EP055 - How to maximize your productivity with VAs with Barbara Turley of The Virtual Hub
About the episode
This episode explores the world of virtual assistants. We tear down many stereotypes and approach the topic of VAs from the perspective of leaders and operations. To discuss, we have Barbara Turley, who is the founder of The Virtual Hub, a network of hundreds of VAs that help growing companies max out their productivity and efficiency.
About the guest
Barbara Turley is an investor, entrepreneur, and Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub - a business she started by accident that scaled quickly to become one of the leading companies that integrate in-house trained virtual assistants into clients’ businesses. This strategy frees up time and energy so businesses can focus on optimizing their operations further to achieve business growth goals. With a strong focus on customized training and ongoing career development, The Virtual Hub ensures that its team is trained in cutting-edge programs (like Hubspot, Ontraport, etc.) to meet its clients’ unique needs in digital marketing, social media, operational support, and administrative services.
Barbara is also a mom to her gorgeous kids Ruby and Alexander, wife to her best friend Eti, and an adventure lover passionate about horses, skiing, tennis, and spending time in nature.
Connect with Barbara on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone. Welcome on the leadership anywhere podcast. Today we will talk about virtual assistants and VAs in general why it should be used by every scale up leader, every founder, every manager and every remote company. What VAs can add to your business in general and in like specific details as well. To discuss, I have Barbara Turley, who is running a whole company around VAs. Hi, Barbara. Thank you. Thank you for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me on the show. Very excited to talk about this topic.
Really excited because I do believe that this is one of the best kept secret of remote work having VAs that can boost pretty much everything internally whether it's ops marketing content or just pretty much Operating as a founder or as a leader in a remote business. To start tell me your story. Before the call we discussed that you are doing this for more than 10 years now. And I'm always super excited to hear someone who was doing remote work for more than a decade, like myself, because I presume we see a little bit differently everything in terms of remote work.
Yeah. It's funny because when I first came to the remote work thing, I actually felt like I was late to the party. And I think it was because I was actually working in corporate. So my whole career I was not the startup founder that had lemonade stands and tried lots of different things. I was in corporate I had worked in an equity trading floor for almost 10 years. I loved it, was very much in the trenches like that, loved it. And then I worked in asset management sales for a further five years. But interestingly, the reason I had an idea that someday I would like to do something by myself. That was about as far as I got. And really it was when I hit my early thirties . Telling my age now, but I had this realization that I didn't really want to be a corporate mom. That was really how it started for me. And hats off to the corporate moms out there. I think it's really a hard gig and yeah, well done to all of those moms doing that. And I started thinking about maybe I'd run my own business or what would I do, but I really had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And the truth of the matter was I saw, I had no idea. I was still working in corporate at that stage. But I had gotten an opportunity during the last big financial crisis in 2008 when everything was just a mess and the whole industry was a mess. And I got an opportunity during that time to literally hop on the coattails of a few very clever people that I still know and that I knew back then that were basically buying a business out of one of the big investment banks. They were trying to take a business out and do a startup in that way. And I got an opportunity to be involved in one of the starting sort of employees and I became a shareholder and I bought some and I got some for free and all of these bits and pieces and I worked for some and that really whetted my appetite. I spent five years working at that company and I'm still very much involved with that company today, 12 years later. I really got to see how great companies get built. I worked with amazing people there and I started thinking, I wonder do I want to build my own? I wanted to build something and that was really the crux of it. Then I was sitting on a flight to Brisbane from Sydney where I was living in Sydney, Australia and I was sitting on a flight for work to Brisbane to go and see some clients. And I literally saw this tiny ad in the back of the flight magazine. And it was for a guy that I ended up becoming friends with in the end. It was a guy called Yarrow Starrock and he had built a blog and he was blogging about blogging as a business back then. This is like probably 13 years ago or so. And I just had never heard of this. I was like, what people just write online. And so I started delving into that world and I did a course with him and it just started to open a world to me. That I didn't know existed, but there was a lot of people in that world. And by the time I eventually made the jump, I did feel like I was last to the party because I had met so many internet entrepreneurs at that stage, like over the following few years, by the time I ended up doing my own thing. And like many, as who leave corporate, I did end up consulting. So I did some business coaching and consulting. And I found that all the clients I was coaching and consulting with, it didn't matter what they were doing industry online offline and what they actually were doing they all needed staff. But they couldn't really, if they didn't grow more, they couldn't get staff. And if they didn't get staff, they weren't going to be able to grow. It was this kind of vicious cycle. A lot of them were in, and I knew at that stage, I had obviously read about VAs in the Philippines and I had gotten one for myself. That was the truth. And I got a few of my VAs friends. Basically to do some work for some clients. And it went so explosively well that friends of clients started contacting me and asking me for VAs. And I literally, before I knew it, I was running 10, 15 VAs. And I thought, wow, I'm in business here. I literally was in business before I realized what I was doing.
