Watch this interview with outsourcing expert Barbara Turley, founder of The Virtual Hub, covering topics on hiring and building remote teams.
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For the past years, we’ve tested, failed, and succeeded in a number of different ways as we built the strong team we have today. In this interview with an expert in outsourcing and hiring, we discuss these key topics that you need to consider when adapting remote work:
– What holds businesses back when technology changes
– What people do wrong when they go remote
– Why you’re crazy if you use email for internal staff tasks (and what to do about it)
– How to remove yourself from being the ‘goto’ for all your customers
– Our favourite simple yet powerful tech tools to connect your team from anywhere
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Get tech help from our team: www.itGenius.com/chat
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To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
Peter Moriarty: Hi, what’s up guys? Pete Moriarty here. I have with me today the amazing Barbara Turley from The Virtual Hub. And I’m going to be sharing a live interview. This is happening live, and this is just our petermoriarty.tv Live series, chats with close business owners of mine who I think are very relevant to chat to with the current economic situation. And super excited to have Barbara here. So, if you’re listening in Live, please go ahead and drop your comments below. We’ll be reading them. I’ll be answering your questions with Barbara … I’ll be asking your questions to Barbara, and yeah, let’s get it kicked off. So, Barbara, let’s bring you in. Thanks so much for coming along. Great to have you here.
Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me, Pete. It’s exciting to finally have a chat with you-
Peter Moriarty: It’s been a [crosstalk]-
Barbara Turley: … some remote work.
Peter Moriarty: Yeah, it’s been a while. We’ve known each other since back, I think we bumped into each other maybe in the Entourage days when I was doing some work with-
Barbara Turley: Long time ago.
Peter Moriarty: … those guys. Very long time ago, and I’ve observed your business blossoming, and really happy about that. And we’ve been able to do some work together, which is awesome as well. I see tickets coming back and forth from our teams, which is really cool. So yeah, tell us about how you’re going at the moment, and how’s the business?
Barbara Turley: Yeah sure, I think the … I mean, business is actually okay. It’s been an interesting five or six weeks, I don’t know how far into this whole crisis we are right now. I’m definitely tired, as I’m sure many people are.
Peter Moriarty: Yep.
Barbara Turley: In that I think the first sort of three, four weeks of this crisis for everyone has been that whole protect, triter sort of sure up your operations, figure out what the hell we’re doing next. I mean, I have an office-based operation, The Virtual Hub has a 140 staff-
Peter Moriarty: Wow.
Barbara Turley: 115 or so of those are in an office in Cebu in the Philippines, and we had to move a 110 staff into a work from home situation when 35% of them had no computer and no internet at home.
Peter Moriarty: Wow.
Barbara Turley: So that has been very tiring.
Peter Moriarty: Crazy.
Barbara Turley: I mean, a great lesson in leadership, I mean in crisis management. I think we’ve all sort of gone through this period. And now we’re coming out at the back of that, and I’m thinking, “There’s been a lot of lessons in that, and hubs do that successfully.” One of the reasons I think we were so successful with doing it is because I started off the business as a work from home model. And when I am a client with itGenius, we were a work from home. So we were already kind of set up and knew how to do it. But still very, very challenging over the last few weeks. And trying to get your head out of that and intellect, pivoting and creation mode. And what do we do next? And do we sell, and I have found that quite challenging mentally. Every day you get up, sort of like, need to find your fight in this market. So, that’s where I’m at today anyway.
Peter Moriarty: So, I’m assuming you’re a active CEO in the business?
Barbara Turley: Very much.
Peter Moriarty: How did you go leading that change with your team? You got a 140 employees, and you had to say, “Hey guys, your whole paradigm is about to be changed.” How did you go handling that?
Barbara Turley: Yes, so I think one of the big lessons I learned, and I don’t think I did this deliberately. I think it was just by accident that I did this right. I resisted the emotional roller coaster that was coming. So for example, we were starting to get tickets from clients, “Oh, my poor VA is scared, and I don’t see why my VA can’t work from home.” And I had to push back on that, because I was like, “In the early days before we were in this situation, I had to speak to some clients and to VAs.” I had to say, “We act as one team here, our culture is very much one team.” And I said, “Whatever decision we make right now is going to be across 110 staff, not one. Especially not one who work part time for a client.” Just because of this fear mongering and we’ve got a situation that has not yet gotten to that point. So I learned very quickly that you need to have stages of response, and to stay grounded in an emotional situation like that where people are pushing back on you. To stay grounded in your leadership I found hard, but it definitely paid, it paid back in the end, because I got everybody onto the same page. And then when it came time to move, what I started doing was planning the move with my very high leadership team, despite staying grounded and resisting it on the floor. And then it gave us time to plan what we were actually going to do across that many people. Because if you allow one person to go working from home, then you’ve got a domino effect. And we would have been killed with that, because we didn’t yet know at that stage that so many people didn’t have computers and didn’t have internet connection. So when we found that out, then I had to go to the clients and say, “Okay, now that we’ve stayed grounded and we have gotten our facts together, we have unearthed that we have this issue, and we are dealing with it. And I asked for the clients to support us in making the decision across the whole company and not just for their VA, because they were also thinking about their own VA. So yeah, that’s been a major lesson and kind of I definitely think that’s something others can learn from to try to stay grounded in a heightened situation like that. And make the right decisions at the right time with the right planning.
Peter Moriarty: I think that’s 101 for CEO, isn’t it? Like protection of the organization, and if you start making decisions based on one individual staff member, or one individual customer, that’s the death of you.
Barbara Turley: Absolutely. Having your employees and your clients understand that. And I actually got lovely emails back from clients who said, “Gee, I had never thought about it from that perspective. Thank you so much for sharing that that is the challenge.” Because otherwise I looked like this cold hearted CEO who wouldn’t let the VAs work from home. I was like, “Well, it’s not actually the case.” So yeah, the clients were just so supportive then when we did move. And we had to tell them that, “You’re going to have internet challenges. There are going to be things that are out of our control. There are going to be potentially data security issues.” For some of our clients they won’t be able to get past those security issues, and we then had to think about, “Well, if we have people staying in the office, how do we do that safely?” So we went to the park, we have our own private driver. We have a bus, we pick people up. We’re catering all their food, and there’s only about 10 people left in the office anyway. But we look after them very deeply, and they’re still at the office, and they’re working away there. So yeah, it’s just getting around the challenges.
