How to Confidently and Successfully Use Virtual Assistants to Scale your Business – In Just 7 Minutes Barbara Turley

Resources/Links:

• http://www.thevirtualhub.com/leadsology

Summary

Barbara Turley is an investor, entrepreneur, and Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub – a company that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants for businesses who need to free up time and energy so they can go to the next level.

In this episode, Barbara shares the ins and outs, and the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant. If you have never hired a Virtual Assistant before, it could be hard to figure out where to begin. Barbara gives you a better picture of your starting point with your VA.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:44 – Barbara’s ideal client: Ideal client for us is anyone running a small to medium business.
• 02:08 – Problem she helps solve: A lot of the problem people were facing is they wanted to get a virtual assistant but really that’s not the crux of the problem. A lot of the problem is training demands, onboarding a VA, managing a VA, and then making sure that your business is set up properly to get to the sense with offshore teams before you hire a VA.
• 03:24 – Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Barbara: They may have tried outsourcing before. They may have tried and it has either failed or they tried and it was a roaring success but the person left and then they got failed after that because it’s actually very hard to find good people.
• 04:57 – Common mistakes people make when trying to solve that problem: On the recruitment side when people go to other websites, they do it themselves. They underestimate the amount of work involved in trolling through and the numbers of people that you have to go through to hit a home run.
• 05:20 – Barbara’s Valuable Free Action(VFA): This two technique: pictures and connections. Everything I want to remember becomes a picture and that picture becomes connected to an existing memory.
• 06:17 – Barbara’s Valuable Free Resource(VFR): thevirtualhub.com/leadsology
• 07:28 – Q:’How’s the English offshore?” A: English can be really missed. So just as someone speaks great English on the phone doesn’t mean that they write great English. That’s a true one.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“On the recruitment side, when people go to other websites, they do it themselves. They underestimate the amount of work involved in trolling through and the numbers of people that you have to go through to hit a home run.”… Share on X “The other mistake people make is they underestimated how much work they need to do in their business to make sure that their business is ready for a virtual assistant or for a virtual team.” -@virtualhubltd Share on X

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland: Hello everyone. A very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. My name is Tom Poland. Beaming out to us ever from on the sand next to the waves a Little Castaways Beach here in Queensland, Australia. Joined today by Barbara Turley. Barbara, a very warm good day. Welcome, and where are you hanging out?

Barbara Turley: Hey Tom. Thanks for having me. So, I’m in a very wet Sydney today. So, I’m sure Queensland is much sunnier than where I am. But I am in Sydney right now, I’ve been living here for about 17 years.

Tom Poland: And there’s a bit of an Irish lilt coming through. So, you’ve migrated from Ireland?

Barbara Turley: I did indeed. I was attracted by the sand, and sea, and the ocean of Australia. And came for a year and never left.

Tom Poland: Right. And you’re not missing that weather in Ireland at all?

Barbara Turley: No.

Tom Poland: Funny that. Okay. Off of geography and climate and on to, back to you. So, for those of you who don’t know Barbara, she is an investor, an entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub. She’s also, congratulations, eight-month pregnant with her second child. Not officially in her bio, just thought I could clip that in. The Virtual Hub is a company that recruits, trains, and I think extremely importantly, manages virtual assistants for businesses who need to free up time and energy so they can go to the next level. What a good idea. So, Barbara the title of our interview today is “How to Confidently and Successfully Use Virtual Assistants to Scale Your Business”. We are going to tell people how to do that in just seven minutes. Your seven minutes starts now. Question number one is, who is your ideal client?

Barbara Turley:Ideal client for us is anyone running a small to medium business. It can be in any niche but you must be doing a digital marketing strategy. Which these days pretty much all businesses are doing. Social media, blogging, content, funnels, et cetera. And anything above is really where we play.

Tom Poland:Perfect. Thank you. Six and a half minutes left, question two. What’s the problem you solve for those business owners?

Barbara Turley:So a lot of the problem people were facing is they wanted to get a virtual assistant but really that’s not the crux of the problem. A lot of the problem is training demands, onboarding a VA, managing a VA, and then making sure that your business is set up properly to get to the sense with offshore teams before you hire a VA. So, although we recruit, and train and all that, those are the problems that we really solve for the clients. We get to the sense with all clients by going deeper. We go a lot deeper.

Tom Poland: So this is immediately, radically, different to almost. Well, all of the online freelancer type websites.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Freelancer, I mean you can do it if you want but you’re taking on a whole other job. You might hit a home run but as everyone knows the internet is littered with disaster stories of VA’s in the Philippines. You know, it’s not as easy as people think but we basically, they get eighty percent of the success.