The business made itself for you.
Yes it did. It was very much by accident and then became organic after that.
Yeah. Basically, you realize later on that, oh yeah I'm actually building a business now, which I actually figured that I want to do, and now I quite enjoyed it.
Yeah. And I realized I was quite good at it. I did. I thought, isn't everyone good at this? And I realized accidentally that I was very good at operations. I was very good at delegation and that's really what people needed help with. Yes. Getting VAs, but actually making the entire thing work was really what I found. I was very good at. So rolling forward to today, we have 350 employees in the Philippines. We have clients all over the world and we also have an operational efficiency implementation sort of team that process and platforms and stuff like that for clients.
So this is an amazing journey. And it's so weird that you said that you thought that you are like late in the party. I thought exactly the opposite. I don't know, like 10 years ago when I told others that I'm working online, it sounded like a scam or I dunno, you're making money online and stuff. And most of the people who were on that thread, they were either digital nomads or like you said, internet entrepreneurs or something like that.
Yeah. I think I was probably in that world a lot and I came into contact with a lot of the big internet entrepreneurs and I thought, wow, look at these people doing all this crazy stuff. And I was really enticed by that world and it seemed exciting to me. So I read Tim Ferriss's book as well. Tim Ferriss's four hour work week. And I was like, that's what I'm sold.
Yes. That's the gateway drug, but yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. But it changed during the times, I think. Personally I also came from enterprise but from an advertising world and I had to change my, I dunno, ICP or ideal clients from enterprise level clients to startups and scale ups because they were just simply, they were more open to work remotely with others either as a consultant or whatever it is.
That was the same for me. We have dabbled with enterprise clients now, but not back then, but now, yes.
Now yes, now, yes, obviously. And that's the change. So we didn't five years or I don't know, six, one or two or three years before the pandemic people started to realize. Is that okay. So this is like people like working from their laptops. It's a thing now. And people are coding, not just coding, but also doing marketing maybe and operations and stuff like that and HR, finance, you can do it online, whatever. And the pandemic hit and then obviously it was like a big boost for remote workers.
Interesting about the pandemic actually, when the pandemic hit people were saying to me, how are you guys coping and what are you doing? Because we were actually office based by then, but interestingly, I had started out as a virtual company way back at the beginning. And then when we got to about 65 or 70 staff, these were, they were contractors back then. This is way back in the day. I got some advice from a great mentor of mine. And she said, it's time that you grow up this company and you need to come to the Philippines and incorporate here and make everyone an employee and pay their benefits and private health. I can really grow up as a company and move to get office space. And I did all that. And we moved into office space. And within two years after that, the pandemic hit. But the great thing was that we were able to, because we had started as a remote company, we still had the operational framework of a remote company. And I kept all of that, except we were in an office, but it was so fast to just move everyone out. Like I was like what's the problem? We just put them all at home. And for me, that was an easy move. We never went back.
This is exactly what others should do, by the way. Even if you have an office, you should operate as a remote first business anyway, because it's just so faster and smoother and clearer for everyone. But now you've worked with a lot of enterprise clients as well, like I, like myself and other remote workers as well. Now people are actually working remotely. thing. And right now we are debating at all around whether we should return to office or we should work remotely entirely and what is hybrid, what is not.
On that debate about whether we should go back to the office or whether we should be remote. The debate is raging online and there's two sides. There's like the back to office crew.
I know, and no one listen to anyone by the way.
No, and everyone's fighting about it. And I feel like when I'm watching these debates and far be it for me to say that I know the answer. However, when I'm watching the debates, I feel like both sides have lost sight of what the problem actually is. And I feel like location, what we need to do is build digital first companies that render location and trust irrelevant. Build companies that it doesn't matter whether you're in the office, distributed, remote, whatever it is you want to call it. You're just people working in a virtual, like in a digital first company where the office is now in the cloud and we need to create spaces that we all show up to work, collaborate on work, do work, report on work, but not in the physical space. Even if some choose to be in the physical space, that would be my view.
100 percent behind everything that you just said. Yes, people should build remote first companies and by building that location, time and whatever becomes a hundred percent irrelevant. Let's talk about VAs and let's start from the basics. Sorry, that might be super basic for you, but what is a VA? How would you define a VA? Because it's virtual assistance. Okay. Anything else added to that terminology might be useful.
