And I do spend about three to four months of the year back in Europe.
So I kind of go between.
I'm old around the world a bit.
And I run a company in the Philippines.
Europe.
And mainly, well, my I mean, I'm Irish, so I spend a lot of time in Ireland.
And then my husband is Hungarian.
So we go to Budapest quite a lot.
And then we also are big ski fans.
So we spend quite a lot of time in the winter.
We go to France
around Chamonix, Mont Blanc, which is beautiful, beautiful, biggest mountain
in Europe. We like to go there.
So we sort of mix family time with sea time and winter time.
For sure. Kids.
We've got two kids, an eight year old and a five year old, who also love
the mountains and love to be up the mountain.
So, yeah.
Oh, that's so cool.
You try to live unconventionally.
I've always been a fan of trying to build a life that is
unapologetically unconventional in lots of ways.
One of my clients wrote the book on world schooling.
It's literally called world schooling.
Her name is Ashley de Moque de Teo.
Phenomenal, phenomenal individual.
I don't talk about her enough on this.
She's one of my favorite people on Earth.
And yeah, it would be interesting to see y'all exchange viewpoints.
She's a detail publishing dot com.
She helps with authors write the manuscripts and publish the books and all that.
She is phenomenal.
I've never met somebody more well studied and more well rounded than Ashley is.
So I hope you guys get a chance to catch up.
I would love to.
It's so all right.
So you've got the opportunity to live in multiple parts.
You help companies with virtual assistance and help people find and hire,
orient, train those virtual assistants.
You do a lot of pre-qualifying.
I love what I saw on your website.
So we'll be coming back to that as we talk
about transforming how businesses operate before we dive in too deep.
So, Barbara, you've got a depth of experience and a lot of a lot of areas of life
for other visionary leaders out there.
What are three resources that you recommend they lean into?
Wow. OK, so my top three and this is unprepared.
So the book that changed my business life, the book and the person,
the human that changed my business life, and there's been many.
But the one that always stands out for me
is Vern Harnish's Scaling Up. It's a heavy read for those who are not
into operational efficiency, but I am and strategy.
And that was really the book that blew things open for me.
And then I was very lucky to actually get to know Vern over the years.
I've done his courses and built the company on scaling up methodology.
So I actually had dinner.
I had the chance to have dinner with Vern only a few weeks ago in the US.
I was on a trip there.
That's been a great journey.
But his book was really a pivotal moment for me.
I accidentally stumbled upon it and it blew a lot of things open for me business wise.
The next one is the tool again.
When Asana, Asana.com, you know, there's lots of them.
Click up this Monday. There's all of those ones.
But when Asana launched and I first found Asana,
to say that it was a game changer in my life, my business, in my everything,
and to this day, it's still to this day, has been an absolute game changer for me
in how I run the business and in enabling me to build the unconventional
life that I wanted to achieve. So that's a huge one.
I love that tool.
Yes, it's been phenomenal.
I think like Asana and the iPhone were what kind of changed my life completely
and enabled the way that I live.
The third one I'll do a shout out to a podcast that I have followed religiously.
Again, another game changer in how I run the operations and how I scale the business
and things I learned was Cameron Harreld's
podcast, the Second in Command podcast, where he interviews the best COOs in the
world and not just the best CEO, COOs, but COOs from all sorts of companies.
And you learn so much about scaling and
operational efficiency and all the things that COOs do that typically
entrepreneurs and visionaries and founders and that sort of thing,
you know, tend not to be the best at.
Now, I naturally more a CEO type, so I like it.
But so those would be my top three.
I've got a book, a tool and a podcast.
Well, you've got that you've got that
unnatural capacity, though, that most people don't.
And that's you're a visionary on one side and you've embraced that.
And on the other, you're an integrator.
I am so EOS, right?
I'll give Rocketfuel a bit of credit on that.
I prefer the E-Myth and what Michael Gerber did with that.
But both both are still really important
and great tools that we we've utilized.
And as the Rocketfuel, you know, as EOS pointed out,
less than I think they said less than four percent of people in the world are
integrators.
So I can see that.
