they didn’t go well because I didn’t handle it well. You know, I might have gotten too annoyed or resentful or my tone, all these different things that you kind of have to learn over time to do better. So I’m really looking forward to delving in here into your strategies. Matt, how do we attack these tough conversations?

Matt: Definitely. Definitely. So Barb, you mentioned just before today’s call, a couple of examples of what’s gone on recently for you at Virtual Angel Hub, in this area.

Client case study – shying away from the ‘tough’ conversation

Barbara: Yep. An interesting one we had recently where our HR team, who are fantastic in the Philippines, I no longer get involved in the client. When something’s been elevated to HR, it means that, we have a process internally that takes clients through a troubleshooting process. Step 4 of the process is if you’ve done the other 3 things, then it’s now time to elevate it to HR and ask us to come in to help.

Our HR team got on a call, there were two from the team on the call, one of our success coaches and our head of HR, got on the call with the client and the VA in question. What they did first was they got the client on the phone first, just to hear how the clients feeling and what was going on. The client was, you know, irate, upset, annoyed, you know, frustrated all of the above. And they said, “Look, what we want to do now is we want to bring the VA on the call, but we need to have an open discussion. We need to really air the feelings here, but we also need to hear from the VA.”

Now, when the VA came on the call, the tone completely changed from the client, and she started apologizing and wouldn’t … just totally shied away. The team were shocked, just completely … the conversation just completely changed. She didn’t want to have the tough conversation. They found it fascinating. In the end, the outcome was that, you know, the client ended up cancelling the contract. Really our feeling was, “Wow, it didn’t have to end that way, but it did,” because the client was just not able to have that tough conversation in a constructive way. So, how do we deal better with this?

Matt: I think, the first thing I just want to position is, I was taught an acronym for the word “nice” years ago. You write this down, n-i-c-e, stands for ‘nothing inside me cares enough’. And so, when you’re overly nice to your people, and you don’t address the tough conversations, it implies that nothing inside you cares enough. You don’t care enough about wanting to make this person better or make the relationship work. You’re just happy to walk away from it. Now, that doesn’t mean that walking away from it isn’t necessarily the best result…

Barbara: Solution. Yeah.

The “tough guy syndrome”

Matt: So I just want to make sure that that’s critical, but you know, in light of what you were just describing Barb, I call it “tough guy syndrome.” Behind closed doors I’ll talk really tough and they’re no good and blah blah blah blah blah and then you get in front of them and you’re not willing to say the same thing. This comes back to, I think, understanding the values of your organization. If you don’t have candid conversations with people … if you’re willing to say one thing about them behind closed doors and not say the same thing to their face, you actually have a fundamental flaw in your business, not just in this conversation.

Candour

Because candour … I highly recommend every one reading the book “Winning” by Jack Welch on this. He talks about candour and great leaders are able to have candid conversations, very direct conversations with their people that are respectful, that are constructive, and that are ultimately designed to have a win-win outcome.

Now, win-win, as I said, may be the person leaving your organization. Often, if you’ve got an underperformer, letting them go is doing them a favour as well as doing you a favour because they just often don’t have the courage to resign.

Barbara: Yeah. That’s true. Yeah. You can leave on good terms then and be like, you know … it’s funny when you were using the word candour; a story I would love to share with the listeners about my approach to candour. Again, I learned this by trying different methods and obviously, I kind of have to have tough conversations quite a lot because in the business we’re in, we’re in a people business, and things can come up quite a bit.

For me, what started to work a lot recently is I just get on a call with my people and I’m like, “Hey, look you’re a smart guy.” Let’s say it’s a guy. “You’re a smart person, and I’m a smart person, so I think we both can … it’s not working. Like, you’re not stupid, right? Neither am I, so let’s just be honest, it’s not working for you, it’s not working for me. Let’s just get to the bottom of what’s going on. Like, what’s really happening here? What’s happening for you?”

And I even go to the point where I say, “Look, do you like the job? Because if you don’t, it’s okay. You know, we need to talk about it.” You’re going a level deeper. You’re dropping business like, and you’re going a level deeper and saying, “Hey, let’s forget all that stuff, the business stuff, everything. Let’s you and I have a discussion about what’s really going on here.” That for me is unbelievable the barriers it breaks down when you do that.

Becoming masterful with your language and communication style

Matt: I’m going to add one thing to what Barbara just said, you need to have that style of conversation with the right person as well.

Barbara: Yeah. I’m not sure whether this would work with everyone.

Matt: No.

Barbara: You know, so it’s probably not … don’t take this as the way to go; it’s just something that I’ve been doing recently that’s working for me and my style.

Matt: One of the areas that I’ve invested heavily in in learning is various communication styles. DISC for me is one method of understanding how to communicate and adapt to different styles. So, someone that has a very direct approach will actually be very receptive to the way Barbara just communicated. But someone that is, say, maybe not as open or open to that kind of direct communication, you just need to shift the language. You have the same content that you’re trying to get across, it’s just in your delivery.

It could be along the lines of, “Hey, Barb. As you’re aware and I’m aware, things just haven’t seemed right lately. They just haven’t really … we’re not really gelling. I don’t know how you feel, but I’m interested to hear how you feel. I just want to have a conversation with you so that we can work out what is the best way to move forward.” That’s just a different style of communication to get to that same outcome. But if you don’t address it and if you don’t communicate to people in their style, if you only communicate in your style, they’ll close off straight away. And so, it’s actually becoming very masterful with your language so that you can get great outcomes.

Barbara: I think in saying that as well … so I really love that because that’s also working with the person you’re speaking to and taking into account their style. Both ways are still very candid, as you said. You’re dealing with going a level deeper than a business-like conversation. You’re going into, let’s forget all that stuff for a second, let’s you and I on this call together go a little bit deeper together.

To work out, you know … as you say, the solution may be that the person moves on or that we both move on. But it can be in a really nurturing way because, you know, if the person needs to move on, for both of you and them, then that can be a fantastic outcome for both of you. Or maybe you give them a different role. That’s happened to me before, where we ended up putting someone in a different role and they totally excelled in that new role. It was just the role didn’t suit them, the original role.

Setting up for those tough conversations

Matt: So a couple of things about setting up for these tough conversations is firstly, in my experience, when you surprise people with these conversations, they never go well.

Barbara: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt: They never go well.

Barbara: They panic. They go into panic mode. Yeah.

Set up a meeting with an agenda

Matt: They go into panic, they don’t know how to respond, or another natural response is defence. And so they almost become defensive and maybe even a bit aggressive. And so, what you want to do is you need to set the meeting up, that you would like to have a feedback session or even tell them, “Look, we need to have a serious meeting.” You may position it in that way, and you need to position it with an agenda.

Barbara: Yes, an agenda is vital. Yeah.

Matt: Because if that person cares and prepares for that meeting, then they’re the type of person you’re probably going to give another chance to, right? But if that person doesn’t prepare for that meeting, if they come very sort of unassuming, then you’ve probably got a good case to move then on, then and there.

Barbara: I think it’s important to pause here for a second and talk about … I always say to clients too, there’s a difference between a meeting and a chat. You’ve got to be very clear on which one you’re having. A chat can kind of … is good. A chat can be good to get things going, but eventually it really is the tough conversation and the end of the line conversation that needs to be a meeting with an agenda. Set up in the way Matt has just described where you allow them time to know this meeting is happening and what it’s going to be about, you know? Get them to prepare for that meeting and show up.

Matt: Yes.

Barbara: Sometimes they might resign before the meeting. If they did that, then that’s a good outcome because if that person can’t even come to the meeting, then you know, then you don’t want that person on your team, to be totally honest.

Present the facts as they are

Matt: Correct. Correct. The second part then is to make sure when you’re conducting the meeting, that we’re presenting the facts. I think that too often people present opinions or present … they dance around the facts. Just present the facts as they are.

Barbara: There’s too much emotion. I will openly admit I suffer from this. This would be a problem I would have. I probably bring too much emotion to that meeting. Too many feelings of how I’m feeling about it and allowing my own feelings about it to cloud how the meeting can go.

I’m being very open on this podcast because I think it’s really important for people to realize that if you’re feeling this way, if you’re listening to this and you’re feeling … what I’m saying is resonating with you, I sort of want to connect with the listeners and say, it’s okay because we’re human, we do have emotion. But it’s about just accepting how I get this to go … I know that’s my … I wouldn’t say weakness, it’s just my style, that I can be a little bit too emotional, so I have to prepare for the meeting beforehand, and I have to think about what I’m going to say so that I set myself up for success in that meeting and not get side tracked with emotion.

Matt: Same goes for me. These conversations probably aren’t as tough for me now as they once were, but again, being prepared, being succinct, being understanding, almost visualizing how the meeting’s going to go before you go into it is critically important.

Use video communication channels

I think the third thing here, like we spoke about in the last episode, is making sure you use the video. Being able to see somebody and watch what’s going on in their body language when you’re having one of these tough conversations is critically important because, again, you can watch what’s going on, they can’t be distracted, you can move the conversation as and where you see fit. And I think the next step is, don’t get bogged down in any one aspect of this.

Barbara: Okay, that’s key.

Matt: What you’ll find is that either you or the person that you’re having the tough conversation with will want to keep coming back to a key thing that they want to express or that you want to express. This is where the agenda is really important. You’ve got to have a clear agenda. Again, you’ve got to go through the facts, you’ve got to enable discussion to occur, but you’ve got to get to an outcome.

I’ll always preface and position these meetings, “Thank you for coming to the meeting today. The main reason for today’s meeting is for us to discuss a few key issues that have been occurring, and for us to get to a clear set of steps on how we’re going to fix it moving forward. Is that okay with you?”

And so we know, if it’s not moving on to the clear next steps to move it forward, then we have to move the conversation.

Conversation hurdles

Barbara: What about, Matt, I’m just thinking here, you know, about my own experiences and stuff with this sort of thing, what happens when you have a tough conversation? I’ve had a couple of these where we get … the conversation kind of stalls because the person is so defensive. You know, and just spends the whole time trying to convince you of why you’re wrong. You know, that kind of thing, has a story for everything. Everything that you bring up has a story for it. Now, I’ve had that situation, and I find that super challenging because it’ll start to bring up my emotion.

Matt: So listeners, I want you to hear me here. I get excited when this happens in those meetings.

Barbara: Oh, do you? I don’t because I start to get … I can feel my blood boiling, and I start to get like I want to end the meeting.

Conquering those hurdles

Matt: Yeah. Here’s why I get excited. The communication back to them when they keep doing that is, this is exactly why we’re having this meeting now.

Barbara: Right. Okay.

Matt: The way you’re behaving, and the way you’re showing up, and the way you’re communicating right now is the key reason we’re having this meeting right now. And you actually flip it straight back around because often that will be the reason … their excuses, their lack of performance, there’s a reason for everything and as soon as you flip that, where are they going to go with it?

Barbara: Yeah, because it’s taking … there’s no personal responsibility. It’s all, “You’re blaming me for everything. I’ve been doing a great job.” In their head they’re doing everything they can. They never think, in their head, I’m doing a great job because they know they’re not, but they always see someone else’s fault why they’re not.

Matt: Exactly.

Barbara: That can be a tricky … I know that that would be a hurdle. You know, if any of the listeners are going into a conversation like this, or have tried to have these tough conversations, I know that’s where you can get derailed very quickly because I have in the past myself too, in that instance. It’s important to understand how to get through that hurdle when it comes up.

Matt: Yeah. Like I said, I find that if I’m having these tough conversations, and they keep going on about the same point, and if I feel it escalating, and I feel their tone increasing, I’ll bring my tone down, and I’ll go, “This is exactly why we’re having this conversation right now. So how do we move past it? ”

You’ve actually got to … you’ve got to be ready with a few key questions. Questions I’ll always ask in these types of meetings are, “What’s the solution here? We’re very clear on what the problem is. How are we going to solve this? How do we move forward?” That’s one of the questions I’ll ask. The second question might be something along the lines of, “If you were me, what do you think the next steps we’re going to take are?”

Barbara: That’s a good one. I’ve used that one before, actually.

Matt: Yeah.

Barbara: I get silence sometimes for that one.

Matt: They know that…

Barbara: There’s nowhere to go.

Matt: Well they often know that you’re thinking, “Well, she’ll probably fire me.”

Barbara: Yes. Yeah, they are thinking that. Yeah. And they’re thinking, “Please, don’t fire me.”

Matt: Exactly. Often with that, you might send them away and go, “You need to think about this, and you need to come back and tell me, well, if you were me, what’s the next step here?” Not always, but often you’ll get a resignation letter.

Barbara: Actually, I like that one because it gives them also … if you say, “I want you to go away, and I want you to come back to a meeting tomorrow or the next day or whatever, or on Monday, I want you to book a meeting with me, and I want you to present to me what you think we should do about this situation.” It gives them space and time to … because this call can be quite confronting. It gives them a moment, as you say, to step back and think about it and you will actually probably get a resignation. Or someone who’s any good will come back with, probably an apology and a very open admission of the responsibility they’re going to take and what they’re going to do about it. But more often than not it will be a resignation. Yeah, that’s very powerful.

Matt: Absolutely, absolutely.

Barbara: I think also giving that space and time gives you a break as well, and it pushes it back on them to come back with their own solution to the problem. I like that. I’m stealing that one.

I want actually the listeners to realize that when I think back on these 3 episodes in particular, and actually many of the episodes that we’ve done, Matt, it’s literally like sometimes I’m getting a coaching session from you. It really is … guys, if you’re listening to this, this is an absolute coaching session on how to deal with these situations.

I come to Matt on these podcasts and present case studies of, you know, issues that we have internally and how I’m dealing with them. Matt is a coach that has coached so many businesses from diverse industries and everything, is coming with absolutely … like the nuggets of the strategies that he’s giving on these podcasts are just amazing, and I’m using them in my business so I would encourage everyone to take on board what you were saying, Matt. It’s fantastic.

Matt: Thank you, thank you.

Barbara: So, I think, too … how do we wrap up this one? Do just want to recap maybe some of the points on the tough conversations?

How to respond if the meeting doesn’t go to plan

Matt: Well, I just want to add one last thing before we go because whilst we’ve sort of painted the picture of this meeting going along and moving through the agenda and the like, sometimes it can actually go the other way. You know, it can get quite heated. It can get quite aggressive or not constructive.

Barbara: Or tears … there can be tears. Yeah, which is hard. Yeah.

Matt: In which case, you need to shut it off quick. You need to say, “Look, this is not a productive use of your time or my time right now. I think what we both need to do is walk away from this and come back in an hour, the next day or whatever, when we’re both in the right mindset to get to an outcome.” Don’t enable the emotion of the situation to take over where you want to head with this. You’ve got to get super clear on the outcome here.

If your outcome in this tough conversation is to move somebody on and your feeling yourself like it’s not going to move, you need to pull away and come back. Re-centre yourself and refocus yourself because otherwise what will end up happening is you’ll end up probably … you’ll end up giving them a pay rise, or something.