Okay. So I love this question because you might think it's a very basic question. Yeah. However, it's not. Yeah. No. The problem with the word virtual assistant or two words, virtual assistant is that it has gone from, it literally now has morphed into meaning of anyone with a heartbeat who can type through to somebody who can code an app. And that is fundamentally flawed. That is not a virtual assistant. What we have to remember is the word assistant. Just because someone's virtual does not make them a virtual assistant. If somebody is a coder or a developer, if somebody's a writer, that they call themselves virtual assistants, but really an assistant is somebody who is there to assist on process execution is not a specialist. It doesn't mean they can't function as that, but you really want to measure your expectations around What a VA truly is, and that is not to downgrade any of the virtual assistants who might be listening. In fact, I think there's a lot of virtual assistants marketing themselves out there as virtual assistants when actually they're online business managers and should be charging higher and should be marketing themselves differently. But because the word has gone so broad, it's quite confusing for everyone. And then expectations management can be difficult when you do hire one. So if you think about, you want to, when you have an assistant, their role really is to execute process that has been developed by somebody else. Can they develop the process? Sometimes they can in collaboration with you or someone else, sometimes they can, but to expect somebody to walk in and build your systems and processes and then execute as an assistant is a completely is a complete misalignment of expectations. So that's number one, you just have to measure your expectations.
Sorry, I love the terminology, and thank you for clarifying that. Sorry for stopping you, but I also wanted to clarify a little bit about the terminology to me, a VA is someone who's working online, it's virtual, and it's an assistant, meaning that he or she is more, so they are more like a small or a very defined specialist within a niche, meaning you can have a marketing assistant. Marketing virtual assistant was writing some sort of copy, managing your socials, whatever stuff like that. I do have a VA just like that. Or a graphic designer assistance, meaning just reframing pictures and stuff like that, doing that saving out printing out stuff like graphic design process work. I also have that too. Or it can be a business process manager, some business process assistant. So like scheduling stuff being in contact with others, much like an executive assistant as well, where I'm trying to get to is that they need to work in a specific niche. But without a highly specialized knowledge to get some really huge bandwidth of work off the chest from the actual specialist within that niche. So usually what I see as a bad operational example for scale ups people wear many hats, right? Because they have short on staff or whatever, they have their problems. Let's say on the marketing department, because that's where I'm comfortable. A marketing manager usually is the one who's writing the content, designing everything around this, scheduling the content, tracking, reporting so many stuff. Why not use that marketing manager as a skilled, highly skilled professional delivering marketing results and everything that's I wouldn't say not specialized, but more assistant focused work can be done by a marketing VA for that company. So this is how I see that I wouldn't expect at all to from a VA to create the entire process of the system for that company.
So I hear people asking that though, and I'm like, that's just way off. That should come from the manager or the leader of the company. Yeah. Or the owner. So we actually see these problems.
And how do you handle that?
Misaligned expectations. On the discovery calls we are very clear, and usually on, and to be honest on podcasts like this, I go out and podcast a lot of people hear me on podcasts. I really rein in the definition because it is, it has gotten a little out of hand online. Maybe in the smaller end of the market, more than the scale ups are get it. They're pretty okay. Sometimes startup founders may not get it so much, but they also, because there's so much to do there. And there's just, they need a real jack of all trades that can like a wing man or a wing woman that can fly alongside them and do lots of different types of tasks. That's okay. That can happen too, but yeah, it's just to be clear. One of the ways I explain it to if you look at I think a lot of everyone's optimizing for everything right now. Like all companies, they want to optimize their platforms, their processes, but actually what we're not looking at is optimizing our people. So one of the most, now that real estate is gone, more or less, the most expensive asset in any company is their people. And they're allowing like 30, anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of people's knowledge workers time to be taken up every day on repeatable process driven and therefore delegatable. Tasks or processes. And they're not thinking about if I have three people in my business and each one of them is getting paid a hundred grand, let's say, and if I was to take 30 percent of the stuff off their plate, get it out of their heads into a process map and figure out what parts of it can be delegated and get an offshore team strategy in place. What have you actually done? People look at the cost of the offshore team member. What I would say is what you've actually done is cloned. The average of those three people and what are they going to do with their time? And that's the way you really want to be looking at this and that's optimizing for human capital, if that's what you want to call it, or your human capital budgets. And I don't think enough companies are looking at it that way.