Well, yeah, because I often think like this is easy, but oh, my God.
I mean, even running big teams and large
organ, I mean, we've 350 people now and I'm like, oh, wow, this is not natural.
Most people
know, we're kicking and screaming into the into the you know, I mean, I just I love
that I love the EOS. I love that would be another tool.
I would another methodology that we follow a lot.
So you follow the rules to you hit three.
All right. And now you're able to go beyond.
Of course, we can talk about more later.
But I love that the three that you highlighted
are three that I've never heard on the show, like nobody's highlighted those three.
And when I'll add one final resource and here's why everybody is listening.
And this is so huge.
You're going to hear everybody recommend rich dad, poor dad.
You're going to hear everybody recommend,
you know, think and grow rich.
These books that are very easy and common to read.
And I'm not doubt I'm not saying those are bad.
They're great books. But what I now listen for is the amount of leaders that I
surround myself with is I listen for the correlation between the types of leaders
that I want to learn from, right, who's actually getting the results that I want
and what do they recommend.
So one day I heard Bill Gates recommend one of his top five favorite books.
The Effective Executive.
All right. A few weeks later, top five favorite books, Warren Buffett.
He recommended the same book, The Effective Executive.
A few weeks later, no joke,
LeBron James comes out and says it's one of his favorite books.
And I was like, what the heck, man, like, why have I never heard of this book before?
And, you know, those are again years.
It became one of my Bibles of business.
I was like, if you got three people that are that prominent with success and doing
things based on systems and frameworks, all saying the same thing,
it doesn't matter what the rest of the world is saying.
Oh, I mean, like that's that's where you go.
So with what you've been able to do and what I've seen about how you do things,
I've got to listen, I've got to read Scaling Up and I absolutely have to dive
into Second in Command as a product. I never heard of it.
How crazy is that?
Yeah, Cameron Howells is a fantastic CEO.
He was the CEO of 1-800-GOT-Junk
and he was able to sort of scale that from six million to 100 million or
something like that. But he's also a super nice human being
and very giving with his
his information and knows Vern too.
So there are just different, different
approaches to the same thing of scaling businesses, really.
And somebody who has over 300 employees
and still comes to a show like this with their hair done, like that's amazing.
And two kids.
All right, exactly.
So I'm loving this.
We'll be right back.
I'm a professional.
You know, I like to do.
Look, I'm a natural high achiever.
You know, you sort of.
Yeah, you got to share.
You got to balance by you.
You got to balance by you similar to Ashley.
And again, that's probably why she came to mind is like it was just an aura and a vibe.
So we're going to be right back.
We're going to dive in deeper into
Barbara Turley's vision and we'll see you guys on the other side.
All right. Welcome in to Vision Pros Live with Jackson Callum.
I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary
entrepreneurs and guest leaders who are building fantastic visions out there.
So let's get started.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome in to the episode of Vision Pros Live.
I'm your show host, Jackson Callum, founder and CEO of First Class Business.
I'm super excited now to have Barbara Turley on the stage with me.
I didn't know what to expect.
You know, I found this.
I found her website.
Of course, she provided that to us.
Let me just let me just go check on that real quick.
The virtual hub dot com.
And I saw the
so much promise, so much hope of an entity that may actually be doing virtual
assistant relationships the right way that I was like, oh, man,
this is going to be interesting.
And I dove in deeper and deeper and deeper.
And I just kept catching things that caught my attention for good.
And that is not common in the virtual assistant space.
My friends, you might think it's common,
but I've been there and done that enough times to know that a lot of these
companies are not going to be able to do that.
And I've been there for a long time.
I've had enough times to know that a lot of these companies aren't doing it
the right way, and so I've got a new level of hope.
I'm like, OK, I can't wait to explore this beyond the podcast.
So we'll be talking to Barbara about what she's doing, how she's doing it,
how she's going about prequalifying virtual assistants for individuals
because the market doesn't know how to do this.
Entrepreneurs, visionaries, you don't know how to do this.
And you think you do.
And I'm telling you, it's one of the scariest, most dangerous, most like it's
not an easy thing to do.