Barbara: I know. I was just thinking to myself, I would give them a bonus or something and then what I’ve realized is that sometimes you have to accept that you might have a very manipulative person on your team. Like, sometimes you’ve got passive/aggressive people. Sometimes your staff member might seem crap in some areas, but they might be very manipulative. You know, they’ve got … I’ve had this happen, too. We’ve got manipulators, and they can manipulate you very easily when you get to this point, so you’ve just got to sort of watch out for these cues, too. Without assuming that … that’s not everyone, but sometimes it can be a manipulative thing.

Matt: I think just being ready for that, also coming into these, if the conversation is derailing, just kill it then and there and come back with the outcome. The other thing I just wanted to add is, 30 minutes. Don’t enable more than 30 minutes for this meeting because the longer it is, the more off point you’ll go.

Barbara: That’s so true. Yep. That’s very true. Hour and a half later you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Matt: Exactly. The reality is, you get a tight agenda. There needs to be clarity coming into the meeting, what it’s about. You then need to ensure that you follow it, and then I would just be very respectful and clear in your communication. If someone’s not performing, as I said earlier, give them the facts.

Barbara: Yeah.

Matt: “Let me be clear with you on where this is at”. You know, you might use language like that, or you might go, “Look, as you know we here to discuss X, Y, Z today. Is it okay if I, first of all, go through and give it to you from my perspective, and then I would like to hear it from your perspective.” Or you may even do the reverse. “I would like to hear it from your perspective, and then I’ll give you my perspective.” Frame it up, use that clever language in there like you’re asking for permission. It’s very direct, but clear and it’s not aggressive. I think that’s what I see in these conversations. People tighten up, so what happens is they end up coming across as a little bit aggressive in their language.

Barbara: Yep.

Matt: In wrapping this up, understand that if you want to grow a successful company, and you want to grow it fast, you will have to at some point have these conversations.

Barbara: Yeah, it’s a natural … yeah, the bigger your team grows.

Matt: That’s right.

Barbara: Yeah, you will…

Matt: Eighty-five percent of businesses problems have hair on them, per say.

Barbara: Yeah.

Matt: And so, you’re going to have to have these tough conversations. As much as you can put the great processes in place in your business to recruit the right people and ask the right questions, inevitability, I have not come across a business or business owner yet that hasn’t had to have these tough conversations.

You want to grow, and you want to grow fast. You’ve got to nip it in the bud quicker, and you’ve got to have the tough conversations sooner so that it doesn’t ponder on, it doesn’t affect the rest of the organization, and you and the organization can keep moving forward.

Reducing the number of tough conversations

Barbara: Now, I would like to finish on something though. Guys, a way to reduce the number of these conversations … sometimes I talk to clients and they’re literally spending all day putting out fires with these kinds of conversations. Take a step back and go back to episodes 1 and 2. Look there first. Just think, “Can I change my entire process?” I might need to go back and change my entire process so that we actually reduce the number of these tough conversations we’re having.

That is something I did, probably because I was, you know, not liking the tough conversations but I actually went back and improved a lot of the processes, so I could get rid of … actually, not even hire those people coming in. That’s part of our recruiting process now at Virtual Angel Hub; we try to eradicate a lot of the problems. Also, just setting it up so that you don’t have as many of them, and it doesn’t escalate to that level as often. So, episodes 1 and 2.

Matt: It’s classic cause and effect, isn’t it, Barb?

Barbara: Yep.

Matt: If you just keep putting Band-Aids on, you’re never actually going to get to the root cause of the challenge or the problem.

Barbara: Yeah.

Matt: And that’s what episodes 1 and 2 help you with. They help you understand that if you effectively communicate at the front end, setting things up, it often can reduce the pain moving forward.

Barbara: You know, also just a follow on point from that is if you choose to just avoid … not do episode 1 and 2, and just avoid tough conversation, and fire someone instead, and then hire someone new, I can almost guarantee you that you’ll have the same problem the second time around. You’ll start to go into the same problems with your … because it’s your leadership style now that’s starting to falter because you haven’t been putting … you’re just thinking, “I’ll just hire new people.” That’s how people end up in the hiring and firing situation.

Matt: I agree one hundred percent.

Barbara: Yeah. Then, you’ll keep blaming each person that comes in. Probably is there fault, but it’s really yours at the end of the day.

Matt: Absolutely.

Wrapping things up

Barbara: Yeah, great! As always, guys, if you’re … we would love you to subscribe to the show on iTunes. We’re available, Virtual Success on iTunes. Also, share these shows with anyone you think will benefit because, as I said earlier, like me as a business owner and entrepreneur, I’m benefiting massively myself. I know, Matt, you are from us having chats like this. I know it’s a topic that really nobody’s out there talking enough about, how to deal with these kinds of situations, so share the show.

We’ll be back with more Virtual Success. We’ve got some great interviews coming up, and we’re going to tackle some more difficult case studies that are actually happening. If any of you have got anything that you would love us to tackle on the show, there is the Virtual Success Facebook group. You can join that, and you can suggest topics for shows. We would love to hear about what you want us to talk about on this show. We would happily dissect on the show for you.

Matt: Fantastic. Barb, have a wonderful week.

Barbara: You too.

Matt: I’ll talk to you soon.

Barbara: Okay, see you then. Bye.

Thank you for listening to the Virtual Success Show. If you found this show helpful, take a moment to share it with a friend so that we all grow together. Find out more about the inside scoop in outsourcing success by going to our website, virtualsuccessshow.com. Until next time! Thanks for listening!

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:

03:18 – It’s a two-way street

04:17 – Resistance as a result of fear

06:01 – Client case study – “Please don’t tell my VA, but…”

06:46 – Lose-lose strategy

08:04 – Be clear with your feedback communication

09:48 – It’s not a blame game

11:56 – Be mindful of cultural differences

13:13 – The use of video communication

14:00 – Feedback is more than one conversation

15:55 – Be willing to invest the time up front

17:43 – Some practical steps to put in place

20:03 – See yourselves as a team

21:14 – The mindset for success

22:36 – Being mindful of how you communicate your feedback

23:50 – Make your intentions clear

25:25 – Wrapping things up

Barbara: Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of virtual success, where I’m joined by my fantastically insightful co-host, Matt. How are you, Matt?

Matt: I’m well, Barb, how are you?

Barbara: I say that because every week I just get so many insights from you that I’ve implemented into my business, so I’m stealing tips along the way, as we do these podcasts together.

Matt: I’m writing, “Note to self, think of opening for Barb.”

Barbara: Did I catch you off guard, there?

Matt: My magnificent co-host.

Barbara: Yes, you can use that for the next show.

This is episode two, everyone, in our communication series. So if you haven’t listened to the last episode, where we discussed that we were going to talk about this topic of communication – such a huge topic – that we’ve decided to split it into three shows. This is episode two, where we’re going to deal with how to give effective feedback, with emphasis on the word effective, because giving feedback can be quite a challenging experience, especially when the feedback has negatives in it.

To set this up, really, with communication, it’s a three-part show that we’re doing. In episode one, we discussed how to set up a task for success in the first place, and your communication from day one. It’s really worth listening to that episode, if you haven’t been there yet. Today, obviously, we’re going to be talking about giving effective feedback, and then in episode three, coming up soon, we’re going to talk about how to have the tough conversations which everybody shies away from, naturally but it’s really important to know how to do that effectively.

So Matt, I’m excited about today’s one, yet again.

Matt: Me too. I guess, just to set up today’s show on providing effective feedback, I think, as a business owner, you need to be open to giving effective and constructive feedback, and receiving constructive feedback, as well. As you’re learning the skill of this, it’s really, really important that you understand that it’s vital to business success. I see so many business owners that struggle, and it’s because they have a very closed mindset, and they’re either not open to giving feedback, which is vital for the growth of their people, or receiving feedback, which is vital for the business and their own growth.

This area of communication and feedback is one that I don’t think is spoken enough about in the business community. It would really be one of the rocks of business success.

It’s a two-way street

Barbara: You know, Matt, I think as well … Let’s be honest. I don’t think it’s something that us human beings were naturally drawn to. I think we naturally struggle, and I know I definitely did, anyway. Giving feedback, and even receiving feedback, is something, as an entrepreneur, that I’ve personally struggled with in the past, and I’ve had to learn through multiple experiences of being forced to do it, how to do it in a more effective way, and to see it in a more positive light, that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a horrible conversation, it could actually be a really nurturing, collaborative, and such a great experience, when you learn how to communicate properly in the giving feedback thing. It’s a two-way thing. Obviously, you’re giving feedback to your staff member, but part of giving effective feedback, you have to be able to get feedback from them about their experience of the whole thing, too. That’s what makes it a two-way street, really, which can be hard.

Resistance as a result of fear

Matt: Correct, and in my experience, the resistance to give or receive feedback is often a result of an underlying fear. Actually, an underlying result of two fears. One is, a fear of rejection. People don’t want to feel rejected, and so giving or receiving feedback brings up that fear of rejection. The second one is a fear of not being liked.

Barbara: Yes.

Matt: And so, if I give the feedback, my team member won’t like me, or you know, what will they say about me?

Barbara: Yes, from personal experience, I know that’s my one. The fear of rejection is not one that I have personally felt in the past, but I would definitely have that feeling of … I don’t know if this is a women thing? I know some of the women on the call listening to this will resonate here, but the fear of not being liked. So thinking, I don’t want my VA to go off and tell her friends that her boss is a total bitch. You know that kind of feeling?

You think, I just don’t want her saying that about me, because I don’t want to feel like a bitch. But when you’re irritated with a task not being done, there is a bit of…there is that irritation that comes up, and it’s how you handle the feedback that’s really important, to get right.

I thought, to kick off, as always, I think it’s always really good to have an actual live case study, and the beauty of having this podcast is, I get a lot of actual live case studies that happen for our clients. It happens across the board, we get feedback and we see issues coming up, and we see in the … what’s fascinating is that we see in our feedback forms, or when clients put in support tickets, in the language that they use, we can actually see the fears.

Client case study – “Please don’t tell my VA, but…”

For example, a big thing that we would get would be clients putting in support tickets with a sort of a complaint, but more of a feedback thing on my VA’s doing this, this, and this wrong. I’ve tried to explain … At the end, it’ll say, “Please don’t tell my VA, I really don’t want them to know that I came to you, or complained.”

Our response to that is, “Then what is the use of the …” I’m not sure where they want us to go with that, because really, if we don’t communicate effectively, or help them to mediate that discussion together, then they’re not going to get a resolution at all, and it has just turned into a whinge-fest. That’s honestly what it turns into. That’s really a big problem for us.

Lose-lose strategy

Matt: It’s actually, if you go deeper on this, it’s a lose-lose strategy. The VA loses, because they’re not understanding how they can improve, or how to actually be the valued team member that you’re asking them to be. You lose, because you’re sitting there in a state of frustration and dissatisfaction, and you’re probably having to do the work yourself, where if you had the constructive conversation and gave the feedback, not always, but in most cases, you’ll see improvement.

Barbara: Yes, and you know what’s interesting, I was thinking as you were talking there … I think what happens when they put feedback like that in for our clients, anyway, or support tickets, the bit that comes at the end … it’ll sometimes say, “Oh, and please don’t tell my VA,” and you can see the desperation in the comment. I think what happens is the very act of writing down their frustration, and feeling like they have voiced it, gives them momentary relief from it, so they feel like they don’t need to have that conversation with the VA. But it’s going to keep coming up again and again, because they haven’t … The discussion hasn’t happened. The frustration’s going to come back, if we don’t deal with it in a direct and collaborative way. And yes, the VA has to be involved, because otherwise, we’re not going to get any results.

Be clear with your feedback communication

The other thing, I want to tack on this particular episode, is the situation where sometimes people feel like they’re having the feedback conversation, but it goes something like this. This is an actual live case study, of where I actually spoke, myself, to a client of ours. The client said, “Well, I did give feedback.” I said, “What exactly did you say?” It was to do with a landing page that came back that wasn’t right. She said, “Well, I just told him that it wasn’t right. It’s just not right.”

I said, “Well, what about it was not right?” We unearthed the problem there and then. She couldn’t actually even articulate to me what was not right about it, it just wasn’t right. She said to him look … I just told him, look, let’s forget that one and let’s just move on to another task. Now, there are a whole pile of implications of attacking a conversation in that way, from an emotional standpoint of the person receiving the feedback about their ability, about their worth, about what you think of them. It’s kind of dismissive, and it’s just totally ineffective communication. We’ve got to try and give steps and strategies here for how to communicate, literally almost a script of how to deal with that conversation in a better way.

Matt: I think, back to episode one of these three, that we’re doing here, Barb. In that situation, my recommendation would always be, let’s go back and see how the task was setup, originally.

Barbara: Yes. Most clients don’t want to hear that.

Matt: Part of the coaching that I do, I always say, when you’re pointing the finger at someone else, there’s three fingers often pointing back at the person that you really should be looking at. Which is yourself.

Barbara: Yes.

It’s not a blame game

Matt: You know, it’s not a blame game. At the end of the day, we’re all working together to achieve the same goal. It’s just, we’re going to sit there and go, “Okay, where did this break down? Was the task handed over in an effective manner? Did we follow the system that we know works to set our VA’s up to win?” If you said yes to that, then the next question is, “Okay, where is this breaking down?”

In the landing page example that you’re giving, there Barb, like you said, what specifically wrong with it? If the VA’s not made aware of what specifically is not right, how can they ever improve? How can they get it right?

Barbara: Absolutely. They won’t be able to, because it’s mind-reading.

Matt: Exactly.

Barbara: The feeling with that particular situation was, the feeling of our particular client was, “I just don’t have time for this. I don’t have the time to sit down and give this person feedback.”

I actually said to her, “If you keep with that belief, then you will still be doing it yourself in a years’ time. If that’s the route you want to take, then that’s fine. The investment you make here and now, in getting success here, can pay dividends massively down the track, but it takes you doing this feedback thing.”

Feedback is … the initial stages of giving feedback, anyway, not when something has escalated, are non-blaming, non-accusing, collaborative, but you have to be quite direct. You have to say, in my view, anyway, you have to say, “The results are not really working for me, it’s not quite what I’m needing or wanting, so I want to talk to you about how do we work together to see where the holes are, and what’s happening that we’re not, either we didn’t set the task up correctly, or maybe we haven’t communicated back and forth enough on this, to help make you understand where things are going wrong. Now from my perspective, this little area here, here’s what I would have done, here’s what I was thinking.” That sort of language is very collaborative, it’s not accusing in any way.

Be mindful of cultural differences

Matt: I think, too, particularly if you’ve got virtual systems in the Philippines, they have a high desire to please. So bosses can be very direct with them. Using those few softeners in there, in your language, enhances the feedback, and they actually step up, real quick.