I agree. I think we should talk about the price or the cost, shall we say, the cost I think it really hurts the terminology and the image of the VAs. So most founders, and I'm sure that you have this conversation with most of your discovery calls and most of the prospects that you have, most founders view VAs as more affordable, sorry, more affordable alternative to do X, Y, Z. So they put on their cost saving glass when they talk to you. On the other hand, that's not the right attitude. Actually when you hire a VA, it's an extra on your current HR budget, but it's an investment. How can you change the viewpoint from saving costs to doing investment in your people? Because I think that's the golden ticket for VAs. So just to, for, especially for the audience let me give you an example. Okay. When I personally hire my VAs most of the jobs that they do, or most of the tasks that they do I wouldn't say they are simple ones, but delegatable ones that I did before many times, meaning that they are refined and easy to delegate. And teachable. And teachable. Yes. Teachable and trainable. Yes. Teachable, trainable, meaning delegatable. Can I do that on my own? Sure, I can. I did that many times. Why would I pay for someone who's doing virtual assistants for me for a work that I actually can do? Because that's the investment in the business. I will win those hours not by the actual numbers of the hours, but 10 times of those hours, because I don't need to deal with those things anymore. I just maybe, I don't review or whatever.
It's not just a time suck. It's not just actually a time suck. It's an energy suck. Energy. Yeah. And what you're thinking about is like the most expensive time and energy. In any company is being sucked by stuff that maybe you might even like doing it. Like maybe you like being in Canva, creating images for social media, but it is the best use of your time if you want to grow the business or you just want to be a consultant with a lifestyle that you want to go on live a certain way. That's the choice of whoever's listening to this, but it's really, yes, the way to look at it is not about the cost of that. Yes. The cost savings, of course, going offshore. You need to have an offshore, yeah. You need to have an offshore team strategy. And the reason you will have to have an offshore team strategy is to ensure that your onshore team or your main team or whoever, whatever way you want to describe it, are using their time and energy for the work that moves the needle and not for the work the busy work that needs to be done, but doesn't need to be done by them. And I'm a living, walking, talking example of it because for six we had we got to 150 employees before I ever had anybody else in the company outside of the Philippines. And most of the people on the team seriously grew up with me as VAs. Like our financial controller started out as a VA 10 years ago. I trained her up and we're, we met, I mentored her up into roles. We've had HR people, we had trainers, we've had all people, all sorts of people progress on from VA roles with us and go into leadership positions. In my company, and it's only in the last two or three years that we've started, we've got someone in the States, someone in Australia, we've got a smattering of people, but we've got 350 people and we've only got five that are not in the Philippines.
Wow.
It for me, I know I'm talking my own book, but it's just an absolute no brainer. And at the same time, I talked about not wanting to be a corporate mom at the start of this. I'm running this business eight and a half years. I have a seven year old daughter and a four year old son, and I very much was a hands on mom and still am. I'm picking up from school and I'm doing the school runs and it's fine. It works with my lifestyle and that was what I wanted.
Yes, and you don't need to focus on the nitty-gritty details because it's done internally by others. That's the key here. And by the way, by not focusing on the nitty-gritty details you can actually focus on growing the business.
That is how I grew it. Could you need space? You need space in your head. And you can't and I'm with you, like I often will do a process myself for quite a long time until I refine it and I get it really nailed down. And then I delegated, there's always a moment where I think, yeah, this is going right. And now I'm going to teach one of my team members and invariably God, like 80 percent of the time I can get a VA to do it, or I can get a VA to do 80 percent of it. And I only need sometimes a fractional consultant or someone to do the other bit. So that's quite useful as well.
Yeah. So how, if I'm a startup founder or a leader in a scale up, how should I approach having a VA? How would I know which processes and which kind of work or what kind of work can be done by a VA and when should I reach out to your VA. Is there a tipping point maybe?
Yes. So in the early stages, when you're a startup founder, let's say it's just you and maybe there could be another couple of people, but let's say it's small. It's you know, 10 people. Yeah. Under 10 people. Look, under 10 people, I still think you need VAs, but in startup culture as you would know, startup is all about product to market fit. It's all about marketing sales, right? You need to get that right. And often it can be very chaotic and very messy. And it isn't, there aren't nice neat processes and your systems are not really developed yet because everyone's just running around trying to find this. You know what, throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. So in that scenario, in that environment, you still can utilize VAs really well. So founders who are finding themselves doing a lot of different things and are a bit chaotic need a great generalist virtual assistant that can literally like a wingman or wingwoman that flies alongside them and they can delegate stuff ad hoc. Go research this. I need to find out that. Can you book this meeting? This sort of thing, right? That's an assistant in your marketing team. As you just said in marketing, there is so much to doing that needs to be done that is actually grunt work, but it's so important to get it done. And you want to make sure that you're not tying up the time of the marketing. Creatives and the people trying to drive the strategy with trying to do all the doing. So VA is there massively useful in sales, massively useful for sales, follow up even appointment setting, these sorts of things, following people around on LinkedIn. And there's a whole entire LinkedIn process we have now developed at VA. help with. So that's in that stage. And that goes on into scale up. But then once you get into a scale up phase, a lot of operational stuff can start to take over. So as you really develop your systems and processes out, as the work that you tend to do with clients to help them to really get that stuff dialed in. It's always about asking how much of this actually needs to be done by the person with the IP in their head, or really Could we process this up, train it, and actually delegate most of it to a VA? And you will find that you could have teams of VAs in these businesses. And the dividends it pays later are enormous. Not just from the cost saving point of view, but making sure your key people, their energy is being used to drive the company. So I think all the time.