Peter Moriarty: So your email that you sent us being a customer of you as well, your email that you sent was one of the first emails that I received from a small business.
Barbara Turley: Was it?
Peter Moriarty: Yes.
Barbara Turley: I felt late.
Peter Moriarty: Oh?
Barbara Turley: I never do late. I did [crosstalk].
Peter Moriarty: No, you were a week before we sent anything out, and it actually really led how I approached that communication of our response to our customers, so I so appreciate that. But I think what I appreciated in what you did communicate was that, “Here’s what we’re doing, and we thought about it, and we have an action plan.” There were plenty of our suppliers that we didn’t hear a peep from. And we were reaching out to them, kind of go, “Hey, is everything okay?” So to receive that and to have it, for us it was in a timely manner. That was awesome. So, I [crosstalk] for that.
Barbara Turley: Thank you for hearing that, because I think in this role as well, you don’t hear enough. Like I got a few emails from clients, and people, also friends and stuff. But it’s good to hear that, because I think in a time like this you also don’t know that you’re making the right decisions. And you don’t know how it’s going to resonate. And I decided to go the completely raw approach, and you probably saw my videos. I was like, “Here’s why I’m uncomfortable with going back to this work from home model that I started with.” And I was very raw, and our clients about the way that was, the case, but I did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do for the people.
Peter Moriarty: Yes, yeah totally. I didn’t see that video, but I saw the emails and the responses with that. So I want to dig in a little bit about the business and chatting with you. I’ve actually had on my mind to call you and connect with you and chat about a few things. I want to chat about the kind of Philippines and the outsourcing and that journey. But I’m mostly interested in how you’ve transformed from a business that kind of started, you were previously based here in Australia, and I know that the business is now domiciled outside of Australia. You’ve recently moved to France with your family, which is awesome. Apart from locked down and not being able to ski. So, I’m interested, because we’re a business that’s going through growth and scale and we’re staring to attract international customers, and we’re starting to think about, “Okay well, is Australia the best place for us to be incorporated?” And all those kind of questions start to come up. What was your journey like there? I’m curious.
Barbara Turley: Yeah look, looking back it’s been … There were times it was so frustrating, because I didn’t have anyone to really talk to about these decisions. And [inaudible] my advisers, I mean, it just … That’s why I’m happy to share with anyone, the journey. It started of, it was such … I call it my accidental business. I mean, honestly, I had done business plans for other businesses before, and this one sort of started over my shoulder by accident. And I turned round, it was like, “Oh my God, there’s a business right there.” In that I was a business coach in Australia, doing okay. I wasn’t that into it to be honest. I think I was an all right coach, but I wasn’t that into it. And I found I was enjoying more doing systems and processes with clients, and getting VAs in to help them, just so we can get on with strategy. And I had a VA in the Philippines that started, like a couple of her friends. And before I knew it I was getting more demand for VAs then I was for business coaching. And was finding I was enjoying talking about that more. And then I literally was overnight going, “I think there’s a business in this. I don’t know why people would pay me to do it when you can just go online and get your own VA?” But people seemed to struggle with this. So The Virtual Hub was literally born very by accident, no website, no business plan, nothing. And the first six months were hell, absolute hell. We did loads of sales, but I rapidly started to see why people needed help with outsourcing. Because it’s not as simple as people think, as you know. You can go to Upwork and get a VA. You might get a home run on your first try, but the majority of people have had really bad experiences. The VA would even had very bad experiences with clients.
Peter Moriarty: Yes, yeah.
Barbara Turley: So the combination of this whole delegation gap, communication gap, and inability to use online tools like Asana or G-Suite or Hangouts or … Just this inability to connect properly. And then on the VA side, not trained properly. They’ve learned their skills through a sort of mish-mash of projects on Upwork and they’re not really deeply trained. So the business today, fast forwarding five, six years. Obviously I’ve got a company in the Philippines. I decided to legitimize the whole thing a few years ago and actually have employee, and we can dig into how I did that. We’re about a 125 staff at the moment, office-based, temporarily, I don’t know way it can work from here. But yeah, we’re domiciled in Hong Kong with the Philippine structure as well, and we have clients all over the world. So we operate 24-hours. Yeah, but it was a labor of love in that the first six months … I sort of after about eight months I nearly shut it down, and I was like, “I can’t do this anymore.”
Peter Moriarty: Wow.
Barbara Turley: Because I was just getting slammed all day by Facebook Messenger, Skype Messenger, email. Anywhere a client could get to me, they just wanted to complain about how bad the VAs were, and honestly, some of those early VAs were terrible. They were terrible.
Peter Moriarty: Yep, yep.
Barbara Turley: So I did rebuilt it after about six months, and then I spent about 18 months building a platform where we train clients, we train VAs, we nailed our recruitment process. I mean, we nailed it again two years ago. And then you just start to build over time, and you have to keep iterating and moving, so.
Peter Moriarty: So how much of that training is training businesses had to work with remote teams? And how much of it is like the Philippines culture, like this is how to work with remote work in the Philippines?
Barbara Turley: Most of it’s about how to use the systems and how to work with virtual teams, so I’m sharing it through my podcast. I have a podcast that I produced out of frustration initially, called The Virtual Success Show, where we actually talk about all the tactical things like how often should I talk to my VA? Very, very tactical sort of stuff.
Peter Moriarty: Amazing, awesome.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, lots of shows on that kind of thing. And we train clients more on that. We should do more on culture. But to be honest, I think we actually recruit people who are able to deal with the Western culture, as opposed to getting clients to try to cope with the Philippine culture so much. It’s a tricky one. Lots of our VAs are well capable of dealing with Western clients, so we’re … We don’t find that such a big problem anymore.