Tom Poland: Yeah. Because the person you’re hiring is coming in from a knowledge point of view, completely naked. And unless they are equipped with what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and who to do it with. Okay. So, question number three is what are some of the typical symptoms that people are going to be experiencing before they find the Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: They may have tried outsourcing before. They may have tried and it has either failed or they tried and it was a roaring success but the person left and then they got failed after that because it’s actually very hard to find good people. And managing staff overseas is a challenge all by itself. Even when you have a rock star VA. They can be slippery. You know sometimes people say to me, “Oh, when they’re there their great.” Which is a major problem, there’s no consistently. So, we’ve eradicated pretty much all of those issues with the business model that we have. So, people are frustrated and they don’t feel confident that they can get success which comes back to the title of what we’re talking about today.

Tom Poland:And so that must be quite frustrating for some people to feel like that sort of scalability is, is there almost within their grasp but it’s a bit elusive.

Barbara Turley: Because other people are doing it, you see other people succeeding online and hearing about it. And Tim Ferriss writes about it and everyone’s talking about it but you can’t get success yourself and you wonder why. So those are some of the feelings that people have when they come to us.

Tom Poland: Right. And in fact, a lot of those other people that we perceive are very successful using virtual teams probably struggling as well. So, four minutes left, question four. Some people are going to try and do this on their own or go to one of those websites who won’t be named. What are some of the common mistakes that you see people making, again, before they get to you? So, what are some of the war stories that you hear when people get to you and they go, “Thank god I’ve got you” because this is the mistake I made before.

Tom Poland: Yeah sure. So just on the recruitment side, when people go to other websites, they do it themselves. They underestimate the amount of work involved in trolling through and the numbers of people that you have to go through to hit a home run. So, they tend to hire based on rapport, or resumé, or interview. But really anybody can say anything in their interview. Some people interview very well in their term level of job. You know there is a lot more to it than just trolling through websites and getting resumes. The other mistake people make is they underestimated how much work they need to do in their business to make sure that their business is ready for a virtual assistant or for a virtual team. And the reporting lines were in place. So just getting a great person doesn’t often solve the problem. It just means you’re throwing a body at the problem. So really, you’ve got to try and make sure your systems, your processes, your communication channels, and your structure of your business is correct before you go this path because you’re going to waste time, energy, and money otherwise. So those are the two big problems. Yeah.

Tom Poland:You’re actually going to be worse off than doing it yourself, almost.

Barbara Turley: You’ll spend a lot of money. Yeah. And you’ll be overwhelmed.

Tom Poland: And wondering why they’re not getting the results. So, thank you. Two and a half minutes left, question number five. One valuable free action that an audience member could take that’s not going to solve the whole problem but it might take them one step closer.

Barbara Turley: Well we have. I wrote a little e-book on this which is short, to the point. You can get it at thevirtualhub.com/leadsology. It is the five biggest mistakes people make with VA’s and how to fix this. So, I run through all the mistakes there. It definitely will help you to get a picture, kind of where you may have failed before or if you had never done this before, the mistakes other people are making. So, it’s definitely worth going there and downloading that e-book there. You don’t even need to sign up for it, it’s just a download.

Tom Poland:Oh, okay. So, it’s www.thevirtualhub.com/leadsology. And you might in fact be a woman ahead of your time because I was about to ask you for one free resource.

Barbara Turley:Oh wow. Okay.

Tom Poland: Well that’s okay. Let’s get back. If someone grabs that resource. And what’s one action they can take that will take them a step closer to cracking those?

Barbara Turley: Yes. The biggest one. It’s tedious but it’s worth doing. You have to map out the tasks that you need done per little department no matter how small your business is. They all have departments; marketing, sales, HR, finance. What are the recurring tasks in each of those departments that are bogging you down? Those are the first little small easy to outsource, easy to delegate tasks that you need to get clear on. And you need to have a little process for each one about how you like it done. So, therefore, you maintain some level of control over how it’s done when you delegate it.

Tom Poland: Perfect. Thank you. And question number seven, 40 seconds left. What’s the one question that I should have asked you but I didn’t?

Barbara Turley: The one question you should have asked but you didn’t. Let me think about that for a second. Probably the, people struggling with onshore versus offshore. Like how’s the English offshore, that’s a big one. In the Philippines for example where we specialize, English can be really missed. So just as someone speaks great English on the phone doesn’t mean that they write great English. That’s a true one.

Tom Poland: Very true. Perfect. Barbara Turley thank you so much for your time.

Barbara Turley: Thank you.

Tom Poland: Thanks for checking out our Marketing the Invisible podcast if you like what we’re doing here. Please head over to Itunes to subscribe, rate us and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out wwwfivehourchallenge.com.