Yes. So as a jumping, but I think we analyze or described two fundamentally different type of ways here. One type of way that most founders pre scale up phase during the startup phase they already have probably have product market fit or something they are still early at the stage. They need someone to help with more so it's a little flexible VA it's a desktop researcher pretty much or People who need to be able to think through a brief, execute on it, but the brief is very broad. Let me give you an example. For example, yeah, it's really loose. For example, sales you want to sell your B2B product to certain type of audience who are by the way, actually attending certain type of events because People in B2B love events, by the way. And the only thing that you need to do is to research all the events, all the exhibitors, all their names, all their contact details, put it in a spreadsheet, and then the salespeople can actually execute on that list. But I know it sounds super simple, but there's a lot of work in it though.
There's a lot of work in it.
It's a week of work or even more. Do you want to do that on yourself as a founder or like a marketing manager? If you have someone in house already. Why not having the marketing manager or the sales manager doing the actual work, like reaching out, outreach and stuff like that or content creation. Do they really need to build a really huge list of out of bases within two, I don't know, three to four days or a week? No, you hire a VA, pay, I don't know a small amount of fee and it will get done and that's it. But and the second part is a more structured or less flexible approach. Once you reach to a certain stage, like a scale up or something, you will probably understand what sticks and what's not, what not sticks within your strategies. So probably you will have some, already some defined processes on how you do things. And that's when you actually need to understand or realize what are those processes that you can outsource to a VA or get the help of a VA small processes only. So those VAs are, I wouldn't say less flexible, but they are more focused on one single process and they execute it every time.
Yes. That's a good point. It's a good point. Actually. I think the founder type VA needs to be someone who is very resourceful. Someone who likes when you give them a problem, they like to go hunt. Yes. And even if they come up with all the wrong answers, they're quite, they're going to go out. There's those types of VAs I call them the real generalist. They're able to fly by the seat of their pants alongside you. Whereas they in the scale up phase, you want to bring on people that like methodical recurring they want to come to work and execute and do a great job, but they don't, they may not want to be challenged too much to be doing sprints and things like that. You just want them executing.
Yeah, it's not just a personal trade, but it can be a personal trade as well. But the narrower your process, the less likely you as a leader need to review that process all the time because it just replicated anyway. So yeah interesting. And can you, I think we should talk a little bit more about the tipping point because when startups need to realize that, okay, so this cannot go on forever. We need to hire someone who can help with the nitty gritty work. Do you have any kind of insights on when others realize that there is a tipping point and they need to hire a VA, what drives them? What is the main pain point?
Yeah, unfortunately, usually when the tipping point has come, it's already chaos. And then you're, it's not that it's too late. It's never too late to get a VA, right? Never ever too late. However, if you leave it until that point where you feel, usually it happens at midnight. The founder is up I've had these stories with clients someone will say I just and my wife were up till midnight answering customer support tickets and we just couldn't do it anymore. And I was like why are you doing that? Like you can, why did you do that in the first place? It's okay because maybe they didn't know what the answers were or the templates or they didn't have process or things just take off. And the problem then is you get a VA in and you just want to throw it at them and say, Oh my God, I'm so relieved. Can you just do this? But unfortunately you have to realize that you're going to go through some pain first because the VA is coming in and you are doing the job and trying to you're trying to build the plane and fly it at the same time. So it's difficult. And if a VA is not fast enough, people just get annoyed and get rid of the VA. I'm like no you need to take a step back here for a moment, unfortunately. And you need to slow down for a second so that you can speed up later. And that can be very difficult for a founder who's in full flight to accept, but it is better because otherwise you're going to crash the plane. It's just a fact of life. So the tipping point is usually too late, but unfortunately people don't realize that they should get help before they need it. And VAs are so cost effective. I got one from my original business when I started it because I had read the four hour work week. I hired one full time and I didn't think I had enough for her to do, but invariably after two weeks I did. So yes, that was how it started.