Peter Moriarty: I guess then like you start to get into the territory, and we’ve had the challenge ourself. You start to get into the territory of business advising. And that’s like, “Oh you know, how far do I want to go down that road telling you how to run your business? Your culture is your responsibility in a way.” But also I guess your job is to really gear people up to be as prepared as possible to take this step in their staffing.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. I think one of the things I do around culture and … Like communication is a tricky one, because I mean, how many marriages are falling apart because of bad communication. It’s a problem in society in general. So there’s only so much you can teach people about how to communicate more effectively. And I’m still a [inaudible] myself, trying to do it better. But we do teach clients certain things that we’ve learned. We’re not saying it’s best practice, it’s just like I try to share my own experiences and mistakes I’ve made, and what I’ve done to fix those mistakes. As opposed to saying, “Here’s the bible according to Barbara Turley as to what you should be doing.” I’m like, “Well, I don’t know if it can work for you, but this is what works for me, and for the whole company as a whole.”
Peter Moriarty: I’m just really happy sharing other people’s ideas. I just love to say, “Hey, I’ve got this idea from this person, you might like it. Got this idea from this person, you might like it.” I’m just a hole for other people’s ideas, and I just keep spinning them off.
Barbara Turley: I just make all my own mistakes and then I come out and say, “Hey, this was excruciating for me, I’m hoping nobody else has to go through this pain.”
Peter Moriarty: Don’t do this.
Barbara Turley: I’m willing to share. Even with the structuring and all the entities and stuff, desperately difficult to manage it, yeah. So happy to bring all this.
Peter Moriarty: We’ve got heaps of people watching, which is great. Thanks so much for everyone who’s joined us, Ann, Alistair, Neil, Michael, Nadi. Please guys, drop your questions below if you’d like me to ask Barbara any particular questions. We’re talking about outsourcing. We’re talking about remote teams. We’re talking about the current economic situation. So, please let us know. Or if you just want to say hi, that will be amazing. Do let us know if you have any aha’s or anything that’s interesting to you. So, I’ve always been of the opinion that when hiring, if you’re going for your first few hires, you should absolutely do it through an agency. We obviously we hire direct. And I want to help people build effective teams. And if it’s more cost effective, then that’s easier, and that’s a good thing. But it’s kind of like giving someone a loaded gun saying, “Hey, go to Upwork, or go to online jobs, and yeah, just use this job ad template and you’ll find someone great.” It’s just not that simple. So I’ve always said, “Look, if you’re hiring your first one to three international team members, go through an agency.” What do people do when they then scale up? Do you find that people work with you for a number of years, kind of building up the initial team and then they go to a more traditional BPO type business? Or do businesses end up growing with you and staying with you over a long period of time? What does that look like for you?
Barbara Turley: Funnily enough they end up staying with us and growing with us over a long period of time. I’ll tell you why. We start to get … When you get teams that are growing to sort of … And then we don’t have loads of these, I’d like more, but they are going to find these people. We obviously, one of the things that we do very well at The Virtual Hub, I mean, I’ve invested a lot of money in this, is we have a very strong operations team. We have a very strong HR team, and we have great team leaders, and we have great culture going on. So, to pick your people out of that then, and move them into your own, they’re already in an office, so to move them all to work from home and to be their own siloed thing, I just think business owners are too busy by the time they get to that point. And when it’s humming well, usually what starts to happen is, they’re coming to us and saying, “Hey, what I’d like now is my own person to manage my team on the floor.”
Peter Moriarty: Nice, cool.
Barbara Turley: So we’ve had some of those. And if the team got big enough, we would siphon off a room and actually put their own brand there if they wanted to. We haven’t done that yet, but. So I think working from home, look I’m a fan of it obviously. I do it myself, although I have kids now and I’m strongly thinking I need to change tact. Think I’d like to get out of home, so. It’s almost impossible. But to do work from home with large teams, I know you do it and you got 35 or so staff. I think I did it up to about 60 VAs, and at around 50 it’s to kind of implode for me personally. I wasn’t been able to do it. And I think for some business owners it could implode at five or six. And I think they, some people would still want the house life. Others like the professionalism of the environment and the computer systems and all that sort of stuff, so.
Peter Moriarty: Look, I have those days. Probably one week out of four each month I have one of those blow ups where I go, “Right, we’re going to get an office.” And so yeah.
Barbara Turley: It’s challenging, very challenging.
Peter Moriarty: It’s challenging, yeah.
Barbara Turley: Even with great people.
Peter Moriarty: Absolutely.
Barbara Turley: I still have some people who work from home, and I would say that it’s still challenging. And when we were looking at growing and moving everyone home, even some of my original people who are in Manila now, they work from home. There’s a few of them left, and even they said to me, “Don’t do it Barb. Don’t do it, it’s like a slippery slope.” Because we all have to manage it then.
Peter Moriarty: Yeah.
Barbara Turley: Now we before, we have to do it with the virus, and it’s working okay, but yeah, it’s not as easy as people think.
Peter Moriarty: Awesome. I don’t think there’s a perfect answer there, because we’ve had both, we’ve worked with so many businesses that have both. And I think it’s a kind of jury’s out kind of thing. So we’ve got a question here from Neil asking, “Barbara, do you manage the team from Australia or Philippines?” So where do you prefer to manage from?
Barbara Turley: Say that again. Well, I mean I live in France.
Peter Moriarty: Where are you managing [crosstalk]? So Barbara just moved to France, Neil, so she’s managing from there. So, interesting, 24-hour operation. How do you go managing that? Because my fear, we’re in the process of expanding our hours, and eventually we’ll go to 24-hours as well. My fear is that I’ll either need to work 24-hours, or that I’ll have to have management team run off their feet 24-hours. How does that work as a CEO? How do you make sure you manage your time?
Barbara Turley: Yep. So when I was in Australia, actually it’s almost easier from here, because in the middle I cut across all the teams. So for me this has been interesting, because I got my night shift team leads and my day shift team leads, and I catch the end of the Aussie day in the morning here, and then the night shift people come in. So I can cut across them all.
Peter Moriarty: Cool.