Barbara: They open up more, as well. Let’s talk for a second about the Philippines in particular. Shame is a major, heavy emotion. The Filipino’s feel that quite a lot, and if you … they don’t take criticism so well. They find it difficult, but if it’s done in this way, in my experience, anyway, they light up, because they feel like we’re working together, and that you’re sort of taking your part, and they can take their part openly, rather than getting defensive. If it’s accusing or blaming, they’ll go defensive and shut down. You won’t get out of them what you really need, in my experience, anyway.

Matt: Mine, too.

Barbara: This approach really works really well, and I would encourage the listeners to just think about being direct in this softening language, but without being a wallflower. You can’t blame yourself, because we see clients doing this, too, they blame it all on themselves. It has to be a two-way thing, when you’re in this feedback stage.

The use of video communication

Matt: I’m also going to recommend, here, this is where I think, turning the video camera on. Being able to see someone face to face can be vitally important. I think that, if you can’t … there’s something to be said about being able to read someone’s body language, or response to something. Often, over time, you’ll become more receptive to hearing it in their voices, and the like, but I think, just switch the video on and allow them to see you, because they’re going to see … they might think they hear frustration or anger, or whatever it might be, but in actual fact, when they see your facial expressions, and you see theirs, it’s a totally different meaning you put to the conversation.

So, I think that I would highly recommend using the video when you’re doing this with your virtual team, and you’re giving feedback.

Feedback is more than one conversation

Barbara: Yes, absolutely. Well, that’s definitely how I approach things, also. That would be how I see the initial feedback conversation. After that, you can’t just have that one conversation and then think to yourself after the call, “Okay, well that’s dealt with.” What’s going to happen is, you need to have that feedback conversation, and then over the following couple of weeks, you need to make it very clear to your virtual assistant, say, “Okay, look, over the next couple of weeks, I’d like us to really stay close on this one. I want to get feedback from you along the way. Again, it’s going back to how you should report back to me on how it’s going so that we can get to a point where you feel empowered to do the job, a fantastic job, and I feel relaxed enough to let it go. I want to work with you to get to that point.” That’s really collaborative.

Matt: As you’re saying that, Barbara, if I rewind a little bit to what we were saying before about the landing page incident, where, “I just don’t have the time to do this.”

I’m almost having this premonition of the next conversation client’s having with you is, “I don’t think a VA can work for me”.

Barbara: I’m so glad you said that, because that’s exactly what she said to me. I did have this conversation with a client, and she said, “I just don’t think a VA’s going to work for me.” She mentioned a friend of hers. “Such-and-such told me that Filipino VA’s never work out for her, either.” There was a very strong belief there that she was right. She did use the term there, “I feel like I’m wasting my money.”

You know, very challenging for me to deal with someone who is in this business and sees how the slip between success and failure is so little. It’s like a tweak in the mindset, and the right direction can get you explosive success.

Be willing to invest the time up front

Matt: I think if you hear what Barbara and I are saying, today, and in these episodes, is that whilst a team of VA’s or a VA can speed your success up in your business to new heights, it takes time. You have to invest the time up front to build the relationship, and to enable yourself to delegate and let go. If you’re not willing to invest the time, it won’t matter if it’s the VA, if it’s someone that you employ sitting next to you in the office, if you don’t invest that time, they will fail. They will never be able to do it as well as you will, there will always be a reason, and you’ll end up just keeping on keeping on, and you’ll actually become the bottleneck in your business.

Barbara: Yes, because you’ll go through the hiring and firing cycle, and eventually you’ll end up going back to doing it all yourself, or paying a lot of money to an agency and not even getting any better results, sometimes, because you still haven’t learned how to communicate effectively. The interesting thing about this feedback situation, is this can spiral out of control. Let’s say you’ve tried to give feedback, and it’s been in that useless communication way, because saying something’s not right, or forget it, let’s move on is a very, very negative form of feedback.

Let’s say you do that, and in the next task, you have the same experience, and it fails, and you do that again, what starts to happen is that you get a vicious downward cycle. The person that is working with you, the virtual assistant, starts to feel low about themselves, you start to resent each other, and they can lose respect for you, and you lose respect for them. The relationship is almost … it’s just on a hiding to nothing, at that stage, when you allow that to escalate. I feel, anyway, it’s hard to reign it back in.

Some practical steps to put in place

Matt: I one hundred percent agree. Let’s put some practical steps in place here, that can help everyone in the feedback process.

Step number one, is you need to get clarity on where the process has broken down. What specifically are you unhappy with?

Number two is then … The quote from Steven Covey’s book, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” you need to seek to understand before seeking to be understood”. You need to get clarity on what they did to get to their outcome, because if you don’t understand what your VA did to get to their outcome, you don’t know how to actually refine or tweak it. You’re only actually just looking at the end product, you’re not going back through and going, “This went off the rails, here, and if I help them with this little piece, it will put them on track to where we want to go.”

Third is to understand that you need to slow down in order to speed up. What I mean by that is through the feedback process, you need to go back step-by-step. There may be a retraining phase. There may be something that you actually need to refine in your system, through this process. There may be something that you both need to change in your communication. It could be like we talked about in the first episode, it could be instigating reporting mechanisms, so that you actually pick this up sooner, and can put things on track.

Those are the three steps that I would be recommending. The last one is just, as Barbara was saying before; it’s in the style of communication. You’ve got to sit down, and you’ve got to really be mindful of your language. Take the time to go through this with them, communicate effectively and as I suggested, I’d have the video on for this, because that could be even more effective, and want them to become better. Your mindset has got to be that if I invest a little bit of my time here, with the right person, that will enhance them and help them become better, which, in turn, means the task doesn’t come back to me and it gets done the right way, each time.

See yourselves as a team

Barbara: You know, I’m thinking, to add on to that. Seeing yourselves, even if it’s just you and one VA, see yourselves as a team. The two of you are a team, it’s not them and me. The them and me conversation is very different from a team conversation. Even when you’re having a meeting, it’s, “How are we going to work together to get success so that we can go far together,” rather than, “I’m not happy with what you’re doing, and here’s what you’re doing wrong. You go fix that.” That’s a different mindset to be in, and to see yourselves as a team, even if it’s just you and one VA, is very powerful. It will change the energy of the entire relationship, and your VA will feel that, even if you don’t actually communicate that. They’ll feel that sense of being a part of your team, together.

Matt: I just want to add one last thing to this, and it’s in light of that comment we were just talking about, which is, “A VA won’t work for me.” And I see this, and I’m sure Barb, you see this all the time, that…

Barbara: It doesn’t work for me, it won’t work for my business, it doesn’t won’t work for me.

The mindset for success

Matt: Just to put this into context, I have literally now coached in excess of 1,000 businesses worldwide, I see what works and what doesn’t, and I’ve see VA’s work in every industry that I’ve coached. I’ve coached from building companies to services to manufacturing to … such a broad spectrum of industries, and I’ve seen VA’s work in all of them. The common denominator between success and failure is the owner, manager, or leader’s ability and mindset coming in to making it work. If your mindset is that, this is going to work and I’m going to do whatever it takes to make it work, which means, “You know what, we’re going to make some mistakes along the way, there may be some challenging conversations, and I’ve got to slow down and become better,” it works every time.

But if your expectation is that I’m going to get this person and I’m just going to dump a whole heap of stuff onto them, and they’re just going to know how to do it, and if they don’t, my conclusion is, “It doesn’t work for me”; it won’t work for you.

I just really wanted to emphasize that because it’s so important, this feedback part is really what differentiates, in a lot of ways, success or failure with your VA.

Being mindful of how you communicate your feedback

Barbara: I one hundred percent agree. The mindset is number one, and your ability to communicate effectively is number two. All the other stuff, you can both learn. Tasks, skills, processes, all that sort of thing, you can work on together. The two big things that are hardest to change in yourself are mindset and communication. Those are the things that are really worth working on.

I’ll just finish on this. Like I said before, at the beginning of this episode, it’s not something I feel that I was naturally good at, either. I really had to push outside of my comfort zone, when I started doing this for us to have effective feedback conversations. To be honest, I still don’t really like it. I have to kind of work myself up to it, but it’s about centering myself, feeling like it’s a team conversation, collaboration, and just being open. Trying not to be too business-like. In this conversation, I think you almost need to drop a notch below business-like. Yes, you’ve got to be business-like, but you’ve got to see the nuances of what might be going on in the background.

The video on, watching the body language, is the person overwhelmed? Is there something else going on? All that sort of thing, great cues for you to figure out what’s really going on there.

Make your intentions clear

Matt: To add to that, Barb, what I do with all of our new VA’s in their induction, I actually let them know that through this entire process of the time that we work together, I will be providing feedback, and this is the way that I will do it. At times, whilst I’m moving really, really fast, because we are a fast growing company, that if my communication is fast or a bit direct, and you think it’s rude, please tell me. It’s certainly not my intention. My intention is to be able to provide feedback so that we can both grow. That’s actually part of the opening induction I have with every single person that joins our organization, so that when those conversations happen, they’re not a surprise to them.

Barbara: That’s a great tip. That’s a great idea. That’s a fabulous idea. Set them up for success, and they know what’s coming.

Matt: That’s right. If they don’t like that, then they should actually, probably, leave now.

Barbara: It keeps them on their toes, in a good way. They know what’s coming. As you say, if they don’t like that, they’re going to end up leaving. We’ve had that situation happen in our training program. We’ve had people walk on the second day of training, because of the orientation I do on the first day. I’m like, “Here’s what we expect, and here’s what our clients expect, and if this resonates with you, you’re going to love this company.” Some of them, it doesn’t resonate, and they walk. That’s fine with us, because we say; we’d rather lose them now than lose them … than have problems with clients down the track. Yes, in the induction, definitely a fantastic tip.

Wrapping things up

It really leads us in … Episode three, I think, is going to be a fantastic one, because we’re going to deal with the tough conversation, when something is just spiralling out of control. You’ve tried everything. You’re sort of staring down the barrel of maybe, potentially removing the person, or having, I call it, the “Come to Jesus talk,” which is like, “We’ve talked about this already, we’ve… you know?”

That can be an extremely challenging communication style to get right, and most people will shy away from it and just fire someone, without actually even having a conversation.

Matt: Yes. It’s going to be a great show.

Barbara: We will see you guys on the next show, for that. Be sure as well, make sure you follow us on iTunes, subscribe to the show, and if you find it useful, be sure to share it, because lots of people are struggling with this area of out-sourcing and virtual teams, and even staff delegating in general. We’re giving some great strategies here, to help everyone get success in this area.

Matt: We’d love to hear your stories about feedback that may have gone well, and maybe feedback that didn’t go so well, so that everyone can learn in the community, as well.

Barbara: Yes, that would be fantastic. I would love to hear some of those stories.

Okay, until the show, guys, have a great week, and we’ll see you for Tough Conversations, next episode! Thanks, Matt!

Matt: Thanks, Barb. Talk soon.

Thank you for listening to the Virtual Success Show. If you found this show helpful, take a moment to share it with a friend so that we all grow together. Find out more about the inside scoop in outsourcing success by going to our website, virtualsuccessshow.com. Until next time! Thanks for listening!

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:

02:36 – Communicate effectively

03:14 – “Communication is the response you get”

04:25 – Setting up for success

05:48 – Styles of communication

07:49 – Communicate what failure looks like

11:20 – Slowdown in order to speed up

12:22 – Communication must happen regardless of experience

17:00 – Reporting back

18:14 – Clarify how you want to be communicated with

21:10 – Wrapping things up

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

Matt: I’m well, Barbara. How are you?

Barbara: I’m good, thank you, and excited about today’s show.

Matt: I know. It’s a really interesting and exciting topic we’re going to be talking about today.

Barbara: Absolutely, absolutely, and just for the listeners, we’ve been talking about, Matt and I have had the topic of communication written on our podcast show list for quite some time, and it’s a show we haven’t done yet. And actually today, I was just saying to Matt off-air that I’m really glad we didn’t do it yet, because today we have such a powerful episode for you based on actual live case studies and actual live problems that we are seeing with some of our clients in Virtual Angel Hub, and we’re going to dissect them on this podcast, and actually on a few, we’re going to split this podcast into three episodes, that’s how deep this topic is.

We’re actually going to kick off today with talking about, how do we actually set up for success? How do we make sure that our communication sets up for success with a virtual team?

Then episode two, we’re going to dive into giving effective feedback, with emphasis on the word “effective,” and then in episode three, we’re then going to move on to having the tough conversations, because these, obviously, are the things that can derail us emotionally, can be very challenging to attack, and we’re going to give you some great strategies and tips on how to attack those tough conversations in a constructive way.

Matt: Just to add to what you’re saying, Barbara, I think, for the listeners, I want everyone to understand that, what we’re teaching in these three episodes are relevant to not only your virtual teams but your teams that you may have in your offices or locally as well. These teachings are universal and you need to really understand that communication at all levels in your organization is critically important.

Communicate effectively

Barbara: In fact, actually, I would say, and I know you’ll agree with me here Matt, for me, in what I’ve observed over the last couple of years of dealing with clients, dealing with virtual teams, I would say that your ability to communicate effectively together actually is the difference between success and failure with this. Task lists and processes and all those things are vitally important that we’ve been discussing on this podcast. But your ability to hear each other and to be able to communicate effectively for success definitely can make or break your success in this area and that goes for any staff member, actually, I think.

“Communication is the response you get”

Matt: You know, the best definition I ever heard of communication, was at a seminar years ago and the speaker, I can’t remember their name, would you believe, but they said to me, they said to the group, “Communication is the response you get.” And I think as a framing for these three shows, please keep in mind that communication, we think communication is people’s ability to listen to what we’re saying to them. Communication is the response we get, so it’s our ability to communicate in a language that they understand. I want to frame that right from the beginning because if you take that message right through these three shows, I think you’ll get a lot more from it.

Barbara: Absolutely, I was just thinking Matt, as you were saying this. You could really apply this to marriage as well, to any relationship actually. Really, communication is a tricky one and I think the hardest part is that we all feel like we’re being clear, when often to the other person we’re not being clear or we’re dancing around the communication that we need to have.

Setting up for success

To kick it off, I thought for today’s show I really want to delve into this idea of, step one really with this is setting up for success from minute one. I know we’ve talked a lot about processes and setting up tasks, etc. We’ve talked about the logistics of setting up tasks, the project management systems, the steps, all that sort of thing.

But what about the communication around setting up for success with the task? So I want to just give a little live example of a question we got in our forum from one of our members which was interesting, where she was saying, “I’m not quite getting what I need from my VA in terms of my branding”- so images and landing pages and things like that. She said, “My question is, should I create a video, I’m very specific about my brand and I’m very particular about it. Should I create a video explaining how I feel about my brand and how I want it to look and feel?” For me the obvious answer was, absolutely! Because obviously the implication there is you haven’t had that discussion yet with your staff member, so how would they know, there’s a bit of mind reading there.

