2020 – The Essential Role of Virtual Assistants in Modern Business with The Virtual Hub’s Barbara Turley

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1:05With us right now, it's Barbara Turley. Barbara, you are the founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub. You're found online at thevirtualhub.com. Barbara, thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me, Josh. Well, I'd love to learn a little bit more about what The Virtual Hub is, what you do, and who you serve. Sure. So we typically serve scale-up companies who are in that phase where their operation starts to become quite a thing. And what we find is that the owners of the business or the managers in the business tend to start getting bogged down even more in the busy work that needs to be done, but not necessarily by them.

1:44And we integrate great cost-effective support teams into those businesses to free up the time and energy of those people so that they can go on and grow that business and have the impact that they really want. yeah and this is the world that that you watch uh you know obviously staffing and building teams and uh you know kind of knowing as well you know how we can connect with remote teams to be able to you know do the things that we really really want what's the state of the i'd say the state of the union as it were uh for you know all things va and staffing and virtual teams right now Yes. So the look, the virtual staffing, remote virtual assistants, this whole industry has been around, obviously, for a very, very long time.

2:32And some people think it's just new, but it's not. It's been around for a couple of decades now. But it has exploded, particularly since the COVID years, of course, because more and more companies that wouldn't traditionally have looked at, you know, remote teams. COVID came along, changed everything. Now it doesn't matter. different house, different state, different country doesn't matter, essentially. So more and more companies are really embracing this. I think the other side of it is as well that, you know, obviously since COVID as well, we've had interest rate increases. We've had issues around difficulty getting capital, you know, margin squeeze, employee engagement is plummeting.

3:10All of the issues that are coming are seeing companies think really deeply about their people budgets and their people strategy and they've realized a lot of these issues and the burnout the lack of engagement etc is coming because people are actually really really overwhelmed with all the busy work there's a lot of work to be done sometimes this hiring freezes and in this context what you really want to start to do is think about how do we deliver how do we get more out of our current resourcing out of our current people out of our current capacity of course you can do that with platforms and tools like Asana or even AI, which is, of course, a big topic that's coming.

3:49But there's still a big place where people are really needed. And I think that's just the landscape is changing in that people are companies are more open to doing remote and are now looking at this strategy for a whole host of reasons that I've mentioned. Yeah, well, you know, there are a lot of ways, I think, to find great team members, you know, Certainly, there are plenty of platforms that have existed for a long period of time.

4:21And platforms, let's say like an Upwork or Fiverr, some of these other platforms solve certain needs, but there are problems that are inherent with those types of platforms. And obviously, I talk with a lot of leaders and it's really great you know, depending on what the role is that you're looking to fill, to be able to work with what, like with exactly what you do with the virtual hub. Do you mind maybe sharing how the virtual hub is a significant improvement over say other platforms? Sure. Yes. So of course you can, you know, you can go online and you can get, you know, they call it cheaper staff offshore.

5:07That's, you know, you can do that and maybe get a home run doing that. But what I would advise is usually companies or businesses, by the time they come to us, they're already too busy for this. And I think if you're going to use some of your time and energy in recruiting and in managing people, you probably want to save that time and energy because it does take a lot of time and energy to get the right people. You want to save that for the really key roles and for the key people that you already have within your business. If you're going to go out looking for what I call the support layer. So the support layer is all the doing that has to happen, you know, beneath certain roles or in certain roles.

5:43If you're going to go out and try and find assistance or a team to actually deal with that support layer, it's going to take you a lot of your time going online, sifting through resumes, interviewing tons of people. when typically this what we're talking about here is a support layer role. If you partner with a company like us, we do all of that heavy lifting. We also manage training, HR, culture, all sorts of things. So we're very much a plug and play premium type service in that regard. And companies like that because we even have seven to 10 day onboarding. So it's one call coming in. Hey, we need a support layer.

6:22We get what you're talking about. What are the next steps? when can we get started? So, you know, I think other things we see companies doing is that, you know, they sort of go, yeah, I think they're having an assistant to be great, but they're just not willing or ready to put in the amount of work that it's going to take to find one, then cultural fit, integrating them inside the business. And then the third point I would make, which is more on the on the client side, I think sometimes certain companies or people think, well, we're all really busy. I know, let's just throw a body at the problem.

6:55So I call this like literally you go online, you find someone and you dump a load of tasks on them. You don't treat them like a proper employee. You don't treat them like a part of the team. You know, all of these issues, this is where things start to unravel. So realistically, I think we help with a lot of the heavy lifting of that with a client too. And in addition, we have a final piece of the puzzle, which we built a couple of years ago because we saw the need. A lot of companies are not set up with the right operational frameworks in order to make remote work work. Now that's a whole other topic, not just about assistance, but if you want to make remote and distributed teams work really effectively, you need the right tooling, the right architecture.