Barbara Turley: But having said that. I lead from afar. I have run, so although I have everyone in an office, I have built a company remotely, because I am remote. And I know it’s all down to the systems that you have. It doesn’t matter where you are, because I can get up any morning, and we are massive Asana users. At Asana, we’re a big client of theirs. And within about 15 minutes in the morning I can get a full picture of every single department across the entire business, and I know everything that’s going on. I’m a bit of a systems junkie, to be totally honest. We have these huge automation going on. We’re a big Ontraport user, we’ve got Asana, we’re obviously a big G-Suite user. And I’m a firm believer that you don’t need … I don’t do any of the doing, but I lead the entire team. So I know who’s important to who and what’s going on. And I’ve managed to set it up that way. Asana is the motherboard for us, and everyone knows that. We don’t use Slack, we use a bit Skype, we should use chat in G-Suite, but anyway.
Peter Moriarty: It’s free.
Barbara Turley: Asana is where it all happens. Do you know what I mean?
Peter Moriarty: Cool. What are your favorite features in Asana? What do you make use of? Is it like the Portfolios View? Is it like checking up on the inbox? Do you have a number of repeated tasks that you do every week to check in on things? What’s your kind of process there?
Barbara Turley: Asana’s been a bit of an evolution for us as well in that we started off. I’m a big fan of keeping things very simple. I just, I love systems, but I can’t stand complex systems, I just like systems that are very easy, four-year-old can get it.
Peter Moriarty: Yep.
Barbara Turley: So in Asana, part of that was kind of recurring task list and project list, all of a sudden it became Frankenstein, you know what I mean? It can become funny there. And these days how we run it as a team is we run pipelines. So our projects lists are all pipelines. So for example, we would have client leads, client calls, then client pipelines. So the ones that have signed up. And we’re constantly moving people through. Like in the client pipeline we have someone who climb up, then someone who’s coming to interview, then somebody who’s going through to onboarding. And we move them up and down our pipelines in Asana. And we have daily huddles where we do that together. So the huddle is kind of something we try and do in the middle that cuts across as many teams as possible. And keeping it simple and having rules in your business around how everyone uses Asana is key. Because you’re all exactly on the same page. If one person likes the board view and someone else likes the list view, that’s not going to work, right? So you have to set the tone, the pace, set the system, and then everybody has to kind of plug into the system. Otherwise it won’t work.
Peter Moriarty: And then you’re going to have Solid Systems documented. I’m a big fan of this. Solid Systems documented, I’m like, “Okay, in this task, when it’s on this board at this stage, this is what’s need to happen.” And then it’s boom, boom, boom, boom following that.
Barbara Turley: I’d like to think we’re better, we’re big fans of that, but we’re not very good at it.
Peter Moriarty: Okay.
Barbara Turley: [inaudible].
Peter Moriarty: Okay, cool.
Barbara Turley: We’re okay at it.
Peter Moriarty: Look-
Barbara Turley: Our data process is a bit more often than we do.
Peter Moriarty: As long as people are doing the thing they’re supposed to be doing. I think that’s the most important thing. And then if you have enough to teach someone new how to do it, what we’ve found is, we’ve started transitioning to using Google Classroom, which is part of G-Suite, which is like a structured learning platform. It’s a little bit like you can do it with WordPress member site or any kind of elements learning management system. And that allows you to, and our team built this out now, which is amazing. They just say, “Okay, here’s all the things that this person needs to know if they’re going into this area of the business.” And anytime we teach something new, it’s recorded, and boom, it goes straight in there. And so when someone comes on it’s like, “All right, are you starting with support, or are you starting with projects? You’re going to go into that classroom, and you’re going to learn how to do all the things in there.” And then it’s tick, tick, tick.
Barbara Turley: I’m going to steal that idea.
Peter Moriarty: Please do.
Barbara Turley: Thank you, I’m taking that one and I’m going to start implementing that.
Peter Moriarty: Please do. It’s classroom.google.com, and one of the best features is you can set quizzes. So it’s designed for schools, and so you can have quizzes and assignments, and the assignment might be, watch this video, and then they have to hand it in. And then they have to get a passing mark on the quiz, and if they don’t pass the quiz it’s like, “Okay, we’ll go back and redo the coursework,” which is all the videos that you shared. So at our team, the great thing is the team members, not just the managers have been creating the content, because they want to make sure that anyone who’s working with them has a basic level of competency before they allow them to join the team. Which itself is pretty cool. We’ve got some cool questions coming through. Okay, we got a big question here. I’m going to try and summarize. Okay, recently launched our company in the Philippines, transitioned our existing team from [inaudible] through BP over six years. Started growing our team, but I found it hard to recruit. Our recruitment agency has not got back to our requires. So we ended up getting our own recruitment manager. All going well, what tips you have for procuring services in the Philippines? So an Australian business procuring services in the Philippines. What’s it been like? I’m curious with that too. What’s it being like you’re doing business … I’m not sure how much time you’ve spent in the Philippines where you’ve done months at a time or longer or less? But what about doing business locally? How’s that been for you?
Barbara Turley: Look, I don’t use a lot of suppliers. Again, I like to keep things pretty simple. We’ve got a great accountant. Don’t over complicate it, I was going to say, “Maybe don’t use an agency, hire your own recruiter.” If you’re not [inaudible] and you’re going for it, then I’d probably bring on your own recruiter, because I think that’s probably going to be more cost effective than an agency. We tried to use some agencies, they didn’t get back to us either, and when they did, they were not cost effective at all, so. And I don’t think they really understood what it was we were deeply looking for. So we built our own-
Peter Moriarty: Recruitment team.
Barbara Turley: … recruitment. I have my own HR team, I sort of built my own stuff. The suppliers we’re using, we obviously have our office guys that help us to build out our office. They’ve been great, but I don’t tend to knew any services. But the one that I have, I’ve been lucky though, because the guys that I use that help set up our structuring, I got introduced to those by a guy in Australia, and they’ve been fantastic.
Peter Moriarty: Awesome.
Barbara Turley: And they’re in Manila, they also do accounting. Not great on the accounting side, but then the accountants I got were from someone I knew anyway in Manila. And they worked out well.