I’m going to challenge you Matt, in your experience with coaching people and also managing a lot of virtual teams yourself, how do you feel people should attack this particular setting up for success area?

Communication Styles

Matt: Well, let’s use this example that you’ve given on ‘should I or shouldn’t I create a video around the branding?’ I think it’s really important to understand that there are three key communication styles; you’ve got visual, auditory and kinaesthetic styles of communication. So, if I’m trying to communication through speaking on how I want my brand to look, it’s always going to be a lot harder. But if I can show a video, which shows exactly the do’s and don’ts and how I want things positioned and the like, then the likelihood of the person receiving that video being able to succeed, increases massively. I think choosing the form of communication based on what you’re trying to get across is vitally important. So if something’s very visual, trying to use an auditory way of communicating to somebody is really, really challenging.

Going one step further with video, I think with your virtual teams, I think quite often, people don’t use the video function on Skype enough. Being able to physically see somebody whilst having a conversation, watching their reaction and response, actually ensuring that they’re present also makes a huge difference. All of us know that at times I’m on the phone, I could be doing two other things at once. Whereas having physical presence and actually observing and sitting with someone and seeing them can make a huge difference as well.

So in answer to this first is, with what I’m trying to communicate, is there a visual that’s needed here, is it okay in just an auditory way or is this something that I need somebody to do? If you think about the kinaesthetic piece of it, do I need to provide a quick little template and get them to actually write something as I’m teaching them so they can retain the learning here as well. I think it’s vitally important to understand those three forms of communication.

Communicate what failure looks like

Barbara: Yeah and also, I’m just thinking as you’re talking there, I know in episode three we actually delved into a whole episode on expectations management, where we talked quite a lot about how to set up, how to manage the expectations with your virtual teams or your staff member. One of the things I think I said in that episode was to also ‘communicate what failure looks like’. So, somewhere where I’ve had success myself, because sometimes you do these videos and processes and you still might not get what you’re looking for. Often I go a step further with that and I add a thing to say, “Now if you send back something where this font is not this size or this font, you’re going to upset me. It’s going to be wrong, so my suggestion is don’t do that and here’s the reason why. I’m very particular about my brand for this, this and this reason. For me it’s very, very important that I feel like I can let go of this to you and that you feel empowered to do a great job by yourself. So if there’s any areas at all that are unclear or you’re feeling like you can’t achieve, you need to let me know straight away”. So it’s like, here’s what it looks like but here’s also why it’s so important to get this right and here are the things that can go wrong.

Matt: I think that’s brilliant because, it’s that last part that I think is really, really great and here is how I can see things go wrong.

Barbara: Yes.

Matt: We love to think that every system or process we put together will just ensure a smooth running business, but that’s not reality and the reason that so many people fail to let go is because their people don’t understand the exceptions and how to deal with the exceptions and so, the natural response is, it’s quicker and easier if I just do it myself. Whereas in the communication that you just described to everyone Barb, is that this is why it’s really, really important and these are the points that are critically important and this is where it can go wrong. But it was in the last thing that you said also, which was, “If you feel that you can’t succeed with this, have a conversation with me”, you’ve made it safe for them to go and ask you a question. I think that’s very clever communication, everyone really needs to take note of that.

Barbara: I think where I learnt that actually and this is a good little anecdote for the listeners as well. Where did I learn that? Through trial and error myself, I found that I was being very clear, I had a lot of processes and I know that some of our clients would feel like this. It can cause a bit of frustration because you feel like, yes I’ve done all that but the step that’s missing is to show them where the holes are. Because your experience, you’ve done it yourself many times and I just find where I get the most success is when I say, “Now typically, when you first start doing this task, what happened to me was, I noticed that if I put the fonts here or if I just forgot to pick the right font, I noticed when it shows up on Facebook that it cuts the top off, or whatever”, and you show the actual nuances and especially when you’re on video like you suggested, their eyes light up and go, oh, I see what you mean, oh my god. I can make a mess of this so easily even if I’m following the process and I think that’s key.

Slowdown in order to speed up

Matt: One thing I want all the listeners to understand in what Barbara’s saying is, there’s an element of slowing down in order to speed up here. It’s taking the time to take your VA or your team member through the steps of how you want them to do it, through the steps of where it can go wrong and ensuring that they’ve got a deep level of understanding. When you do this, whilst it’s not guaranteed success, it certainly sets them up for success and enables you to let go a lot easier and I think this is an area where so many business owners bypass because we’re so busy. We’ve got so many things to do, I want to be able to just hand this to someone and they deal with it. You can get them to that point, believe me and it just takes a little bit of time up front in setting them up to succeed, so that when you give them that task, the second, third or fourth time and beyond, they know what’s expected of them, they know how to do it and it just gets done.

Communication must happen regardless of experience

Barbara: You know, what’s interesting as well and I want to add to this too Matt, is just listening to what you were saying, sometimes feedback that we get as well from clients that are new to this or, they often say, “I just don’t have time to train somebody, I don’t have time for this, I want somebody experienced”. Now what’s interesting to me about that is I have had both types of people on my team or I’ve hired people who are experienced and I’ve also hired people who are not experienced where I’ve trained them myself and that sort of thing. But even when somebody is experienced, let’s say, at whatever it is, they’re still not experienced with your business, with your mindset and with how you like things done. Even my experienced people need me to communicate with them in this way initially, in the set up phase of the first, even the first two to three months of working together, until we get our flow together and they sort of see how I like things done and how both our communication styles are working together. I think sometimes people just want to run away from it and say, the person lacks experience. But this is actually not totally to do with experience; communication happens regardless of experience, would be what I think anyway. What are your thoughts there Matt?

Matt: One hundred percent agree! You’ve got to remember back to the first time you did something, how many mistakes you made and understand that in setting them up, what you’re trying to do is bottle up the mistakes you’ve made over a period of time and ensure that they don’t make the same mistakes. But in actual fact, the only way to learn is through mistakes and so the goal is to minimize them and get your people up and running as quick as possible.

Barbara: Yeah and here’s a funny story actually, I want to share this story with everyone because obviously, we come on this podcast and we always sound like we know exactly what we’re doing and we never make these mistakes. But just recently I made a massive mistake with this! One of my most experienced people on my team, someone who, she’s in the Philippines, she’s amazing, she’s like my right had woman and I even ask her for advice, we talk about business and stuff like that. But because she has so much experience with business, I sort of forgot this little step myself and we had an issue the other day where she made a massive mistake and I just was so in my head, so irate about it because I was thinking, she’s so experienced how could she make this mistake?

The reality was, I had just assumed that because she was experienced she would know our process and how to iterate that process and I actually had not sat down with her. I had given her the process, I had not sat down with her and said to her, now if this happens, here’s how to handle it and if this thing happens in this particular process we did have happen to her and I wasn’t available and she didn’t know how to deal with it because I hadn’t, there was no specific process for dealing with this particular iteration that might happen. So it can happen with even the most experienced people, you have to train them, everyone that comes into your business, on how you run it.

Matt: Absolutely. So if I was just to summarize, to give everyone a sequence here on what we’ve been talking about, the first thing is, number one, you want to spend some time with your virtual assistant, setting them up with what you need them to do. When you go through that process you need to emphasize why this is important. The next thing you need to get clear on is when are there milestones or deadlines and then, the next step after that is, where could this go wrong. Not just, don’t just talk about this in a theoretical manner, actually show them. If you do this, it could do this and like Barb was saying with the example about Facebook. And then, I think the last part is then emphasizing that it’s really, really important to understand that you’re very precise with this for these reasons. Like Barbara was talking about earlier and I think if you follow that sequence each time, number one, you’re setting your VA up to succeed, number two, what you’re doing is you’re actually getting greater clarity in your own mind on what it is specifically that you want and thirdly is, you’re now creating a replicable process that ensures that over time this person can do that task for you time and time again.

Reporting back

Barbara: Matt, I’m going to add a fourth step, because I know that we discussed this before. But it is a vital step, the fourth step I feel, and it’s something I’ve implemented more recently, really works. You have to also set up how you want your virtual assistant to report back to you on milestones, progress, roadblocks and results. Because if you don’t set up as part of your process here about setting this task up, you’re telling them but you’re not telling them how you need to be communicated back with because some people love to be communicated with ongoing, updates quite ongoing. I’m one of those people, I want them to give me quick updates in Asana, I like to see it happening.

Others only want an update once a week, but they want a thorough update and they don’t want to hear the problems, you know, if the problem hasn’t been communicated earlier. So, it’s about setting up your communication back and forth then on a task. Once the task has been created for success then the communication on the progress of the task, the milestones and the results of the task is vitally important and I think most people are missing that step.

Clarify how you want to be communicated with

Matt: It’s so true and I think, it’s understanding what’s right for you here, as Barbara was saying. Some people it might be daily updates on where things are at, other people are happy to understand that if this is the deadline, unless we’re off track, I just want to see it get done. It’ll be very, very different, it’s a very personal thing but I think clearly articulating that to your team is vitally important. Because otherwise, if you’re the person that needs daily updates and you’re not getting them, you’re going to get frustrated and if you’re the person that doesn’t want daily updates and that’s what you’re getting, again you’re going to get frustrated.

Barbara: Yeah.

Matt: I think the clarity there will enhance speed and ensure that the relationship strengthens as well.

Barbara: Now we have had feedback from some clients who have, not complaints but feedback, saying just results, I’m not getting the feedback and when we’ve approached the VA to discuss it, sometimes it’s so fascinating, sometimes some of the VA’s will say, “But she’s really busy and I don’t want to be hammering her all day with Skype messages”. Some of them also try and sort it out by themselves, they don’t want to be bothering the client, and I’ve said to them, but maybe your client wants to be bothered, have you asked them. Because you guys haven’t had this conversation about, for me in my business I’m actually available all day on Skype. I’m occasionally on podcasts and calls, but typically I’m at my desk and building systems and things like that, so they can ping me on Skype. Other people might be in meetings all day long and they don’t want to be pinged on Skype all day because they don’t have time. So it’s about setting those boundaries with each other, around the communication channels.

Matt: I can give a differing view there as well because I’m the opposite, I’m probably more unavailable than I am available to my team.

Barbara: Yeah.

Matt: So we’ve set up various Slack channels, I’ll jump on Slack a couple of times a day and see what’s happening there. But what I’ve set up with my team is what I call the Bat Signal, which is if somethings urgent and I’ve defined urgent to them as well, they send me an SMS. They’ve all got access to be able to SMS, all my team, all around the world and they know that if they need a quick response from me on something they’ll SMS me because that’s where I’ll probably pick it up first. They’ve got to give me some clear communication, if they abuse that Bat Signal they’ll hear about it as well. It’s really important that you set up what is urgent and what can wait. But they’ve got that ability to enable them to keep moving on task as well as getting input from me where they feel they need to.

Barbara: And not feeling afraid to contact you. They know the context within which they can contact you and when not to, when they have to deal with it themselves, that’s great. I love the Bat Signal, that’s fantastic, I might implement that myself. The Bat Signal.

Wrapping things up

Matt: I think in summary, if you just look at this, on the first of three podcasts that are around communication, it’s vitally important that you set your VA up for success on tasks. It’s vitally important that you understand that one form of communication is not going to fit every single met task or what’s going on and I think that, the last thing is, you need to make sure that you get clarity on how they are going to report to you so that the flow of work can continue and each person on both sides, you and your VA, feel that they’re getting what they need to move things forward.

Barbara: Yeah, that’s great and really sets us up now for episode two of this podcast, where we’re going to deal with, let’s say assuming you’ve done this step, let’s say it’s still not working, then the next challenge is how do you give effective feedback so that you still continue to get success and we’re going to deal with that in the next show.

Make sure you guys tune back in for episode two of this really important topic, it’s really going to help you a lot with any of your staff, be they virtual or in the office with you.

Matt, we’ll get ready for the next show and listeners be sure to follow us on iTunes, you can subscribe to the show and if you’re finding this show is helping you then please do share this show, because we’re really sharing some vital tips that people are missing here when it comes to virtual teams in particular, so we would love you to share the show far and wide.

Matt: Fantastic, have a great day Barb and we’ll get ready for the next episode.

Barbara: Thanks Matt, bye.

Matt: Bye.

Thank you for listening to the Virtual Success Show. If you found this show helpful, take a moment to share it with a friend so that we all grow together. Find out more about the inside scoop in outsourcing success by going to our website, virtualsuccessshow.com. Until next time! Thanks for listening!

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:

01:46 – Key team players

04:34 – Part-time vs. Full-time vs. Project-based

05:25 – Advantages of virtual teams over local teams

07:30 – Challenges of working across time zones

11:40 – ‘The Hurdle’

12:30 – Getting over ‘The Hurdle’

14:43 – So I have a VA, now what?

16:40 – Good relationships

17:33 – How proactive should my VA be?

19:56 – The art of communication

21:39 – The more you grow, the better people you need

22:52 – Wrapping things up

Matt: Welcome to this episode of the Virtual Success Show. I’m really excited to be sharing and talking with Siimon Reynolds today but before we introduce Siimon, hey Barb how are you going?

Barbara: I’m great Matt, thank you very much. Delighted and excited about this show to hear Siimon’s great insights into virtual teams.

Matt: Fantastic, and so welcome, Siimon, to today’s show!

Siimon: It’s great to be here!

Matt: Fantastic! Siimon and I, we work closely together at The Fortune Institute and I met Siimon back in 2008 and I think at that time you just moved from Australia to United States, Siimon is that correct?

Siimon: Yeah absolutely! I’m there now, here in almost always sunny, Los Angeles.

Matt: Fantastic! What amazed me at the time when we met – that time when we met you were coaching me – was that you were running your coaching business, you were living in the US and yet you had a team here in Australia doing a lot of the coordinating and the like for you. So, I guess what we want to share with everybody today was your experiences with virtual teams and using virtual staff for many functions within your businesses and your experiences with that. So if we could start with just sharing who you’ve got on your team, or your virtual team, and what sort of key roles that they play or task that they do for you.

Key team players

Siimon: Yes sure! Well, look I have a virtual assistant and have had for many years in Australia and she’s responsible for doing a whole lot of stuff, she sets meetings for me, she actually handles a lot of my finances, you know so she pays bills that are needed, all that kind of stuff. I use her also for research, so that could be work research or ‘Can you search for a company that does XY and Z?’, or I even use her for things like holidays, so if I want to go to Italy, I don’t search through for the best hotels in Milan, I say I want a hotel like this within these parameters in Milan, can you present me three good examples of that.’ So that’s incredibly useful and an amazing way to slice off time and I’ll even use her to slice off a minute, numerous times a week, so for instance, if I have or someone wants an appointment with me, I’ll just send it through to her and even though that may only take her one or two or three minutes to actually get in to the diary that’s just one less task I have to do. I use her for super short tasks, I use her for personal and business tasks and I use her for some financial tasks, and in addition to that, I have a sales person in another part of California and through some of my work in America coaching, I have a closer.