Yeah. Let's talk about the documentation part because I think it's a hundred percent crucial. You cannot really outsource or delegate anything, which is not written precisely on how to do that and how to replicate that process or task or whatever it is. Now I have two questions actually. Why is that important in general? I think we can talk about that anyway to have a documentation in place by the leadership, not by the VAs, but also the second question. Do you think that the VAs can help with the documentation? So what I'm trying to get there is that the VA is this is the person who A, understands what needs to be done and also creates their own briefing or like all own templates. Obviously collaboratively with the leadership of the company, but still.
Yeah. So let's start at the beginning. So why is documentation important? So forgetting delegation, VAs, people for a second. Documentation and process maps and operational manuals, if that's what you want to call them, but the documentation the most valuable businesses, a business at the end of the day, every single business should be built for sale. Even if you're like, I never want to sell this business, right? Or whatever, it really should be built so that it could be sold. And the most valuable businesses are the ones that somebody could step in and operate tomorrow. And how do you do that? That's by having amazing documentation that is a system that you can put people in to run. So that's the reason that documentation is way more important than I think anybody really realizes from that perspective. The second part of it is, the stronger that your systems process documentation, whatever way you want to call that, the stronger that machine is. The more cost effective the staff are that you can put in to run it. So maybe this is why I've been quite successful at this because I'm actually very good at the documentation piece and the processes and the systems. I'm also very good at automation. So the stronger the documentation is, the lower the cost of people you need to run that machine, whether they be onshore or offshore, it doesn't matter. You don't need all the big, you don't need heads of and the easier it is also to bring in things like AI automation, et cetera, because you already know you've got a deep process. Then you can actually have teams of VAs doing lots of parts of the work, and you can then use your human capital budgets or the big budgets to make sure that you have key people, not too many of them who have that created like the freedom, the creative and strategic freedom to grow your company successfully. So I hope that sort of encapsulates that part of the question.
I actually took a note on one statement that you did, which was amazing by the way. And I'm highlighting it again here. The more efficient your documentation is, the more cost effective is your operation at the very end. So you don't need your heads off and many heads. That's where it's and C level executives.
And you don't need all your A players. Everyone says, I just want to hire A players and let them at it. I'm like, that's going to be very expensive. You might want to have a few A players. And then they walk out the door with the IP in their head. So it's really. Challenging. Yes, you want to have a players, but also I think the real a players out there actually like to join a machine. Nobody wants to join chaos, right? And it protects your company, right? So you can have amazing people and they can leave and you can slot new people in and that works really well. So it's a sort of a risk mitigation strategy as well. How quickly could you replace this person and keep the wheels running? And the second part of the question was more about VAs and I need to revisit. What was your second part of that?
So the question is that we understand why documentation is super important and why it makes sense to actually do that from the very early stages.
Oh, can the VA help?
But can the VA define their roles. That's the main question. Can the VA help the founder to define the briefing, define the template, define the documentation in order, because the most problem you frame the problem really well, that when you are on a full flight mode and answering support tickets at midnight, which is, we are laughing at it now, but I have people are doing that. Jesus, I have endless examples like that all the time from founders and they are surprised why they don't have time to do actual meaningful stuff for the company. But that's like a separate discussion. Hire a VA. Is that when they are in this full energy mode and full flight mode, it's really hard to slow down and think about what the day they are doing. So that can be outsourced to someone else. And the question is how can a VA assist them to shorten that? Shall we say short flight mode or something?
Yeah. So first the quick answer is yes, a hundred percent they can help you and help you a lot, but here's how you do it. You don't say to them, I'm desperate for help. Can you just figure that out and go and build me a process? That's not how it works. Yes. Just video yourself. If you've already been doing it yourself, just stick loom on and video yourself doing it. Give the videos, the VA and say, Can you turn that into a process map for me? Then, here's the trick though. Now I want you to go and execute, so turn it into a process map, some steps, in the video, that have a process map. Then I want you to execute that process. And you see what comes back and you wait for the mistakes because invariably what's going to happen is this. You didn't realize that between steps five and six, there's a way that you think and there's IP in your head. That means that you're thinking about those steps as you do them slightly differently. And the person who doesn't have that IP in their head is going to do those steps potentially differently and maybe not get the same results. Now this is what frustrates people. They go, but I showed her how could she have messed this up? Then you have to watch for mistakes. And then you go back and iterate the process together and you go, Oh, I see. Yes. Okay. Between five and six, we're going to stick a step in there and teach that person the bit that they didn't know and don't shoot them for it. You have more IP than them. And that is how you collaborate on getting your processes and your systems really well oiled. And a VA can absolutely help you with that. Maybe by making a mistake. Sometimes a mistake is a gift because it shows you where the hole in your process is. And that's a good starting point.