7:37Online, you need to build the company digital first and everybody needs to be connected in the cloud. And that doesn't mean Slack and Zoom, right? Slack and Zoom don't make a digital company essentially. So we also have consulting and implementation to help with certain platforms like Asana, for example, or Monday, we do all sorts of things in that way. And that helps when you also have a remote support team to really integrate them properly and for everyone to feel very, very connected within the mission and within the company. Yeah. Barbara, and I love that you kind of talked about, you know, tips for ensuring success, which I think is just so critical because I know it can be very problematic and very expensive.

8:24You know, if we get going with someone and it doesn't work out and it can be easy for leaders or team members or hirers to say, well, it's the VA's fault. You know, they just kind of gave up or, you know, they're not as good as they were, you know, during the first month or so. What tips would you provide so that, and again, this could go for, you know, obviously someone that we've sourced through the virtual hub, or, you know, maybe it's our own, you know, employee that's a little bit more local. But are there any best practices that you think are just very valuable to ensure that people stay connected, that everyone feels rewarded everyone feels motivated we're creating great outcomes together sure yeah the number one tip I can share and this applies of course to remote teams or a support layer that we would put in but also this applies to any company in today's environment where regardless of even if you're all in an office together there will always be somebody who is not in that day or is out on the road that day distributed and remote teams are not new everyone thinks it's new since COVID but there were always people who weren't in the office.

9:42You know, if you think about it, it's actually been that way for a very long time. But in today's world, you know, with hybrid working and all this sort of thing going on, you need to change the structure of how we work. So, of course, platforms really, really matter, but also process of how we use the tools also matters. You need to have, so starting at the beginning, you need to have a design that the entire company agrees upon. For example, you can't, I mean, lots of companies are doing this wrong. They've got one team that likes Asana, another team that likes Jira, another team that likes ClickUp, and everyone's allowed to choose their own adventure with the platforms that they use.

10:20And while you might think that that's a great way to allow people to, you know, explore whatever they want to do or do it the way they want to do it, from a company perspective, there's no cohesion. Right. So you need to all be rowing the boat in the same direction. You all need to be in the one boat for a start and then rowing the boat in the same direction from a company perspective in order to achieve your goals. So there has to be some, you know, discussion about the architecture we're going to use, the tools we're going to use in order to get into this digital first realm. The second piece of it is the process around how we use the tools.

10:55So, for example, a lot of people are talking about it now. Again, it's been around for multi decades, but objectives and key results are absolutely a game changer for how you deal with remote teams. And that trickles right down to support layer assistance. And if you're focusing on, you know, what are we trying to achieve and what are the key results we're expecting to to to see that we've achieved these objectives? It means that your conversations become more about the outcomes, about where we're driving to and the processes that we're doing to get us there rather than watching work hours, etc.

11:30And you can have those conversations with your entire team at the beginning to make it very, very clear what is the process around how we're going to work together and how we're going to get success. You can also kind of lay down the foundation of if we don't do this, then here are the steps we're going to take along the way, be it coaching, training, mentoring, discussing it. And eventually we're going to say, well, is this a people problem, et cetera? So it makes those conversations a lot easier later in a remote environment where problems around transparency and visibility are the key issues, right?

12:03Because we can't see each other. We feel like it's a black hole. So therefore, we've got to plug those gaps in visibility and transparency. And if you do that really, really well, and you get this kind of platform and process set up right, then you can plug, you know, a lot of support layer people in because now you've built a machine. I mean, this is business 101, right? This is the, you know, Michael Gerber's e-myth. It's all, it's all of these, these things, you know, put into, put into practice, but the amount of companies that are still not doing it is phenomenal. I see it all the time. And they invariably blame the lowest person in the company, which is the assistant who, you know, doesn't get it, isn't trained and all of the above, but really you're not putting them into a system that is designed for anyone really to get success and then you churn through people now the issues are real though you you do have people issues you know we're talking not a widget we're talking people who walk and talk and change their mind and do the wrong thing and all that sort of thing but from a company perspective if you build it this way and you have the right communication flow and platform architecture then you're a long way towards being able to integrate great support layer cost effectively and get the most out of the VA world or the remote world.

13:19Yeah. Okay. Give a couple more. I wanted to ask you one more question before I kind of talk about next steps for our friend that's listening. AI has likely impacted your world quite a bit. And my suspicion is that more and more employers are probably asking about that because they're looking for efficiency or they're looking for, you know, some sort of enabling that, or, you know, can I get, you know, talent that knows how to use AI enabled tools so that, you know, we can do more things together. Is that, are you observing that or is that just my imagination? I don't know. No. So with AI, great topic.