So the clients would find about me on the internet and eventually they go through a webinar system and eventually they will get on a call with the sales person and so that’s entirely virtual. I have had one lunch with him at his request, he wanted to actually see if I existed or if I was you know an alien life force. And so we had a physical lunch and since then I haven’t seen him. And then thirdly I have someone in the Philippines who does all my graphic design and my slides for presentations, if I want some kind of brochure done, who would do that, if I need to go logo done, who would do that. So they’re the three people that I’m working with. Now, Matt you and I work together in a whole different company where we use a whole series of virtual assistants for design, for InfusionSoft, the back end CRM systems etc.

Part-time vs. Full-time vs. Project-based

Matt: Yep! And with the 3 key people you mentioned there being your assistant, the sales person you’ve got and the designer, are they all full-time? Are they part-time? Or are they on project basis?

Siimon: Yeah, all project basis. None full-time! So my assistant works on average between 4 or 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. My art person in the Philippines could work as little as zero hours to, on the upside, might work on a big week, might work 15 hours for me and then the sales person probably does average of a day a week, so he’s very much doing sales for other people as well.

Advantages of virtual teams over local teams

Matt: Fantastic! And why have you chosen to use virtual teams for these roles Siimon rather than say, having people locally that you can have access to within your office or the like.

Siimon: It’s definitely cheaper, there’s no doubt about it! And it’s really interesting to see the very high quality of people who are virtual assistants. Better and better some of the Asian countries are just improving in leaps and bounds as it becomes a more established career for some to be a virtual assistant. But even in America, you find that there are a number of States, Arizona being one of them, where you can find very inexpensive and good Americans doing virtual assistance, assistant work as well, so clearly price. But too, a huge advantage of virtual assistance is the time. So plenty of times, if I’m up against a deadline, if I was to rely on someone in my own time sphere then I’d probably be paying a fortune for someone to work overnight. But I can just switch to another country and get somebody to start working on something while I sleep and I do that frequently, particularly with the art guy, I’ll wake up in the morning and there will be 7 or 8 hours work done by him, or even with Tania my assistant for my day to day secretarial stuff, she’ll frequently do stuff while I’d be asleep.

So, the advantage is your 24/7 operation and the cycle of getting work done is much shorter. And then finally it’s the fact that they’re not on full time you know. I know that’s often the primary reason that someone chooses a virtual assistant that you can just outsource when you need them but it’s just one of many reasons for using them in my opinion.

Challenges of working across time zones

Matt: Just on the time zone shift, particularly with Tania your assistant, are there ever any challenges when you’re across, you know, such a wide gap in the time difference?

Siimon: Yeah that’s a good question! Plenty of challenges, half the time I’m in the west coast of America, she’s in Sydney in Australia, so the time difference, in effect, even though its a different day, so it’s technically 17-hours difference, how it manifests is there’s either a 5- or 7-hour difference depending on what country has daylight savings at one point in time. And plenty of times it works, that I’ve stopped work and she’s still working but on the other hand in the mornings, she’s not there so she’s doesn’t come on until about my 2pm typically for most of the year and sometimes she doesn’t come on until 3 or 4 pm, once again depending on each country starts its daylight savings or stops daylight savings. When there is a 7-hour difference that’s tough. So for me, unless you just want them to work at night, if you want to liaise with them during the day, you want to keep, you have the difference somewhat relevant. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

If I was really going into virtual assistance in great depth, I’d probably have them, I’d have them standing by but not on retainer so it’s not costing me. I’d have one or two standing by in other countries so, including my own, America where I am now, so if I needed work done at any point in time, I have someone. Now I haven’t organized that yet but I think it’s a potential for me is to have someone that I trust in several different areas, secretarial or admin, in art, possibly in sales but probably not necessary and they’re sitting around the world and 24-hours a day if I need them, they’re ready. That’s the ultimate for me and not having that can be a disadvantage.

Matt: Fantastic! All your assistants work from home?

Siimon: Yeah! Yeah, they do and you know an interesting thing again here is, that you’re getting often a better person because they don’t want to work in an office. Here’s an interesting stat, around 60%, 60% of IBMs staff worldwide are now outsourced. So obviously it’s a giant complex organization doing complex activities and complex products. So that’s absolutely extraordinary! Now, why are they doing that? Part of the reason is they can attract high caliber people with the promise of working at home and so this is another reason that the virtual workforce is going to grow and grow. A lot of people say, ‘You know what, I’d like to come in at lunch time and cuddle my child!’ I don’t just want to see them for a brief period in the beginning of the day and in the end or even only one of those. And so for the sheer calibre of people it’s a very attractive position as IBM have found out.

Matt: Certainly I think having had people work from home and from a workspace as well, I tend to find both work, like you said, it comes to the person. As long as the person is happy with wherever they’re working and their environment, it works! For some, I’ve had assistants were working from home just doesn’t work for them, they’re not set up properly, their environment doesn’t support it or it’s too noisy or whatever it might be but on the other hand, some of them wouldn’t have it any other way. So I think it’s an interesting point. Barbara, do you have any other questions for Siimon?

‘The Hurdle’

Barbara: I do! Actually yes, Siimon I’ve got a very interesting one for you. I would love to know your thoughts on this one. I’m sure you hear this a lot as well. I mean, you deal with entrepreneurs all the time, coaching programs, you’ve privately coached lots of people. What about the hurdle? And I call it a hurdle because it is a big hurdle for people to get over. Early stage entrepreneurs or the solopreneur type person who is currently doing everything themselves, I hear a lot of people say, ‘It doesn’t work for me!’, ‘I can’t get virtual assistance, the whole virtual team thing to work.’ And they just to run back to doing everything themselves. What advice would you give to people who are at that sort of juncture where they can’t really grow unless they get a team but they just have this fear and this thing holding them back that it won’t work for them.

Getting over ‘The Hurdle’

Siimon: Well, there’s 2 types of virtual assistants as far as I can see that you can get. The first is that you deal with them direct and then the second is you use a company that manages them and has pre-selected them. And I would definitely recommend that option for that style of person and in fact for most people who seek a virtual assistant. It may be, not always, but it may be slightly more expensive to have an in-between manager but what happens is you’re very sure of the quality of the person, you’re very sure of the management of the person and the efficiency of the person and it’s an easier process to first step into having a virtual assistant to work with an organization like that. So I’d ask them, I guess I suggest to them, to do a little bit of research, go and check out some of these people who manage and procure on your behalf, high-quality virtual assistants because that makes it easier, so a lot of the problems of ‘how am I going to run it?’ or ‘I don’t know how I can do this’, or ‘I’m not very digitally oriented’, etc. they are all very real problems, most of them are mitigated by using a kind of a middle man to help sort it out and be a lot easier. And then the second thing I’d say is this, like anything on the planet that’s of value, study it. Say, ‘Okay I’m going to spend two or three weeks, I’m going to spend an hour studying the world of virtual assistants and I’m going to look online, we’ll look at the pros and we’ll look at the cons and we’ll look on how to run them.’

All of these are free blogs around the place, free pieces of advice. You know you spend three hours studying the area, it really gives you a lot more confidence. You got to forums etc. online forums it gives you a lot more confidence because you’ll know a) its viable; b) it’s possible for someone who is unskilled in the virtual world to enter this field; and c) give people confidence that there’s a lot of people who are making this work and there’s a good chance it can work for them.

So I have a VA, now what?

Barbara: And a follow on question from that then would be, because the other problem that I’ve been seeing with a lot of clients of ours would be that’s sort of the first problem and then once we solve for that problem around the management and giving comfort around how the person is manage etc. it comes down to now you have a VA, let’s say for example, and all the HR side of it is managed etc. but then a lot of it boils down to your ability to create your own processes and the systems and how your business operates and what this VA is actually going to be doing for you. So how much weight would you place on people getting very clear around their processes etc. so that they can get success with their VA?

Siimon: Well, I think you know, that’s a really valid point. It’s not just set and forget, it’s not that they’re magical and, you know, you just throw it all over to them. It’s no different from having a real life person in your office. They’re going to run a lot better when they’re given processes. When there’s a system of checking up on them. You know, I was only coaching someone yesterday and they just instituted a system on checking up on their stuff every couple of days as to whether they’ve actually done the stuff they said they were going to do and it’s made a massive difference to their quality. So if that’s the case in real life, it must be even more so in the virtual world when they’re not in front of you and you know it’s a great point because developing these processes is not just going to make them more effective virtual assistant, it’s going to make your business a much better business anyway, instead of you just winging it and being able to get away with it, because the person happens to sit across from you in the office. These kinds of disciplines should be done for real world offices and virtual offices but certainly doing it for virtual offices is a great way in improving the smoothness of operations.

Good relationships

Barbara: Yeah, we see that a lot. The people who do really well, in our experience any way, are those who really focus on their processes and actually having good relationships, developing that rapport with the VA and actually discussing their business vision, the strategy and how those processes link in and how that VA actually, what part they play I guess in the whole thing.

Siimon: Yeah! You know, again a good point. A lot of people might say, you know, treat these people because they can’t see them as much, that they’re not holistic humans, of course, and that’s you know, ridiculous. Winning them over, winning their hearts over towards your company and towards you is fundamentally the issue and just because someone’s virtual doesn’t mean the fundamentals of leadership don’t apply.

How proactive should a VA be?

Barbara: I’m sorry Matt, I have just one more question, another follow on point is that sometimes people, what I hear anyway and this is the frustration I guess from clients who are not getting success, sometimes the feedback I would get is, ‘Oh they’re not proactive enough!’ and I sort of feel well, you know, with a virtual assistant, for example, how proactive should we expect them to be or are we… where does the line go between an implementer and a strategist, I’m interested to know your thoughts there!

Siimon: Well it depends on the manner in which they’re employed. You know, if someone’s employed on an ad hoc basis versus you would have to of course be completely proactive in briefing them, whereas if someone’s booked for a certain number of hours a week then yes, the virtual person ideally would be a little proactive themselves. But, you know, what do people want for their money? You know, you’ve got someone really keen, you’ve got someone who understands the task, you’ve got them usually incredibly inexpensively versus many other alternatives. If the owner of the business has to do a little more pushing, has to do a little more leadership, has to do a little more planning, well that’s a small price to pay for all the other advantages.

Barbara: Great!

The art of communication

Matt: Siimon I’ve got these two quick questions! Just specifically with regards to Tanya your virtual assistant, like your secretary. How often do you meet face to face with Tanya?

Siimon: Well, each time I fly to Australia. We try, not always, we try to have lunch for an hour and a half and I think that’s good for the relationship. I don’t think by any means it’s necessary. I think it’s good but not necessary, so if we can’t then so be it. I don’t think you have to meet them but you know after you have lunch with someone, you always feel a little closer to them as long as you’ve enjoyed the lunch and I think it’s worth a lot, they feel more loyalty towards you, there’s a better bond, you feel more comfortable talking to them from a great distance, so definitely worth that.

Matt: And then just a follow on from that, how often do you, the both of you communicate week to week?

Siimon: Not enough, I’m pretty bad on that so we’re communicating by email every day and we’ve tried to initiate 10 minute phone calls 3 times a week and often you know we’ll extend to 20, 25 minutes but we started putting short phone calls in the diary to make sure we at least spoke to each other a few times during the week and most of the time I stick with that but it’s something that I’m not being as good as I should and the danger of that if you just constantly emailing people is you begin to be a little disconnected, I mean I’m fine with it but often people and she’s a case in point, she might feel you know a little like she’s sitting on a deserted island. So, yeah I think it’s important to have regular calls and I think it’s important to have them diarized. You can add them, add ad hoc ones to it but definitely have a series, a base series of foundation meetings locked in the diary and that helps, you know, keep the systems smooth.

Matt: Fantastic! Barbara are there any questions that you had for Siimon?

Barbara: I just have one sort of wrap up little question that I’d love to throw out at Siimon and I know what the answers going to be but I think for the listeners it will be good to have this one. Siimon in your view, you know you’ve grown many companies yourself massively, you’ve coached a lot of companies into massive success. Can you grow a company all by yourself?

Siimon: Well, it depends what size!

The more you grow, the better people you need

Barbara: Ok, let me ask the question in a different way. Without you know, once initially in a startup we we’re all after-sales, it’s all about sales and marketing but then when we start to grow you know without systems, processes and teams, can you create the sort of entrepreneurial freedom that everyone is after and grow an epically large company? How difficult is it to do it by yourself?

Siimon: Clearly its…impossible, you will need to have an incredibly automated digital business to be able to do it. Sure you need people and you know, the more you grow, the more you need people to the point where, you know, a guy I used to be in business with used to say to me, he said his main job is to make himself redundant and he was always looking to do that and sure enough you know when we had a company that was worth of over a half a billion dollars, he used to sit in his office and I don’t think he had that much to do. He had truly made himself redundant so that’s the aim but you’re only going to do that through good people, and as you say through good processes and finally through fair remuneration.

Wrapping things up

Barbara: Great! Thank you so much for the fantastic insights into how you do it. I know the listeners can benefit a lot from some of the insights today.

Matt: Fantastic!

Siimon: Well, thank you! I appreciate being here.

Matt: Fantastic! Thanks Siimon and that’s our show for today. Be sure to continue to listen, add any comments or questions underneath and we’re looking forward to continuing to bring you these amazing interviews and insights into the world of virtual success. Thanks Barb for your time and I look forward to our next episode.

Barbara: Yeah, thanks, Matt. Thanks guys!

Matt: Thanks, Siimon!

Siimon: Thanks!

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.

01:16 – Project background

03:05 – The right person for the role

03:30 – A clear project plan

05:55 – Clearly defining roles within the project team

10:06 – Different people have different skill sets

10:46 – Investing the time upfront to get it right

15:00 – Setting clearly defined project roles

16:55 – Don’t make assumptions…

17:15 – Have clear project milestones

18:52 – Don’t just have a deadline, have check-in points as well

21:19 – Driving the strategy

24:55 – Dealing with project curve balls

27:36 – Being a leader

29:27 – How to be a GREAT leader

34:57 – Wrapping things up

Matt: Good morning everyone! Excited to be here for today’s episode of the Virtual Success Show. Good morning Barbara!

Barbara: Hi Matt! How’s it going?

Matt: Going well and yourself?

Barbara: Great! Thank you, good week again.

Matt: Yes, another great week and so many great things happening. Which leads me to what I want to really focus on in today’s podcast was around an event that we, that I put on recently and how we utilized our virtual team to pretty much do the majority of the organization and setting up of the event.

Barbara: I’m so excited to talk about this topic because you know obviously, I have had a lot of experience, I have big virtual teams myself now but I haven’t put on an event yet so I’m very keen to pick your brains on how you interacted with the team and how you, because you pretty much offloaded most of the setting up of this event, didn’t you, to the virtual team.

Matt: Actually all of it! It was unbelievable, so I’ll start with how this whole thing came about and then we can go from there

Barbara: Yeah!