Peter Moriarty: Awesome.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, I don’t have a lot of advice on that, because I haven’t had many challenges.
Peter Moriarty: I think that’s advice enough. I found as well a number of times for us that building it internally was the solution. And I guess, I’m a control freak, and so-
Barbara Turley: We all are. We all are. We’re all controllers, we all are.
Peter Moriarty: So doing it my way. It was kind of oh I don’t … And then once you … In my case at least I found, once I was exposed to the labor market and the efficiency of the cost, it was like any time we considered working with an Australian firm for advertising, or for legals or for any kind of consulting it’s like, “Whoa, holy crap. That’s just so many dollars.”
Barbara Turley: Just can’t do it.
Peter Moriarty: It’s challenging. So why did you choose Hong Kong over Singapore or I don’t know, one of the other companies, the Seychelles or Virgin Islands or something else?
Barbara Turley: Well, I don’t think again there’s a particularly detailed answer to that. I just I had some-
Peter Moriarty: That’s okay.
Barbara Turley: I started out with the wrong advisers that blew up a load of money trying the wrong structuring. And then I was introduced to [inaudible] Ethos. Ethos Hong Kong is the one that I use, run by an Australian guy. Very happy to introduce them to anyone. And they were great for me. I mean, they just sort of held my hand through the whole process. And the Hong Kong Filipino structuring is I think … Well, it’s the one most that we’re using. It’s the best sort of tech structuring that you can get. I didn’t explore Singapore. I think it might have been easier to do to get banking and everything maybe set up in Hong Kong. Once I kind of saw that solution, I was pretty happy with that. I didn’t look too deeply into the other areas.
Peter Moriarty: And have you been concerned like with what’s going on in Hong Kong-
Barbara Turley: No.
Peter Moriarty: … over the last year or so? No, it doesn’t really bother you.
Barbara Turley: Not really. I think Hong Kong has been a business hub for a very long time. I might want to eat my hat with that maybe, but I don’t think in the short term it’s an issue.
Peter Moriarty: Yeah, I don’t have an opinion one way or the other. I’m just kind of going through the same journey, and curious whether people had been actually worried about it. So, I’ve got a personal question for you, and you don’t have to answer this one. But where do you plan on accumulating assets for your wealth building? You spend time in Australia, you’ve got the corporation in Hong Kong, you’ve got links to the Philippines, but I know you can’t really land, you can back on their stair, but not land. And now you’re in France. Where do you plan on stashing the … Is it like gold bars in a Swiss bank account somewhere? Or is it all in cash under your bed? Where do you plan on domiciling your wealth?
Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a very good question, and it’s something at the moment funnily enough I’m trying to find … I actually have an adviser over here in Europe that I’m working with, because I have this Hong Kong thing, I also have a trust in Australia. I have a company there. I’ve got stuff everywhere. And that’s fine at the moment, but if I’m planning … I don’t know what we’re doing with this Europe thing. Eventually you’ve got to start thinking about how you mold all this together. I don’t have an answer for it. At the moment it’s kind of in lots of different places, and to be quite honest, I’m not sure how much wealth is there right now anyway, so. But what I would say is, the power, if I’ve learned anything, the one thing I spend money on, Western advisers in legal, tax, and accounting. I would just start with it. I’ve made this mistake myself. Where you try and think about yourself, or you try and get a cheap solution. Good advisers cost money, and they’re worth the money. So find the right advisers. And I now have to find somebody that can cope with the global tax structure in a situation like that. So there’s no point in finding a low [inaudible] who can deal with the Australian thing and doesn’t really know what’s going to happen in France, or … There’s a lot of implications living in France, or in Europe right now. From a tax point of view.
Peter Moriarty: And you don’t want to go to KPMG and drop 200 grand a year on advisory?
Barbara Turley: No.
Peter Moriarty: You’re just sort of in this weird middle bit.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s why I’m pretty much talking to a lot of people and finding people in your network that maybe know others that have used … It’s very difficult, but it’s worth spending time finding the right advisers, yeah.
Peter Moriarty: Certainly.
Barbara Turley: My only answer on that really is just to take your time with those decisions, don’t rush into anything.
Peter Moriarty: Yeah, it’s been a journey for us. And yeah, appreciate the sentiments. If you’re comfortable, but you don’t have to share it right now, but if you’re comfortable with sending me the links to some of those advisers that you recommend, I can put those in the show notes.
Barbara Turley: Oh, yes. No problem, I could share those links.
Peter Moriarty: Cool. Yeah, we have Nadi who said he would love a referral and Chris has asked, “How many staff do you have in the Philippines?” Chris, I can answer that one. Barbara has a 140, 140, is that right now?
Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s about 125 now, I’m about to shed a couple.
Peter Moriarty: Okay, had to move a couple. So where do you see the future going? We’ve got a question mark on three to six months for Australian businesses. What advice do you have? Where do you see things going? And what would you like to share to the business community about what you think they can expect or what they should be doing?
Barbara Turley: Yeah, so a couple of things. Just to give a little bit of insight into my background before I did this. I spent 15 years in investment banking. I was 10 years as an equity trader in the financial markets, so I’m adapted, pivoting on a daily basis, and dealing with the volatility and all that sort of things. I’m involved in a management buy out of a business. I did some equity, I had no money at the time in 2008. Been through a couple of these massive big financial … Because this isn’t a health crisis, this is a financial crisis.
Peter Moriarty: Oh yeah.
Barbara Turley: The health crisis is just the trigger. And in ’08, ’09 I came out, I mean, I was laid of in Deutsche Bank like everybody else who were losing jobs. And I got an opportunity to kind of jump on the coat-tails to be honest of a group of people that were taking their business out of Deutsche Bank. And it was an asset management business, and it’s 10 years in now, and I’m sure it’s going propain at the moment. But that grew just sort of five, six billion of fund centered management over the 10 year period.
Peter Moriarty: Wow.
Barbara Turley: But I’m still involved in that company, I’m just not employee there anymore.
Peter Moriarty: Yeah, yeah.