14:06So AI, when it first launched, I mean, like many of us, we were thinking, oh my gosh this you know so many businesses are dead the reality is of course ai is it's amazing it is moving super fast in two years time we have no idea how amazing this is going to be what it's going to cannibalize like all sorts of things however on the flip side what i am really seeing is that while the tools are amazing i personally don't really use the tools because i want my team using the tools right so i still you know we have managed to get uh better work and our support people are able to like the the assistants at that layer are actually more effective than they ever were before because of ai now but i don't know whether it's fully replacing them because you still need someone to run the tools and to you know if you're snipping this podcast for example of course there are ai tools that will do it for you we've tried them all out they are good um i'm personally not going to spend my day doing that though i'm still going to get my assistants to do that and just speed them up.

15:08And it means that we can do more content, more snipping, more and better. But sometimes we find the tool doesn't quite get the snippet that we think, you know, we sort of still have to work with it. So I think - Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I agree. It's okay, but I often find that we're sort of re-snipping it going, oh, I'd miss this bit or that bit or - Yeah. Specifically, I think if we're talking about content and content is still, you know, there's, there's definitely an AI voice and it takes quite a bit of massaging plus, you know, editorial oversight. Now that said, I think leaders, listen, if you want to monkey run with AI, use it for planning, use it for strategy, use it for decision-making, use it for mind mapping, use it for, you know, a SWOT analysis or something like that.

15:51We use, I use it all the time for just like thinking things out and potentially creating SOPs that I can then give to my team, you know, so that, you know, I feel like I can resource them better or in a way that they deserve me to resource. And I think historically that's been a challenge for me. You know, I was like, you know, do I come up with, you know, robust SOPs or have I relied on them to kind of figure it out with more high level direction. And I would say if I'm criticizing my own past behavior, pre-ChatGPT and AI tools, I would say I did a, I do a much better, let me just reflect on the positive.

16:34I do a better job today. Yes. And look, let's be honest, writing SOPs is like sticking needles in your eyeballs for most people. I mean, I actually quite like it. Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay. I don't feel so bad. No, mostly it's such tedious work. It's painful. I mean, the only reason I sort of get off on it is because I'm the type of person who I'm naturally lazy and I just think oh my god if I could process this up and I think to myself if I could just process this thing I could delegate that and then I don't ever have to do this again I can train it and delegate it and I'm really good at like I've created processes and systems from all sorts of things that you wouldn't think you could get support assistance or virtual assistance as we call them to do but I've been very successful at that so I'm very passionate about the process mapping thing so whatever helps you to get the processes done is an absolute game changer because doing them yourself is tedious right so that's okay you're totally normal you're most people with this and if you can use ai i mean use it whatever way you can um and then you can use it to iterate process and say you know watch for mistakes and go like a mistake happened here because sometimes the person doing it doesn't have the ip that you did when you're thinking through the process so you deepen things, but you know, whatever way you can use AI.

17:52But, but having said that though, the key point here is, I think that you've really highlighted, whatever way you get to the processes and the systems to build your company, whatever way you get there, it's important that you get there for a number of reasons. Number one, you'll have happier people. Number two, it'll expose the support layer that's in your business. And there'll be lots of processes that you'll go, well, 80 % of that process doesn't need me. So why am I doing 100 % of it? I should really get a VA to do 80 % of it and I do the 20%. People have very all or nothing thinking when it comes to this sort of thing.

18:27And then, of course, the final bit is we're all in business, obviously to create impact and to do amazing things, but it is also an asset. And the better your business is built, the more systemized a business is, the higher the asset value of that company and the cheaper the support layer you can get in to run it. So there's a whole myriad of reasons why you would want to have a well-built, well-oiled, systemized, process-mapped, digital-first type company. And putting in the support layer or virtual assistants or support teams or however you want to call it is kind of the big icing on the cake.

19:06But the real key is actually building the company properly. 100%. Your website, thevirtualhub.com. Barbara, when somebody goes there and they're looking to build out their dream team, what would you recommend? You know, I see something here. I don't know if you were going to mention this. I'm going to mention it. You've got a button right on the front that says, watch the masterclass. And that looks like it's pretty valuable. It's how to delegate and scale your business. That plus anything else you'd recommend for a friend that's listening? Yeah, so that masterclass is definitely by me. I mean, I have a background in the financial industry and scaling companies, etc.

19:44So it's really my philosophy unpacked a bit more than the things we've been talking about here. So I'd really encourage anyone to go and look at that masterclass. In addition, excuse me, of course, on LinkedIn, I'm talking a lot about the issues that we discussed here today. And so please come and follow me on LinkedIn, Barbara Turley. I think it's Barbara-Turley. There's a board slash IN. Maybe we can put that in the show notes. I am. Hi over there. And of course, you know, if you want to explore this further, do book a call with our team. The guys are great. They're not salespeople. They're there to try to help you figure out how we would fit into your company or not.

20:21And what level are you ready for this? Should you do this? Can we help? How we would help, et cetera. So please book a call and go and chat to the guys over there about what we can do. Excellent. Barbara Turley, founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, found on the web at thevirtualhub.com. Barbara, thank you. Thanks, Josh.

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