Matt: Like many of us, I was sitting around and came out with this concept for this event that I wanted to host. Locally, in my local area. I live in the Sutherland Shire and I thought ‘I’ve never done an event for a local business community’. I want to put something on for the local business community and as I said, I had one of those moments, light bulb, sounds great, how am I going to do it? So, I went to my whiteboard and literally white boarded up the whole event. We need a venue, we need landing pages, we need payment pages, we need marketing, all the aspects that we needed. And I looked at it and I went ‘Oh my goodness, how is all of this going to get done?!’ I set myself with this ridiculous timeline; I came up with the idea in late September and with the intension of doing this in the middle of November, so I literally gave myself 6 weeks to do this event. And then I started to think about, well who could do aspects of this? Who could do this part? Who could do that part? And that’s where I’m like, I’ve got this amazing team of people around me but there were some gaps and so I think the first thing I did was get clarity on what the whole thing needed to like and then who needed to be a part of it. And I just happened to see my sister that day who, she’s on maternity leave at the moment with her second child, and she used to be in events and I said to her ‘Do you want to make a little bit of extra money?’. She said ‘What do you mean?’ and I said, ‘Do you want to work from home and coordinate the organization of my event for me?’ and she said, ‘Yes sounds great!’, do you know what I mean?

Barbara: Family member though, that’s key! That’s great, someone you trust. What I’m thinking there is you know, putting on an event I mean, maybe just for me because I don’t do events yet but, putting on an event feels like such a quite stressful thing, you know it’s a pretty big thing to do so to have someone I guess who had a background in events who could maybe coordinate with you is very handy to get things started.

Matt: That was the key, more so than probably being a family was that she had the expertise so I didn’t have to hold her hand through the process. So I literally, what I did was, I took a photo of my whiteboard and I did a video, I took the photo, put it up and did a Camtasia video talking through the whiteboard and what I’d done and how I wanted the event to be, how I wanted it to look, feel etc. and that video was probably 8 minutes and I sent that to Rose and that was what she based everything that she needed to do it from, was that 8-minute video.

Barbara: And that’s key I think because a lot of people will create plans. You know or I mean even a whiteboard plan is pretty good, it’s a pretty good start but to actually put context around it because sometimes what I see people doing, and I’ve probably done this myself you know, you create a process, or you create a map of what you want something to look like, like a product launch or something but without your voice and putting context around what you mean and what you know want to portray, a lot of it gets lost in translation, a lot gets lost without the translation I guess.

Matt: Correct, correct! And you know what, I think for that particular role, it was essential that it was someone local, someone that could converse directly with everyone they needed to, you know, here in Australia. And I think choosing the person to take up specific roles, you need to look at what are they going to be doing. I needed someone in that role that could take quick instruction, who I didn’t need to necessarily walk through everything in a really slow and methodical manner, I needed to give her a high level overview and then enable her to do what she does.

Barbara: And then did you connect her and I’m assuming the next step and I’m probably jumping ahead here but you obviously have a big team, I mean you’ve got a virtual stuff in the Philippines, you’ve got people in Australia, you know you’ve got people in The States. Did you then give her the list of who’s on your team and who you felt would perform what role? Talk to me about the next steps, the team that you put in place?

Matt: Yeah, so the next step was exactly what you mentioned. What I did was, I not only gave Rose all the contacts she needed, but I then introduced her to each of them and positioned her in what her role was with this project so all of them knew she was heading the project up.

Barbara: Oh, that’s key I was about to ask that because there’s a level of, what I see people doing and I’ve seen people doing this with events as well, is they decide they want to put an event on, it might a be small or could even just be a webinar to be honest, and then they’re just flaying about their VA in the Philippines and expect them to be able to coordinate and make it all perfect without much sort of leadership I guess, we’re still leading the concept and putting all the pieces of the puzzle in place in terms of the team and deciding who’s responsible for what bit … I think that’s something a lot of people miss and I don’t know whether you see this happening, but I see people forgetting about the leadership position that you have to take even when you have a virtual team.

Matt: Correct, you know I mean the natural person that this could have gone to would have been Vanessa, my personal assistant, but the reality is as talented as Vanessa is, it still needed someone with the event expertise to be able to see it through because there’s specific questions that needed to be asked. Specific questions around the hotels, the room size etc, etc, etc. So what I did was, I sent Rose the video, she watched it and then firstly I connected Vanessa with Rose because Vanessa, being my assistant, needed to know what was going on. She needed to be across what my aspects of this were and what Vanessa did, I sent Vanessa the same video I sent to Rose asking her to get all the tasks that I mentioned and put them into Asana.

Barbara: So she was very clear because this is the other thing, it wasn’t just connecting Vanessa and Rose, it was also making sure that Vanessa’s very clear on what role she plays in this bigger project because when there’s teams involved in a project what I see happening and going wrong is each member of the team doesn’t really know what particular job or role they’re playing and then you end up in a situation where someone says, ‘Oh but I thought she was doing it.’ Or ‘I thought they were doing it’ and nothing happens.

Matt: And that’s the beauty of getting into Asana as well and so once it got to Asana, there were still some gaps as to who’d been assigned certain things. So there was, outside of Rose and Vanessa, then I’ve got Alex who helps me with my slide preparation and Alex is a virtual assistant who lives in Romania and I’ve been working with Alex for probably about 3 years now and I met him through eLance and so I’ve been testing different suppliers through eLance. We’ve done a few projects together and he’d done a great job that’s where at that point a few years ago I’d said, I’d like to keep feeding you work, let’s come up with a pre-negotiated price and delivery time. So on slide decks of 100 slides or less it’s 48 cents a slide and there’s a 48-hour turn around. And I supply Alex with, I’ll either supply him with a wire frame PowerPoint which just has literally topics in each slide or I will provide him with a mind map with each branch of the mind map being a slide in the slide deck. He understands the style that I like and the sort of template that we use and he turns it around.

Barbara: Now I want you to stop there for a second because I find, I have so many interesting things to say here. What I love firstly is that you’ve got different members of the team and you’re recognizing the different people have different skill sets and you’re not expecting your VA Vanessa, your personal assistant to be a jack of all trades and brilliant at everything. So Alex is obviously a specialist in building slides and presentation slide decks however you’ve, by the sound of it, still spent a lot of time with Alex making sure that he understands your style. How long did that take?

Matt: I think probably 2 or 3 projects initially.

Barbara: Yeah, so he didn’t get right on project one. I mean it’s difficult because obviously I see a lot of people getting tripped up in this area, when it comes to slides or images for some social media. They throw hands in the air the minute the first image isn’t perfect and I sort of think, well really things that are subjective take a lot of working together, feedback, trial and error and not just assuming the other person is stupid and can’t understand your brand. It doesn’t matter who they are, even designers in Australia will take time to understand what’s in your head and what you like and that takes work.

Matt: What I found is with the mind map again I do a quick audio that goes with it, and if I rush that initially upfront then there are a lot of revisions. If I take the time to explain the presentation, the essence of it, go through quickly each slide and what the context of the slide is often now on a hundred slides slide deck there is probably less than 10 slides that I’ll need images revised, so less than 10% and he turns that around in 48-hours with unlimited revisions. But I think the important thing to note though Barb, is that I’m paying 48 cents per slide, so I’m paying less than $50 for a task that would probably take me personally two days to do.

Barbara: Yeah!

Matt: And so if it doesn’t come back right the first time or the second time or the third time, it’s still saving me so much time and money. It’s just, you’ve got to put it in the right context of what’s going on here.

Barbara: What I think there as well, I am probably laboring this point too much because I see people getting tripped up so badly in this area. You know, you’re at that point now where you go back with 10 per cent of the slides maybe needing revisions but on the first project you did, how did that one go? You would’ve spend time with him.

Matt: Yeah, correct! I think the first one, that long ago but let’s say that there was 30 or 40 percent back then but the thing was and this is why I chose him as my preferred supplier was that he got it quickly. I’ve worked with other suppliers before and they did an okay job but he really wanted to get it right. He was really open to getting it right and he was the first person that actually wanted to have a conversation with me via Skype so there was a lot of positives hence for me personally, investing the time to get it right has paid off tenfold.

Barbara: Well that’s the thing and that’s the key point, the thing you just said there. Investing the time initially upfront has paid off tenfold. Honestly that’s happened to me as well; I mean I have had to invest time in all of my team you know. Even at times when I really didn’t have the time, but it pays off so massively in the end but it may take a few months for that to pay off, it could take a year for it to really pay off but it is so worth the time investment at the time and I see people not wanting to make that initial time investment. What I hear people saying to me are things like, ‘I just don’t have time!’, and ‘I don’t have time to talk to them. I wanted them to do it straightaway.’ And I know nobody really and again let’s be honest you’re paying cents on the dollar or whatever. You’re getting someone for $8 to $9 an hour like what we do through Virtual Angel Hub you know really I’m not saying that you get what you pay for but you have to invest some time initially to get the returns that you want, and you will.

Matt: And it’s irrelevant whether you’re paying $8 or $80 but you still have to invest the time.

Barbara: You have to invest the time. I’ve worked with strategists out there… I’ve worked with designers in Australia that cost me an absolute fortune but honestly I felt like it would’ve been easier to do it myself because it took them so long to get what I wanted. It’s just the nature of working with people I think in any industry.

Matt: Correct!

Barbara: Okay, so I’ve probably labored on that one too long!

Matt: No,

Barbara: So you got Alex going with the slides, Rose was project managing, Vanessa was managing Asana and making sure all the tasks were assigned and kept moving.

Matt: Correct, yeah and so it was the end of September and I took a week off and I had set Rose up before I went away and by the time I got back within a week, I had a short list of two venues, I had an appointment in my diary to brief the copywriter, I had a sketch up like a wireframe of the landing page, and all this was in a week while I was off in Hamilton Island enjoying a family holiday. And that’s the beauty of it, I can do all of that and have it happening. I got back, I chose a venue and that was sorted. The copywriter interviewed me about the event, he then went off and did his piece. I briefed Alex after I got back so he was working on the presentation and then the gap was how are we going to fill the room, we need to put 30 people in the room.

Barbara: I want you to pause there just for one second, because I am very interested in the week-long holiday that you had and I have a couple of questions that I think are key questions that the listeners are going to miss a couple of things here potentially because I see people missing this. Before you on holiday, how did you set them all up to know what your expectation was for results when you came back? So did you say, ‘Look Rose, I need to have, you know by the time I come back, I want to have a list of venues minimum 2.’, ‘Vanessa I need to…’ you know how did you set that up or did they just intuitively know what to have done by the time you got back?

Matt: It was all in Asana!

Barbara: So you were leading that weren’t you; you set them up for success? Because I see a lot of people expecting that in their head but not leading that and just going, ‘Oh well I assumed that she would know by the time I got back that she would do this, this and this.’ And I think assumptions are very dangerous.

Matt: Absolutely, Rose knew that on the Tuesday after I got back we were going to have a phone call and that she needed to present to me the venues.

Barbara: I love that because we talked on this podcast before, I think it was our first show. You mentioned something that just so key. There’s a difference between having a meeting and having a chitchat so like, you had organized a meeting with Rose for the Tuesday when you came back and there was a very clear agenda as to what was going to be talked about and what she had to present to you, so you had set that up before.

Matt: Absolutely! It was the same with Vanessa, that was before I went away. They were the two keys that needed to happen and sorry the third person that needed to be involved was, the meeting needed to be setup with the copywriter. So that had to be done, otherwise we wouldn’t have got the event ready in time.

Barbara: So I just love there though you know, that although you weren’t doing any of the work yourself and you had somebody project managing it, it was Rose, you were still leading the project in terms of what success looks like and what are the milestones that we need to, the actual milestones that we need to check-in and what needs to be done. What your expectations are.

Matt: And I think, for the listeners in any task whether it’s a project like this that you’re putting together or just a daily or weekly task, everything that you setup with your Virtual Assistants needs to have a clear deadline and a clear description of what success looks like.

Barbara: Absolutely and I would even add to that, I say to people, ‘Don’t just even have a deadline, have a check-in point as well. If it’s a very big project, you want to make sure that if the deadline is four weeks from today then you don’t want to be catching up with your VA for an update the day before the deadline or on the deadline and expecting you know you just want to rock up and it’s all done. I mean you probably need to be having milestone meetings as well during those four weeks to check in on, you know, are there issues? Do you need my help with something? Are there road blocks? Are there people not getting back to you?’ You know things like that, that can really derail projects and I see people just setting deadlines and then coming back on the deadline date and then going, ‘Okay so what’s the deal?’ and I think really if you’re going to be a leader, you need to have milestones where you’re checking in. Oversight.

Matt: Correct! So then from there where we went was, I was interviewed by the copywriter so I spent 20 minutes with him and then again clear deadlines set on when I would have the draft copy, the venue was set and then as I said we just needed to start putting some marketing in place. I wrote three emails that we were going to send to our database as well as our LinkedIn and we wanted to just target local businesses. So we also had a strategy for, I had a list of acquaintances and colleagues that I have worked with over the years in the local area and reached out to them to help me market this project. I wrote the emails, Vanessa executed and sent all of that.

Barbara: Okay so I’ve got a question here, two questions, which I think are interesting to just pause on for a second. First of all, I’m assuming that everybody involved in this project was invited to the Asana project so everyone could collaborate together in Asana or…

Matt: Correct!

Barbara: And then who was and I’m assuming that it was probably you; you know you said that you wrote the emails and then we targeted people in my LinkedIn etc, etc etc. but you set those tasks up, yeah? And how to do them and then Vanessa executed them, would that be right?

Matt: Correct!

Barbara: Yep! So you were still driving the strategy behind that and not expecting Vanessa to be a strategist in that area because that’s not her skillset, would that be right?

Matt: Absolutely! 100%, 100%.

Barbara: Yeah! So I do see people expecting, again this is expectation management, I guess. You know, at Virtual Angel Hub, we get great VA’s … I put them into businesses but where we see businesses really fail is when they mistake that person for a strategist and the expectation is that the person can come up, I mean some of them can come up with a strategy when you get to know them better and when you work with them for a long time but initially you know they really are people to help you drive your strategy forward and implement things, but as directed by you.

Matt: 100% and I couldn’t agree more and the interesting thing is, it comes down to ‘why did I employ this person in the first place and what’s their role?’. So once we get clear on their role, then the expectations become a lot simpler but when we start confusing it and trying to get everyone doing everything and not be clear on their roles, then all of a sudden you know we’re expecting super human things from them.

Barbara: Absolutely! You know, I actually had an issue earlier this year with one of my gorgeous VA’s, like love her to death and we’ve a great relationship, and I was actually doing multiple businesses at the same time and multiple projects were on and she approached me one day and she was really upset and she said to me, ‘I feel like I’m not doing a good job, I’m dropping the ball, I’m all over the place and I feel like I don’t know what my role is.’ And I thought to myself, yes, I have been throwing things at her, left, right I centre and how I had viewed her role was to help me execute whatever it was I was doing. But in doing that I was actually making her feel very uncomfortable, like she wasn’t good enough and she couldn’t keep up and actually a great person was feeling down on herself because I wasn’t clear on what her role actually was. So that was really a lesson for me as well, you know, just making sure that the person feels supported and that they know what they’re supposed to be doing every day and where they play a part.