Barbara Turley: First of all, I have a lot of experience of dealing with volatility. And on volatility in markets. And I also have a strong track record of taking on risk when there’s blood in the streets. So, I’m an old woman talking about it. Now it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get every crisis right. But what I would say to people out there. I know everyone’s saying, “Oh my God, this is worst than ’08.” The first thing I would say about that is, “Don’t forget how bad ’08 was. The banking system collapsed pretty much, right?” You had queues of people outside banks trying to take their money out. So let’s not forget just how bad ’08 actually was from a global market’s perspective and from a business perspective. The difference in the advice is, we are facing something that is quite dramatic. But in ’08, remember how long it took for governments to agree to drop money from the sky, basically. And to allow the Fed and the Central Banks to buy back assets and to actually drop money out of the sky? It has taken all of about five seconds flash for the governments to come out and drop money from the sky in this crisis.
Peter Moriarty: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s been impressive.
Barbara Turley: It’s true.
Peter Moriarty: It kind of feels like they’re making up. Building the plan is, they jumping off the cliff and it’s good. Little concerning, but it’s good.
Barbara Turley: Now not saying, who knows what implications are those going to have in the future? Inflation, all these things, and we don’t know yet. But right now it took about 12 months for that to happen during the GFC. It’s taken about 12 minutes in this environment. So the likelihood is that we will actually model through this, because are getting money into the … People are supporting the economy. In America it’s happening, in Europe. So businesses will kind of be propped up. Now whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, in the short term lots of businesses will model through. But from a business perspective what you now need to be thinking about is, of the ones that are modeling through, who are the winners? Because this is now going to turn into a race. It’s very insensitive to talk about it in this what we’re in right now, this crisis, and everyone’s being sensitive to each other. But the reality is, there will be massive winners, and there will be massive losers. We’re now in creative destruction. The markets after this will be fundamentally different from what they were before. And it’s about spending the next three, four months, just watching which businesses are going to rise in this? Because online, digital, e-commerce, all these things will boom. So, don’t think that it’s all bad. But there will be winners and losers, and it’s about keeping your eyes open and watching how the money falls and who makes the best use of the money, put it that way.
Peter Moriarty: Love it.
Barbara Turley: That’s my theory.
Peter Moriarty: This Warren Buffett quote comes to mind, “Be scared when everyone’s greedy, and be greedy when everyone’s scared.”
Barbara Turley: I don’t think people are scared enough yet, I don’t think there’s blood on the streets yet, that’s what I’m saying. People do buy now, I’m like, “I wouldn’t.” But, you know? Over the next three to four months you’ll start to see a lot of … The businesses that are trying to model through, but the mindset of the owner is not strong enough to even the money won’t help. It will just, they’ll sort of falter. And the people who have the strongest mindset and the real entrepreneurial animal spirits will come out with their pivots, and they’ll come out stronger out of this whole thing.
Peter Moriarty: Yeah, I-
Barbara Turley: And that’s .
Peter Moriarty: … certainly know that … For us it was, we’re a fairly resilient business, we’re selling email. Not many people are switching off their emails. But it was enough-
Barbara Turley: That’s been proved.
Peter Moriarty: Well yeah, that it’s pretty good. But we do sell consulting as well, right? And that’s a big profit center for us. And people start to cut consulting. And what we saw in the first few weeks was enough for us to go, “Ooh, got to be careful here and make sure that we’ve actually got a real solid plan for it.” Like you I believe there will be winners and losers. A quote that I saw from someone was to, “Promote your dead wood of your staff to your competitors.”
Barbara Turley: Oh no.
Peter Moriarty: It was Brett Kelley. And what I think is there are certainly creative destruction as you say. It’s shifting, it’s adjusting, and I see … I mean, I’m mostly interested in the Australian market. 95% of our customers are Australian-based currently. And what I’ve thought for a number of years is, from spending a lot of time in the Philippines and kind of fluttering around the rest of Asia as well. I found we discovered how far behind we are in online and social business. I went to a Glacier to buy some mirrors for shop fit out in DeWalt in the Philippines. And it was, just imagine, industrial unit, shit everywhere, and we walked in and we try and get a quote from them, and there’s no signage, there’s no phone number, there’s no quotes or anything else, it’s just a shop with glass and shit everywhere. And they said, “We’ll send your dimensions to our Facebook Business page.” And I went, “What?” So they have no infrastructure, no phone or anything else. They’re just sitting in a shed. And they said, “I’ll just message you on the business page.” And businesses are instant in getting back to you on Facebook. And I thought, “You know what? If I came home and I wanted to book my car in for a safety check with my mechanic, there’s no way he’s replying to my Facebook message. Forget it, you got to pick up the phone, and it’s just not the way that business is done here.” Another example is, I was in China up in the mountains. And no phone signal, middle of absolute nowhere. But in order to pay, instead of paying with cash, there was actually a barcode for WePay or Ally Pay or whatever it was. And so you would just pay, and this was a bamboo hut, a bamboo hut that we were in, and they had no electricity-
Barbara Turley: Wow.
Peter Moriarty: No internet, but they had a barcode to pay for your meal. And I saw those examples, and I just thought, “Wow, we’ve got so far to go ourselves.” And I think this is a kick up the arse for Australian businesses. Thankfully people are getting online, they’re using Zoom and they’re doing their online sessions. And people are getting a bit more serious about e-commerce. But it’s like, “Guys, hello, this has been coming for like five years that digital transformation-“
Barbara Turley: Digital.
Peter Moriarty: At least there’s some hustle from everyone, which is great. There’s enough fear that the hustle’s coming out and-
Barbara Turley: Your consulting might drop initially, because everyone, they’ll cut. But then the money comes in, and then some of those clients you need to ask yourself whether those are really clients for you now anyway? Based on where there’s been … They may have been, but maybe there’s a … You just got to think. You don’t want to save every client, because maybe they’re not all for you in the future anyway. And it’s not really to kind of go, “Well, we’re in this kind of shifting landscape,” but for what it is you’re doing and for what you’re consulting on, is there going to be a market for that? 100% there is, the companies are going to come around and realizing this in a few months time and going, “Jesus, we were completely … We got blindsided by this. We need to make sure that we never get blindsided by this again. Who do we go to?” And I mean, that’s where … So you might not see it straight away, but in time when they model through, people will come back in and then the transformation will happen. That’s my opinion.