I can see that your operate how many, 300 VAs 350 staff. Yeah. Jesus Christ. So people say to me, how do you know everything that's going on? I'm like, I know everything from whose grandmother died to literally everything. Everything that's going on, and it's not I'm a huge Asana user as well. We're an enterprise customer of Asana. We've built OKRs and all the water falling up and down the chain.
There is a dashboard.
There's a way to build that. There's dashboards, there's information tickets and stuff. And I know when I'm needed for help or not.
But I understand and know that you are doing this because the process that you just showed and explained, it's almost mind bogglingly simple but still it's super effective and it really touches the pain point that I also all the time see when again, by step five and six there is a secret IP secret knowledge, secret sauce. You don't even know that you're doing it. You don't even know you have it. Yes, you're not self aware. But that's where the process gets a bottleneck from others. And personally, I usually tell to everyone that when you do that loon video or whatever you use, when you do that briefing, understand that no one, Even yourself, no one is a mind reader. And there is a reason why you are building this business. And there is a reason why that VA is not building your business. So you do have a secret sauce. Yeah. Because just by given the fact that you are the one who is running the show and understand that secret sauce somehow should be transferable at least on an execution level to someone.
I think with it, with documentation as well, here's an interesting thing when you see, and this has happened to me recently. So this is a good story. So recently, like in the last couple of weeks, I've seen a department go in the weeds, like they weren't really getting any results. Like it was just, I didn't know it was a mess in there, but everyone was coming there complaining and we're not getting the right this, that and the other. And I just wasn't getting any results. So I went and had a look and I was like, this is a mess in here. I could see it. So for a start, this is a mess. But instead of shooting the whole lot of them that were in the department, I said, okay, I'm just going to take a look at it. Just let me have a look at what you're doing. I asked each one of them to explain to me the process. They hadn't written it down. So that was my fault because it didn't, it wasn't there. Each one of them had the steps slightly mixed up. Like they were like, Oh, I don't know. Does she? Yeah. I think she does that bit second. Yeah. That was it. Yeah. This sort of thing. So I went in and tidied it up and I thought to myself, I know my role here. Now every founder is not going to be able to do this. I'm just good at this. It's one of my skills. I can do this, but you need to go in. And I just said to them, just leave it with me for a couple of days. I'm going to go in and clean the place up. And I'm going to reformulate a bit of a strategy, a bit of a process. And then we're all going to meet back here and we're going to discuss the new process. And then we're going to roll that out going forward. And the stuff that got messed up, we're going to just try and get a strategy to siphon that off for now and do, and then rolling. So get them on a new train. And everyone was happier. They were all overwhelmed. One of them nearly resigned. I was like no, there's nothing wrong with the job. The problem is the process is a mess, right? Yes. And actually, in truth, it's because I did let them develop that process themselves and it wasn't because they weren't able to develop a process. I'm just better at it than them. And I had some more knowledge about that area and I was able to help and I mentored them into it and now they're off to the races again and it's fine. But I had to slow down for those few days and I was like, Oh, I've got to, I've got to go in there and tidy up the house.
This is funny that you said you're tidy up the house. I always feel like I'm doing like housecleaning work or something like that, but yeah, declutter. Yeah. It's I'm like the Marie Kondo of businesses. It's weird.
That's a good line. You should use that.
That's a good one.
Yeah, maybe I should use that one instead.
Yeah, please. I'm not sure that should fit me. I don't know, but yeah it's like the same. But by the way, and that's a, that's the last question on the VA stuff. I think that's where a company like yours can excel because you can hire a VA two ways, right? As a founder, you hire I don't know, like from platforms, upwork. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. And you do dIY yourself, right? I think it can work for those who are already documenting and already understanding what they are doing so they know that the process can be outsourced to someone else. Although most of the time I see the exact opposite, by the way, but whatever. Or they can go to a specialist company who are actually managing VAs and not because they have a bunch of VAs under their belt, but because they have you who actually go in and explain what the heck needs to be done and how it should be done. Am I correct?
Yeah. We've got a lot of best practice like we've got client success managers that deal with all of our client accounts and really a lot of the reason a client might come to a company like ours over doing it themselves is that we handle training as well. We've, we have our own training platform, so we actually manufacture our own VAs to be totally honest, we don't go out and recruit them for clients. We actually hire people month on month and month for ourselves. And I take risk on doing this because they all go on the payroll and everything. And they're sitting in training programs for anywhere from a month to three months with us. And it's only when we feel that they're really ready and that they're actually VAs, even if they've no experience. And then we start to place them on our client account. The training demands and the onboarding demands and the kind of management demands, a lot of people don't want to deal with that. And we deal with that really well. So that's a lot of the reason and also some scale ups like the idea that we, you can scale us up and scale us down with 30 days notice and the person doesn't lose their job. We actually retain them on our payroll as long as they're not as long as they're not bad egg. And it's our job to try to move them onto a different account. And I think a lot of our clients love that because there's no guilt in letting someone go. If it's not working out or that, or you just need to scale back, we go, no problem. We'll whip 'em back. We put 'em on a different account and it's my job to get out and sell that basically. Of course. And we have supply demand matched all the time.