Matt: 100% absolutely! I think also to add; it all comes with experience. Like this case study that I’ve been giving around this event, if you’d ask me three years ago to do this, it certainly wouldn’t have been done with a level of precision and leverage that I can do it today back then, simply for the fact that now I am clear on who can do what, I am clear on, I guess, I talk about it in my book, they’re genius, the things that they love doing, that they’re exceptionally good at that and have a great return for themselves and the business and when you get each person in your team on a project playing in their genius, it’s amazing what happens.

Barbara: Well it’s like an orchestra, it actually is beautiful, it’s like music! Because I’ve had that experience. So the event happened, tell us about any hiccups. Were there any curve balls that happened along the way? And how did you deal with those?

Matt: The only curve ball, actually there wasn’t. The only “hiccup” was that the original room that we had booked was smaller than the number of people that actually taken up tickets.

Barbara: Good problem! Great curve ball.

Matt: Great problem! Again, I said to Rose, ‘What can we do here?’ and she took care of it. She said, we’ve got this option or this option, and she solved the problem. And what was nice was you know just to give … Rose was confirming with me the whole way through so I knew that we had the room booked. She even wrote me this email telling me, and I’ve done many events so I wasn’t expecting this but, when you have someone that’s a professional in their position, this is what you get. She sent me an email the day before saying, ‘You’ll arrive at this time, this person will come to meet with you, this is the room you’re going to, this is what you should see when you get setup in there, this is the breakfast, this is the …’ I was just like, I was blown away, you know what I mean? The level of detail and precision she had gone to.

Barbara: That’s her experience though, you know I’ve seen people expecting their VA to be able to do that for them when they’ve got no experience with events.

Matt: That’s exactly right! That’s again putting someone who has the experience into that position makes it so much easier and to the point Barbara, three days before when I was practicing my presentation, get there on the day, everything’s there, everything’s setup, I plug in, I present, I leave and we had an amazing event, so there weren’t any hiccups as such and I think that was because each person in their role was playing to their strengths and here’s the really interesting thing about this whole thing and I wanted to highlight this for everyone, the investment, what this actually was in real cash terms in Australian dollars, to put the labor part of that event together, so forgetting that I had to engage a copywriter and that was, that’s a different expense. Just the organization, right, of the whole event; the investment was $230.

Barbara: Ah right, okay! Yep, that’s great.

Matt: Because again, Rose is working from home so she’s, so that was $30 an hour. I paid her $30 an hour.

Barbara: What I’m noticing here though and I really want to make sure that I highlight this point though because what I’m hearing and I want to make sure that the listeners are hearing this as well, is that although again, I’m going to labor it. You had the team in place and you went on a holiday, but you didn’t just fling the whiteboard picture at a group of people and say, ‘Hey! I’ll be back in 3 weeks and I’ll show up for the event’, you know. You really were the person who was driving the strategic end of it and you need to take that role. I think a lot of people feel that delegating, and I know we talk about how delegating frees of your time, unless you have a strategist who’s going to take that role for you and your business, you are the person who takes that role and that’s a role that is like the conductor of an orchestra. You know you’ve got all of your team doing their thing but you still need to conduct the orchestra.

Matt: Correct! And in conducting the orchestra, it’s such a minimal amount of effort and time.

Barbara: If you know how to do it right though, because I think a lot of people underestimate the expertise and experience you actually need to be a good conductor and that’s something I’m really committed to in trying to get more business owners to learn how to do that because in the beginning actually, there’s a bit of time investment and sometimes when you start delegating at first, it can be more work initially but the investment, the return comes later in freeing up your time. I think a lot of people think that they’re going to free up their time in week one, when actually the workload can almost double when you start delegating first. But you know, it’s a future, you’re looking down the barrel of a couple of months or whatever to get it right and then you start to see your time free up.

Matt: Correct, so I guess if I give a quick bullet point list on this and how to be a great conductor fast. Number one is you have to have clarity on what success looks like. As the conductor you’ve got to get clear in your head what the tasks are…

Barbara: What you actually want and then what it looks like to be successful in all that.

Matt: Correct, correct! Secondly is then you’ve got to look at who’s doing what and does it require specialist skills because if it requires specialist skills then you’ve got to make sure the right person is sitting in the right seats. Hence, Rose being the project manager in this instance, right, was perfect for me to be able to sit at the conductor level, and I don’t have to worry about any of the detail because she had the expert knowledge.

Barbara: And I guess if you can’t afford to get someone for that role, let’s say you’re just starting with your small business, then you need to accept that you need to take that role.

Matt: Correct, correct! Third is making sure that you have a project management system that is the glue to get everyone communicating together. So if you’ve got multiple people, in this case we did, that were all important to the orchestra and have to play in harmony, they all have to have their sheet music, to use the metaphor.

Barbara: And it can’t be email, let’s be clear email is not a project management system. You’re setting yourself for total failure if you use email. So Asana or Trello or one of these project management tools.

Matt: And then lastly is having clear milestones and check-in points, you know what I mean? So there’s got to be, rather than just giving them the project in its entirety, you need to break it down to smaller pieces. For instance, I gave the tasks that needed to be done in that week when I was away and then I was coming back with a definitive ‘here’s we’re going to meet and this is what we’re going to talk about’, and if you break the project up like that then all of a sudden you move with immense speed and everyone works in harmony.

Barbara: It’s good! Everyone feels good then.

Matt: It doesn’t always work perfectly and I want to really stress that because where I think it becomes, when the problems tend to arise, either it’s going to be one of two things. One, the person doing the task has the right skillset so they’re going to require more of your time or secondly is as more and more people get involved with this, that’s when it can become harder but those things we just spoke about particularly around the project management system, they are critical for the success.

Barbara: Critical, I mean I’m thinking as your talking going, I really feel in the last year or two I have totally stepped into that orchestra role and we were talking before the show about this where I just feel like it’s such an amazing feeling when you get it right, but the only way I can do it is by having very clear roles for each person. Project management system is absolutely key and very clear, clearly defined tasks list with proper milestones, due dates and responsibilities for each person and then each person reporting it to me on their progress.

Matt: So I just want to add one last thing on this. I think it will give the listeners all the … I’m going to open the hood up massively!

Barbara: Go for it!

Matt: A few years ago I was terrible at lists, terrible at milestones, terrible at meetings, and I bring that up because I’ve learned the skill and this is a skill, I don’t believe people are born this way, it’s a learnable skill. You have to commit to learning the skill, you have to commit to the growth because if you want to be successful in your business and take it to the next level, these are the skills you need to master in order to grow and scale your business.

Barbara: Absolutely! I mean I was lucky, I suppose, because I spent so long in the corporate world where you’re almost put in a straight jacket when it comes to things like meetings. I mean you have no choice but to be organized. There’s meetings, there’s milestones, there’s strategic plans so I learnt a lot of that through my corporate days and I was quite amazed, actually, when I started working with the entrepreneurial, small business community I guess, how people are so not lacking in that area but not even knowledgeable about how important and pivotal it is to your success. You know, knowing how to run a meeting, knowing how to direct traffic in terms of projects and stuff like that, how to create processes and really if you’re not willing to, I don’t know if you remember when we had Dan Norris on the show, he said something quite controversial, he actually said, ‘If you’re not willing to create systems, processes and lead teams, you’re not an entrepreneur. Go work for someone else!’. And I thought, ok it was a bit controversial, but actually there’s a lot of truth in that, people don’t want to hear that but it’s actually true!

Matt: Exactly and that is the differentiator between mediocre results and outstanding results.

Barbara: And I think that’s a great point to finish on Matt because so many people are getting mediocre results and they’re blaming everything under the sun but the reality is, if you want outstanding results, the formula is actually not difficult, it’s there! It’s just people don’t want to follow it, they don’t want to take the pain and actually get good at this stuff. But I know if I can impart anything that I’ve learned over the last few years doing my own thing is, commit to it because when you get it right, the sky’s the limit.

Matt: 100%! I hope it’s been helpful for everyone today. Just to give a little bit of insight into a real life project and how you can utilize your virtual teams both locally and overseas to coordinate and how cost effective and time effective it can really be when you master this.

Barbara: Absolutely!

Matt: Thanks for sharing that with to me today Barb, it’s been really a great show.

Barbara: Yes, as always, I learned a lot again from you so I’m going to be implementing some of that stuff whenever I get to events. Until next week Matt, have a great week and listeners enjoy your week and remember to come back next week for more virtual success

Matt: You too Barb, have a great week, and to everyone!

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

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

In this episode:

01:24 – Perseverance is key

05:33 – Tough conversations

06:33 – Open and honest communication

09:05 – Let’s have some fun

10:45 – Helping your VA grow in the role

15:30 – Avoiding unrealistic expectations

19:10 – Part-time vs. full-time

23:28 – You can’t afford NOT to have a VA

27:00 – Wrapping things up

Barbara: Hey everyone and welcome back to another Virtual Success Show! Matt, how’s it going?

Matt: Going well and yourself?

Barbara: Great, thank you! Another fantastic week as always, you know, learning virtual success with my teams.

Matt: It’s always an interesting week, isn’t it?

Barbara: It’s a journey! It’s a journey. And look, I’m actually really excited about today’s show because I have one of my favorite people on the planet on the show. Annette Lackovic, welcome to the show!

Annette: Thank you! Favorite people; I love that.

Perseverance is key

Barbara: You do, you like that a lot especially on social media. Annette, I really wanted to get you on the show because as you and I both know, your virtual assistant was one of the first that we placed at Virtual Angel Hub when I started the business and what I just love, and what I want to share this story with the listeners, was that we got this VA and I was really excited about this particular person because I thought she was perfect for Annette and so she started working with Annette and within, I think it was week 2, maybe week 2 or 3…

Annette: I think week 1 or week 2 (*laughs)

Barbara: An email comes through from Annette to me and there were probably a couple of expletives in it. There were a couple of words in capital and I think, as I recall, something like ‘she’s so not worth the money’ things like that. So it basically wasn’t going well, it wasn’t a good email.

Barbara: It wasn’t a good email but you weren’t having a good experience, let’s be honest and this is something a lot of people face in those first few weeks of working with a VA but the good news is that now, you and gorgeous Gemely, absolutely adore each other, work really well together and you’ve made the relationship really work. So I really wanted to talk to you about, first of all, how you got through those first few weeks, how you went from failure to success, I guess. Maybe to kick things off, just tell us about that first day, you know the first week when you met.

Annette: The hardest bit is most entrepreneurs, we need somebody in our business because it grows, and we tend to put them in at the wrong time, it’s when we’re busy. And that’s what happened with Gem and I did make the fatal mistake even though I knew that you just can’t expect them to just run with the ball right away. I thought a week would be enough, and it wasn’t and I really wanted her to run with the ball and things weren’t happening fast enough. And because I had so much on; I did know that I’m the one who needs to train her up, I think this is the hard bit, you’ve got to train that person up whilst you’re trying to do your job and you feel like you doubling up. But what happened after that first week and I sent you that email, I’m a very open communicator so I also said to her, ‘this is not working the way that I want it to. I really need you to work and get these tasks done quicker, get these task completed quicker.’ And she said, ‘Don’t worry, this is not how slow I like to work either, I’d like to work much more efficiently.’ So it was great for her to confirm that.

Barbara: Pause there for one second because what I’ve noticed people doing and I’ve seen this happen a lot, you’re quite direct and I think a lot of people shy away from the direct conversation because they confuse a direct conversation with being mean and often I see people wanting their VA to like them and think that they’re nice. So they avoid being direct and just be honest, open and honest in what they need to feel supported by their VA.

Annette: Well for me, it’s always, a person cannot improve themselves if they don’t know what’s going on, and it’s vice versa. For me, I know that I had to be more patient and I just loved your response because you said, please just give it one more week, because I think you knew that it was just in that time of when Gem is about to peak and go into that she understands the business, she can now run with the ball but I was just in that teething stage, so just when you said that, I said ‘Okay, I’m just going to hang in there’ and with her response as well saying, ‘Don’t worry, I don’t want to work like this either. I like to work faster’, that just reassured me so much that ok great, she’s open to feedback and she’s wanting to grow as well, so it was just a perfect fit.

Tough conversations

Barbara: Ok great, so you had that conversation, actually how was that conversation? Did you feel uncomfortable, were you feeling icky about it? I mean you’re pretty good at this stuff but some people feel icky about the conversation.

Annette: No, I didn’t!

Barbara: Good!

Annette: But I did dodge the verbal conversation and I did write her an email. So I did probably what other people do now, which is they don’t pick up the phone (*laugh) … I did write it so wasn’t an attack, and I think that’s what’s really important. Sometimes you can write things in haste, like my email to you, and because I know she’s not going to perform at her best if she feels like she’s going to lose her job. I know that she’s not going to perform any better if she’s scared. So, I think from memory I wrote it and then went right, let me just clean up the language a little bit. (*laugh)

Matt: Annette can I ask a question? Was it just the speed of which she was doing things or was she not doing the right tasks?

Open and honest communication

Annette: Yeah, it was the speed and then eventually it was into the tasks, and that was part of me being her boss in a way, just getting her to understand my priorities. It was really just the speed of things, just learning to do things. I just thought that she could run with the ball quicker. There’s different behavior styles and Gem is a perfectionist at heart and she does like to get things right and I just had to understand that she doesn’t want to do something unless it’s 100%.

Later on, it was the prioritization but then I just knew that, whenever there’s errors that show up we have to understand as business owners because normally its a lack of communication. So if we have not gone through and said this is the most important thing that gets done. When an email comes through with this, or this is in your tasks I’ve gone onto Asana, and that was thanks to Barbara who introduced me to that as well, but she understands what’s the priority, the highest priority and then some of the other things like graphics, that type of stuff, I call it the fun work, gets done later.

My success honestly with her has been, I think, through two things. One is really forming that relationship with her like she is a proper physical employee, she feels a part of the team, we talk every day, we have fun, I always give her recommendations in what she needs to improve on but I always, always comment every day on something she’s done right because I know, and this is what I was saying before to you guys is, a person cannot perform well if they’re scared, if they’re nervous or if they’re, you know, scared of walking on egg shells, that they’re going to rub you the wrong way. People work in their genius when they feel loved, feel appreciated and that’s when they’re happy to contribute as well. So for me, every day I’ll always find something that’s truthful to compliment her on so she feels really good in her position and then when there’s a recommendation, it lands better and she feels safe so I feel like that was one of the big things that I really needed to embrace.