Peter Moriarty: Oh no, I appreciate that. I’m very comfortable with that. And what we’ve discovered is, we’ve always had in the back of our minds that we enable remote work. That’s always been a really big one for us. We’ve never messaged it that way, because baby boomer business owners don’t want to strap on a backpack and travel round the world as a vagabond, right? But now everyone’s forced to, so it’s like, “Okay, we can go hard with that messaging now.” How will businesses consume our services in the next 12 months? That’s still for us to first to work on. But at the end of the day, we’re about businesses leveraging technology to be efficient, grow and scale their teams, and have things work. So I feel pretty good with that. I think one of the most important pieces of that puzzle is obviously the staffing and the team, which is where you come in. And so I see this symbiotic relationship with technology and people, technology and people-
Barbara Turley: Absolutely.
Peter Moriarty: … and leadership and management. And my philosophy on technology is, if you get it simple and you get it right, then you can just do business. You don’t spend your day fighting technology, you don’t spend your day trying to connect this to that and get Zapier talking to this-
Barbara Turley: No.
Peter Moriarty: … and get all these things. If you get the tech sorted, then you can just focus on being a leader, on company strategy, on the financial markets, on gobbling up your competitors, or whatever the next 12 months is going to look like for you. And so if I could say to anyone, just like the tech is not the answer, and it’s the people in your team and your strategy, that’s business. The tech is just the tool.
Barbara Turley: Well, remember that the word remote, and this could be something you could go out and talk about. The word remote doesn’t necessarily mean working from home.
Peter Moriarty: No, it doesn’t have to.
Barbara Turley: Because I think that we might see a mini boom next year. Maybe not straight away, but co-working spaces are getting killed right now. But eventually, as people say, in my local hometown where I was born in Ireland, a lot of people commuted to Dublin. It’s kind of an excruciating commute to Dublin and back. And I was thinking, “People are not going to go back to that. They’re not going to agree to go back to that.” But are they all going to work from home? Probably not either, because there’s kids, and there’s … It’s kind of awkward working from home, unless you’re set up properly. Especially if you have children. So I think there’ll be a new boom in little co-working spaces in these places where people want to have … They want to work for the big corporate, but they want to work in a professional environment. Because home is not for everyone, and that’s still remote, you know?
Peter Moriarty: Yep.
Barbara Turley: So yeah, remote can mean, everyone thinks remote means nomadic, backpack on, working from home, working from cafes. It doesn’t necessarily, it’s a much bigger word than that. It just means working online from different locations. And those locations could be offices in different cities.
Peter Moriarty: I’m hoping that is the case. There’s a concept called work hubs, which I heard about a couple years ago, which was exactly that. Co-working spaces, but you’re working for a corporate or you’re working for a big company. The most compelling argument for that is, the co-workers that you spend time with socially are not your boss or your subordinates. So you go out for Friday night drinks with your actual team, and it’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to drink to much or say this thing, because that person’s there.” You can’t lay off steam and say, “Oh, the boss has been a dickhead today.” But if you’re going out with someone who is not in the same company as yours, you have that genuine social interaction, vulnerability with each other, friendship, companionship, care for each other. And a great place to work and bounce ideas off each other, without that context of, “This is my boss and they might think differently in my performance review-
Barbara Turley: Absolutely.
Peter Moriarty: … if I’m really raw with him here.”
Barbara Turley: I think we’ll see a boom in that, but not for 12 months. I think that will take time, maybe six months. But I think next year you’ll probably see people go, “Well, I tried working from home, then I went back to work, and it didn’t work. Then I tried at home again, and then all of a sudden this whole thing …” Some people will even out and say they want to do something else, so.
Peter Moriarty: I think it’s the future. I don’t know, I think sometimes I have a rosy optimistic view of what the future will look like. And I’m very curious to see how much of that will actually become a reality.
Barbara Turley: I think we have to be optimistic. I mean, I wake up every morning, and I’m like, “Just give me a coffee, because I’m going down that rabbit hole of ugh.” And then I just think, “As an entrepreneur you have to …” Look, we talk about the front liners in the medical field. At the moment the front liners have been applauded, and of course they are the … I mean, it’s incredible the work that they’re doing. But who do you think the front liners are going to be when the virus is gone?
Peter Moriarty: Yeah.
Barbara Turley: It’s going to be entrepreneurs, it’s going to be the people who are driving the economy, and they’re going to become front liners, they’re all of us. So we need to realize that we’re the next ones that are going to have to step up. And I think that’s a powerful message that I personally am starting to go out with to say, “You’ve got a responsibility.” I was struggling with the idea of selling offshore stuff. I actually had a conversation with a group of mentors last night about this. And I was saying, “I’m finding myself holding back on marketing, because it feels insensitive to say, ‘Hey, hire Europeans, it’s cheaper,'” when countries are being laid off. And it might be. But for our sake, what’s the alternative? Companies collapse. You have the responsibility to go out and tell people that this is a strategy that might save their company. And I thought, “Actually yes.” You’re playing with your thing of the systems and the cloud-based stuff and consulting. That’s the way to think about it. Everyone else had the let’s go back-
Peter Moriarty: More staff equals more sales, equals more GST, equals, yes, you may down the line hire more Australian staff.
Barbara Turley: You do.
Peter Moriarty: I’m paying a general manager an extreme salary in Australia. And I would not have been able to do that without growing the business over the last five years. Because we went from the Australian staff to the full Philippine staff. And then as we’ve grown the business it was … And it was not a matter of needing more executive support. We acquired his business, and he is able to take care of the particular division.
Barbara Turley: Oh yeah [crosstalk].
Peter Moriarty: The reality is that we’re paying someone here and pay PAYG and everything else that comes with it as well.