You pretty much operate like an agency.
We do. But do agencies keep them on the payrolls? Not, yeah. Yeah, but they probably do. Yeah. Yeah, they do.
They do.
So we're, yeah, we're large. Yeah.
Agencies can learn a lot from the internal training program of yours, by the way.
Yeah, we've got big, deep programs.
Yeah. Because most agents, yeah, anyway, don't go under the thread, but yeah but yeah the operational model is much like an agency of a marketing agency or advertising agency. They also make money on the margins and stuff like that. It's the same model. I like it by the way.
The other one is culture. Some people have like big teams of VAs with us. So they might have eight or 10 VAs. We give them their own results coach. We organize all of their team building events and the parties and whatever things the clients want to do. We facilitate all of that. And then ones that only have small numbers of VAs with us, we have team buildings and they're all part of a team. We do weekends away. We do dinners out. We've all sorts of fun things going on in our culture. And that means the client doesn't have to worry about the VA just sitting on their own in the Philippines or somewhere with a laptop they have support, a lot of support.
Yeah. That's super important.
And they have health benefits and all these kinds of things. Yeah.
Nice. And time zones. So most of your people are based in the Philippines or APAC area. Yeah. We are Philippines based and we operate 24, five. So we don't do weekends because they just fundamentally like to have weekends off. And I agree with that, but we do operate 24 hours. So we do, we facilitate the U S time zone in their time zone.
And most of your, and then you have clients in weird time zones as well. I don't know, for example, us like Europe we have your, yeah. So that's like a mid shift in the Philippines. Night shift is the U S and day shift. We operate the three, three time zones really is what we do. And I was, I used to be very against the night shift when I first started it. And then I went to the Philippines and I realized there's such a night culture there because it's alive at night and I thought, and some people like working at night. I've offered to have some of our longer term people. I've said would you like to go to a day shift? And they're like, no, it suits my lifestyle. And my wife works at night too, or whatever they've got the they're just the way their life is built. Yeah, that's how it is. Yeah. So totally.
One last question. I always ask this from from my guests. How do you see the future of remote work or flexible work or I don't even know how to call that.
I think it's a bit like the AI conversation. People say to me, what do you think is AI this? And what do you think about it? I'm like one thing I know is the cat's out of the bag and it's not getting back in. So whether we like it or not work is changing and it's a good thing. I do agree. It's a good thing for the planet. It's good thing for people. It's a good thing for parents, for non parents, whatever way it's good for everyone. I do think fundamentally, it is also good for companies. But they need the right operational framework to make it work so that they're not asking in their heads the question, how do I know my people are working? All these stupid questions that are silently going on in the heads of certain companies. I think they, there's a bit of work to do and we're not quite there yet. Some companies are just not able to catch up yet. They're not there yet, either mentally or operationally. I also think though, I like to highlight to people that it's not new, like distributed teams. I worked on trading floors in the nineties where we had direct lines and microphones that went straight into the London offices and the New York offices. And it was like a collaboration across time zones and across continents. And technically, although teams were in the office, but the other team was distributed from you. So we were remote from each other. We were in an office, but we were still remote from each other. So it's just an evolution of the concept and to try to wrap our heads around it. And also accepting that some people like to work at the office. Some people lament the death of the office.
And that's fine.
That sort of thing. That's okay too. It's okay for, I don't think we should be bashing those that go, I really the office. I like the commute and I want to go to work. That's okay too. It's really, we have to just try to move the conversation towards location irrelevancy where possible.
Yeah. Office is optional. Thank you for taking this late night call for you. I know it was a little late in Australia. Appreciate your flexibility on time zones. It's really appreciated. Where can people find you? If people want to hear more about what I've been talking about, I tend to talk about this on LinkedIn, where we met. So I think LinkedIn is definitely the next, like it is the networking place right now for business. It's an amazing platform. So Barbara Turley over there, you can follow me on LinkedIn. And if you're ready to come and talk to us about how VAs can maybe help your business, please come to the virtual hub com book a call with our team. You won't get to speak to me 'cause I'm the master delegator, of course. But I do have trained an amazing team to speak to our clients all over the world and have a chat about whether we can help you or not. And if we can we absolutely will. And if we can't, we will send you in the right direction of what to do next.
Thank you. Thank you for plugging that in. Really do appreciate your time for this call and all the insights that you shared. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