Let’s have some fun

Barbara: I really feel that is so important and I think with an awful lot of people, what I notice is people don’t realize is actually how pivotal and how important the relationship is that you have together because all the other stuff you kind of teach, but if you don’t gel and…you actually you have to invest time in that relationship as well and the fact that you say you speak to your VA every day, I speak to all of my VA’s everyday too. There are some people that are too busy for that of course but you still have to setup times where you talk, have meetings and then you also need time to have a little bit of a joke together and a little bit of a chitchat, you know.

Annette: We love the little pictures on Skype, you know the little icons you put in. Sometimes we have the little Michael Jackson dancer and it’s just fun. You know, you might smash out a task, we’ve both achieved it and it’s so important and my behavior style as well as Gem’s, we’re a good match with that. We’ve got to have a little bit fun in the day. And you know there’s days when we’re doing launches and we don’t get to talk much and we’re just smashing out a whole heap of tasks and we just know that at the end of the day we do the wrap up. But I find with that connections side of it, Barbara, is having her feel that she’s appreciated, I find what I always have with her is there’s times we’ve actually smashed out, and I mean smashed out the most ridiculous amount of project launches, we’ve done 3 launches in 2 months. This is what people probably do in a year.

Helping your VA grow in the role

Barbara: And can I also mention there, because I know your business and I also know Gem your VA. She also did not have experience with product launches so she was not experienced in that area and for her to rise to that level so quickly you know, really is a testament to you as well because you’ve taken her there on that journey and you haven’t expected her to just be like that on day one and to get there by herself. You’ve taken her on that journey with you.

Annette: Yeah! With Gem, I actually asked her, I noticed that sometimes she was doing it and this is what Matt was saying before about the priority of tasks. Every now and again when I had to have the conversation, and this was right at the start, she’d start sending some graphics through, I didn’t even ask for it, might’ve been my signed off logo. It was just like all these different things, this is where we can book and she’s making these pages all pretty and I thought, that wasn’t really in the task to do and then I said to her ‘What are you really passionate about?’ and she said, ‘I really love doing graphic design.’ And I thought, ‘No joke!’ (*laugh) so I actually thought, well whenever I have some graphics to do if we have the time, I’m going to get her to do that first, to have a go at it just to help grow her passion and her skill because you know, as my business grows there’s going to be things to fill different spots and she’s done amazing! She’s done all the graphics for all my launches for the past 3 launches and what I was saying was because of that, that feeling of that connection, and feeling like they’re part of something, they’re part of the team, they’re not just a virtual assistant, they’re actually a part of something bigger. You know she worked an extra 3 hours late at night and we had all this stuff we had to actually get out, no timeframes around it but then it’s how do you repay them as well.

So for me, we worked so hard, the next day I gave her a surprise, and I said ‘There’s no work today, and there’s no work on Monday!’ and its just how can I reward her for putting in that extra time and not complaining, not saying ‘I have to clock off at this time.’ I think that’s the difference of building a culture within your virtual business as well.

Barbara: Yeah, a couple of things I’ve noticed you saying that, is and what you mentioned about the fun element earlier, is that obviously when you’re paying for a staff member, you want to get the most out of them. But I see people making the mistake sometimes sort of treating them like a lemon to be squeezed down to the last drop because they want to get the most out of the time that they have with this VA or whatever. It’s okay sometimes for 2 hours you kind of did nothing and had a joke on Skype and do a new image, or I don’t know, have a chitchat about the future of the business, whatever, because I do that all the time. I think that is…actually if I could say the secret of my success has been to have those down times together as well.

Annette: Yeah, yeah. And they’re not machines, they are human beings like us. We all need that breather, absolutely. Like I said, that fun, there is scientific proof about the expansion of the mind and the opening of learning and the feeling of security, when you do have fun and if you don’t have that connection with your team at the moment, you’re actually doing yourself and your business a disservice.

Barbara: Absolutely! So Matt, I’m sure you’ve got some insight to bring in here and some questions for Annette, I’ve been completely monopolizing the time here.

Annette: Yeah, we’ve just been chatting away here, sorry Matt.

Matt: It’s ok guys, so I just went and grabbed a coffee and came back and you guys were still going, unbelievable!

Barbara: Women, you know!

Matt: You know, I’m so aligned with everything you’ve been talking about and that’s what I actually teach. You’ve got to treat your virtual assistant like they’re sitting in the room with you, in a desk next to you and so I can’t emphasize that point enough. I’ve got a question though, which is, sorry I’ve got 2 questions. How long have you and your VA been working together now?

Annette: hmmm, I don’t know how long?

Barbara: I think the beginning of March, March/ April; and so we’re now in November, so 8 months or something.

Annette: Wow, that’s gone fast!

Avoiding unrealistic expectations

Matt: So, if you look back at that initial part, were your expectations unreasonable? Did your VA promise something that they didn’t deliver in the initial phase, like being more efficient? Or was it that your expectations were unreasonable?

Annette: It was my expectation. And do you know Matt, this is what it was. I’d had a virtual assistant before and she ended up being an entrepreneur herself and had grown her own business so I had to then re train somebody new and I comprehended that it’s going to take me a month to train her up. I even tell my clients that, but then when it came down to the crunch and it was a busy time so I had the pressure on my shoulder, yeah, I cracked. It was just I forgot what I knew and my expectations suddenly just fell away and just yeah, put the pressure on. Unfortunately.

Matt: Yeah and I think that’s the point like when you’re onboarding your virtual assistant, it’s like any other employee that you’re bringing on locally or virtual, you’ve got to give them time to learn their role, time to learn how to work with you, time to, if they are a perfectionist, time learn how to perfect what is it that they are doing and when you give them that space and when you’re clear on your expectation from the start, I think the relationship starts working a lot sooner.

Annette: Yeah, I think, like you’re saying, the time to learn the business as much as to learn to work with me. Even today, even this week, it’s still having her understand some of the language because I teach sales, I teach a reverse sale so I teach ‘how do you get the customer to feel inspired to buy’. So it’s all in the language. So, there was one thing I got her to tweak on a lead page and I noticed that just some simple language – how would you like to pay for that – and pay is like the F word for me, and I was like, ‘Okay, cool! She doesn’t actually understand that,’ so which option would suit you best. So I got her to understand some language and that’s what’s important as well is the time to learn the business because we’re in our businesses so much and we think it’s just so easy for someone to grasp but it’s not, it’s that whole expectation thing that you’re saying Matt. There was nothing that she came to me saying this is what she can do and let me down, it was me really letting her down with expecting her just to pick everything up and run with it.

Barbara: Annette, actually how do you feel now when you think about Gem?

Annette: I love her!

Barbara: Because I know I feel this way with my team as well. When you watch them grow and they grow with you and you see them achieve. I mean it is the most uplifting feeling ever and I know that you feel that way about Gem as well; watching her grow is part of the joy.

Annette: And for her to acknowledge her growth as well. She’s done so much visual marketing for me and I wanted to show her family what she’s done. I said, ‘Have you shown your family what you’ve actually created? Before you started with me, this is just something you liked to do but look what you’ve actually done. A marketing campaign!’

Part-time vs. full-time

Barbara: You may not actually know, when we first got her we didn’t realized that was a skill set that she was actually hiding. That was a little hobby skills set that she had that you’ve really developed in her and it was just by asking the question and allowing her to play in her genius zone, I guess. The other question I want to ask you is, you started out with her part-time and then you very quickly moved to taking her full-time and I want to know your view, because I have a view on this around, I took full-time staff straight away because I wanted them in my business. What’s the difference between having someone part-time and full-time, what would you say?

Annette: Everything! Look, I feel like the reason why everybody that takes part-time first thinks that they don’t have enough work to get covered, or they’re working with a tight budget and they need to understand, and understand pretty quickly, that their time per hour is much more valuable doing the task and will bring a lot more money for that business. So for me now, having her fulltime is just as invaluable, just on so many different levels. I can depend on her, I can rely on her, she’s that support system, she keeps the business going when I can’t be there. It is such a big difference from part-time to full-time and I understand why people do take that part-time jump because I’ve been there twice in the past, and it’s then being honest with yourself and saying really is this something that I’m doing to make your sales. Am I really doing this to dodge really growing my business and having more face to face conversations, or holding more webinars, or am I just doing this because I’m just penny pinching and really not committed in growing my business to that level. As soon as you take that jump, back yourself to say, ‘I’m growing my business, putting that VA on that you have part-time to full-time’, is where you’re really showing that commitment to yourself as well and how serious you are with that business growth.

Barbara: Yeah, because I get asked that one a lot actually, when is the time to go full-time. I mean I’ve always been of the view, financially sometimes people can’t do it but I went full-time straight away from day one with my business with a VA. I made that decision, in fact, I made the decision not to buy certain you know online programs and coaching things and all that because I thought, well I need someone to work alongside me to implement stuff. And the interesting thing, and I didn’t know that this was going to happen when I first made that decision, with my first VA, it was Melanel Lawa and we affectionately call her Lala, and she is now Head of Operations for the entire Filipino entity for Virtual Angel Hub. Now you know I am just so proud of her because she’s gone from being a VA to like accidentally ending up in an amazing role that has benefited her and her family massively, the opportunity came along. Really when I launched Virtual Angel Hub, the only person who could really step into that role quickly was her because she had worked with me for so long. And I still had to grow her in that role and I still mentor her in that role but the reality was that I had someone ready, who had been working with me for so long already and she was the perfect transition so I didn’t have to go through the pain of hiring someone.

Annette: And I think that goes in line with what you were talking about before is, for us being a business owner and seeing them have that growth, I think what’s also important is if you’re really serious about scaling your business and growing it, it’s understanding that these virtual assistants for that retention, you’ve done all this work and they’ve done all the work too in learning your business and moving through it, do we actually have a growth path for them? Do we actually see what really sets them alive and also show them what’s available in the future because just like us, they’re real people and I think that retention and for them to see the vision and find out what they actually want in the future is aligned and we just help them grow into that person, like you have with, what was her name, Lala?

Barbara: Yeah, Lala!

You can’t afford NOT to have a VA

Matt: And I think a couple of things to add here, I think number one is if you’re listening to this podcast and you think you can’t afford a virtual assistant, you’re going to fail in the business in my opinion because everyone can afford a virtual assistant.

Barbara: I’m glad you said it Matt because honestly I hear this all the time and I go you can’t afford not to have one, honestly if you can’t afford one, you need to rethink your business model.

Matt: Yep, 100%!

Barbara: You can’t afford not to!

Matt: You can’t afford not to! That’s the reality, in particular you know when you’re setting goals and targets, if you work out your hourly rate, what you’re investing in the person to come on and take a lot of these lower value tasks, important but lower value in what the investment to get them done is, it’s just phenomenal and I hear it day in, day out as well. So, I do have an opinion around the difference between part-time and full-time and I’ll add another one which is around project-based. I think there’s certain tasks that you can just outsource on a project-to-project basis and doesn’t require a fulltime virtual assistant to be there on call to do that. I think one thing that you just need to align with this is the organizational chart of your business and looking at, because we’ve got some roles in our business that are only 25-hour a week roles. But we consider for that role 25 hours to be full-time and that fulfils that part of the business. So I think you just need to overlay your organizational chart to this decision and understanding what the requirements are for specific roles because that will help you assist you in decision making of part-time vs. full-time. But if this person is your right hand or left hand person, your assistant, they’re there to assist you, day in and day out; they must be full-time in my opinion.

Barbara: Yeah, I would agree with that!

Annette: And I do remember that you were talking about the project based VA’s as well, Barb, from the very start and just hearing Matt say that again it’s pricked up my ears because it’s something that we probably need to, you know, bring in to our business.

Barbara: Well interestingly the reason, you know, when I first launched Virtual Angel Hub it was all about getting VA’s, dedicated staff into businesses. And what I’ve noticed and we’ve really started to build out now is we’re starting to build the, as part of the hub, we have the experts that you can actually tap into so for example, people who are trying to get their VA’s to build websites for them and I was kind of saying, ‘Look! They can do a little bit of WordPress, but they’re not going to be able to build a whole website for you.’ But we now have a web team that people can tap into on a project basis. We’ve got video editors, we’re bringing in copywriters because those are the project-y type things that you need and I guess I’m trying to build a one-stop shop where people can just get all the things they need and their VA can help the project management for them then.

Annette: I’d love a podcast on that, please!

Barbara: I will talk to you about that and Matt and I can put it together.

Annette: I love it.

Barbara: So Annette—

Matt: You go Barb.

Barbara: So, you know, Annette, I just firstly want to say, you know, congratulations for getting through that first few weeks because I remember we chatted and it was stressful for you. But it’s not as easy as people think and so many people give up in that first 6 to 8 weeks and I call it the critical 6 to 8 weeks; that you’ve got to dig the heels in and you put the work in and sometimes the work load will double before it halves.

Annette: Yeah!

Barbara: Go ahead, Matt!

Wrapping things up

Matt: I just want to say, if knowing what you now know, if there were three critical points that you would share with the listeners today on that success with your virtual assistant, what would the three critical points be?

Annette: I think the first one is, they really need to be able to connect with that business. We need to take that time to help them understand, take them on the journey so they actually know what their vision of your business, maybe where you’ve come from and for me one thing that was really important was the way that she communicates with my customers. The second most critical thing is, the connection between myself and her to make her really feel like she’s a part of something, she’s a part of the team, she’s feeling loved, appreciated and that makes her more open for feedback. And the third thing, I think just the patience, like if I could rewind time and say to my old self even though I knew that, I comprehend it before I started that there was going to be that teething stage but when I was in the middle of it, my patience just, I lost focus.

Barbara: You’re only human, I think we all do, that happens to me with my teams too. What about the project management tools and the more, you know, getting your task lists right? Would that be something that you’ve…

Annette: Actually yeah! The accountability, so learning the prioritization and then using something like Asana, which you’ve introduced me to, so she actually knows the task and it’s just easy. You can bang everything out, you’re not sort of going back and forth on emails which get lost or via Skype. There’s just so much back tracking that happens if it’s through that but the accountability side of it through some type of system really helps with those tasks and the projects.

Barbara: Yep great. Annette, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Annette: My pleasure!

Barbara: I’m so excited to get your insights also because we haven’t really had this conversation since those initial days. How did you go from that to success, it’s really a testament to your, to the growth of your business. I have seen your business grow since you’ve taken Gem on. I’ve seen massive things come out!

Annette: Yeah! I wouldn’t have been able to do half the stuff without her definitely! Thank you so much for helping me share the message of my journey.

Matt: Yeah, thank you.

Annette: I hope some of your listeners have taken some (*laugh) great points on what to do and what not to do.

Barbara: I hope the listeners, you know, if you know other people who are trying to get success in this area then please share the show with them because we’re really committed on this show to not just talking about why you should engage virtual teams but how to get success with virtual teams. Because that’s really the area that both Matt and I really feel is lacking in the market that nobody’s really talking about. So, this is the show!

Matt: This is the show!

Barbara: Right so until next week, Matt see you next week! Annette talk to you soon.

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

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