Barbara Turley: I don’t actually at this point … At the moment I don’t have Western staff. I’ve had a few sales people, at the moment I’ve taken back over sales myself, because we’re in this kind of crisis. But I can’t wait to hire a big Western position. I want somebody to support me in the role that I play. We’re not there yet, we won’t be there for a while. But I will hire somebody, it could be U.S.-based, Europe-based, Australia-based in time. Could be big sales roles and strategic roles that I’d like to happen outside of the Philippines. So yeah.
Peter Moriarty: So, let’s talk about how can people get help with you. What’s the first step in someone chatting to you getting started?
Barbara Turley: Sure. If you go to our website, first of all there’s a ton of resources on our website. But not that you need any more overwhelming stuff. But if you’re at a stage where you want to just find out more how you can work successfully with a VA, there’s a webinar on our website by me. So you go to The Virtual Hub, thevirtualhub.com. And you can also book a call on that website. And at the moment you get to speak to me, which you don’t normally.
Peter Moriarty: Awesome.
Barbara Turley: But I can actually help you on the call to begin with, whether we’re a good fit for you, or whether you’re a good fit for us.
Peter Moriarty: And what kind of businesses? Who’s the customer you most commonly help?
Barbara Turley: Yeah sure. So the one, we have so many diverse businesses, so we don’t have one kind of business avatar. But the one thing that ties all of the businesses together is, they all have a fairly developed online strategy. So, you could be anything from a dentist through to a Facebook ad agency, through to a yoga instructor. We’ve got lots of different types of businesses, but they’re all doing online stuff. So they’re doing webinars, they’ve got funnels running. They might be using systems like Ontraport, HubSpot, Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, and you’re building campaigns, you’re doing social media, blogging. You’ve got a fairly content rich website. Those are the kinds of things that our VAs are all trained on and helping in those types of businesses.
Peter Moriarty: Nice, and it’s so important right now. People should not be cutting back on the marketing-
Barbara Turley: No.
Peter Moriarty: You should be going high on that, being visible at the minimum.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Peter Moriarty: Awesome.
Barbara Turley: I’ve increased my marketing team, just to give you a tip. Everyone’s in marketing now. I’m like, “You’re all in marketing.”
Peter Moriarty: We got a couple of good questions that have just come through. Chris has asked, Chris Finn. He said he just signed up to Virtual Hub, which is awesome. Do you utilize HMS, Hubbard Management Systems? That’s a good question.
Barbara Turley: Say that one again. What is it? HMS?
Peter Moriarty: Hubbard Management Systems, the Scientology business management systems.
Barbara Turley: No, I haven’t even heard-
Peter Moriarty: No.
Barbara Turley: … of that. Is that what we should be doing?
Peter Moriarty: Oh, I have. I’m way into it. This might be one for another episode.
Barbara Turley: Now that we are [crosstalk] there, the other one. We’re about to launch Shopify. We’re getting into Shopify, for you that want to know what I’m doing right now.
Peter Moriarty: Scientology is later. Cool. It’s a business and management framework. Not necessarily Scientology itself, but it was written by L. Ron Hubbard and it was on how they organize the organization. I’m not a Scientologist, I’m non-religious, but I studied the management system for a few years. It’s very interesting. Okay, Anton has asked, “Hey, Barbara, do you hire VAs for business divisions? Or is it focused on supply in one division? For example, do you hire for Ontraport experts or Asana experts? Or is it more broadly like a functional role that you hire for?
Barbara Turley: No, we don’t. First of all I’ll give you a tip. You can’t fully hire an Ontraport expert. We’re not the manufacturer, to be totally honest. You can get people to say that, we actually manufacture them, which take months to train them. So all of our VAs, they’re generalist VAs, but we have three levels of VA. And level one is more like admin-based. Level two handles all those social media, blog, content formatting, that kind of thing. Our level three VAs, they’re only that level because we have to train them so deeply, and they’re in those platforms. But they still do all the other stuff. So it’s just like they do the whole gamut of everything. But they’re more technically savvy and they’re better able to cope with those kind of things. I’m not sure if that answered the question, but we don’t hire-
Peter Moriarty: I think it does.
Barbara Turley: I would hire a bookkeeper for you. I would hire like that, we do this type of VA, and that’s it. I’m not going to go out and find you a content writer. We don’t do specific [inaudible] like that.
Peter Moriarty: Okay, cool. So sounds like a slant towards marketing functions, but starting with the basic competencies of getting content out there, making sure it works on the website, and then moving up in competency, and more specialized services of the Ontraport and the step, which is what someone should do anyway. If you don’t have your basic blogs and stuff sorted out, there’s no point going crazy in Ontraport, because you got to get the basics of your content marketing stuff done first.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely yes. We like to that kind of business. But we will do VAs. We have VAs working in financial advice businesses and stuff like that as well that are doing more counter management, and they’re doing more admin stuff, but they’re very good at that. So that’s okay too. But we prefer to stick within our lane, because we are in that niche of digital marketing implementation, is what we like to do, because that’s what we all love.
Peter Moriarty: Cool. Awesome, it’s very clear and very good to know. I’m going to sign off now. I want to say thank you so much for the conversation. This has been really enjoyable for me, and I appreciate your time shared with everyone. Thank you so much.
Barbara Turley: Thank you for having me. It’s been a joy. Thanks everyone.
Peter Moriarty: Awesome, thank you. I’m going to go ahead and do my sign off now. So thank you very much for joining us guys. It’s been great to have you here and I appreciate spending the time with you. Very much appreciate you taking the time to listen to Barbara as well. If you’re interested in checking out what Barbara does, head along to thevirtualhub.com. And as she said, if you put an inquiry there, you’re actually going to connect with her personally, which is pretty awesome. Pretty lucky for you. Someone who has the business acumen and experience that Barbara has to be able to chat about your business, even for a short period of time.
So if you’re interested in more about what we’re doing, head along to itgenius.com. Below this post there are two links. One is to the Remote Revolution Group, that’s all about running and scaling remote teams. The other group is G-Suite, so if you’re already on G-Suite, check out the G-Suite community. And of course, if you need any help from our team, head along to itgenius.com/chat. Just pop us a message on Messenger, and our team will be happy to help you out. We will sign off now, and we’ll see you in the next one. Thanks for joining. Cheers.
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