You've got to have somebody like her or like some of the other vendors that we
work with for that type of a process.
So be ready to learn a lot on that before we bring her back on stage.
A couple of other resources and groups
that we hope you pay attention to for your own benefit.
Hard to Kill.org with Dave Morrow.
Hard to Kill.org is helping one hundred
thousand veterans lose two million pounds collectively.
Dave's been a phenomenal leader to work with, and I've convinced him.
No, I'm just kidding.
His vision was to expand this beyond the military community as well.
The community is now open to civilians as well.
It's helped me get in shape.
And I have successfully avoided doing that for about eight years.
Every coach that I've worked with, every guru that I talked to,
they weren't able to help me get into gear.
Somehow they was able to help me do just that.
He's got a great podcast, by the way.
Definitely check out his podcast.
And if you know of any military personnel who once they got in the military,
they kind of feel forgotten because they are forgotten and they don't have
the same routines before they might gain a little bit of weight.
It's really sad how depression is taking over and a lot of their lives.
And they can lean on Dave and his community and get back on track.
So help them out, get them over there so they can look good,
feel good and go and do good alongside Dave Morrow.
And we've got Opradena de Trabajo para Latinos.
That's opportunities for work for Latinos.
That's our homegrown program to help Latinos learn about the world of virtual
assistant, becoming digital ambassadors, as we call it.
We do not believe in VA relationships.
We call that virtual abuse.
We want entrepreneurs to come in and actually care about the people that they
work with. If you know of a Latino who would be a great guest for this show,
then bring him our way because we've got our own podcast for this.
Cynthia, who helps me with the production of this show,
she's one of the co-hosts for that particular show.
And we're looking to bridge the economic
gap between North America, South America and rest of world.
There's Cynthia right there.
Hermosa, beautiful as always.
And Luisa, who also helps host the show.
We've had some really, really big hitters come on that show.
I'm talking 900,000 subscribers such as
Kike and Glace.
And we hope that you go and support that cause as well.
If you're in the process of looking for virtual assistance once again,
the virtual hub dot com is absolutely worth considering.
In addition to water teams building with opportunity.
Nice. And there's the water project.
The water project is not homegrown.
It's not one of ours.
It's just something that I fell in love with when I came to see what they did.
I like transparency and transparency is kind of one of the keys, in my opinion,
to creating a better universe, a better life for all of us here on this earth.
When I found out that there's millions
of people who don't have access to clean drinking water and internalize that,
I was like, man, what would it be like for my kids to not have access to water?
I've always had access to it.
I saw it.
They set this up like a Kickstarter project where you actually get to choose
which community that you get back to and they show you how they go about building
these sand dams or these borehole wells.
And I just decided not to let it go.
I wanted to learn more about it as much as I could as we get back.
My hope is that you will talk about this over dinner with your friends and family
or maybe share this link with somebody that it makes sense to share with.
These kids celebrate water like my kids
celebrate Christmas Day and we have the ability to make that type of impact just
by giving back. Now, if you know of another cause
that you'd love to see us talk about or love to see us perhaps
promote on the show or maybe even give back to myself, please drop that link
in the comments because we got eight billion people out there to help in this world.
And the best way to do that is working together.
So without further ado, it's not time to help all of you.
Barbara Turley, welcome to Vision Pros Live.
Thank you so much for having me, Jackson.
It's very exciting.
I love, love, love, love watching those,
those causes and things that you're supporting.
Amazing.
Absolutely. And I appreciate you being here.
I'm going to dive right in to the virtual hub.
I've made some assumptions.
I usually ask who your audience is, but I think your audience may be people
like myself who are looking to scale smarter, right, and find the right types
of team members. Some of the things that drew my attention
was your focus on NPS, Net Promoter Score.
I don't think very many entrepreneurs even know what that is,
even though it's one of the gold standards of growth.
And you're really big on exposing how you go about
hiring people and filtering through who it is you guys are hiring from the
application process, revealing all the way through to them going through
a graduation and then actually finally getting the opportunity to work with clients.
I'm blown away.
I'm super impressed.
It just brain dump on me if you want to.
What's the deal?
How did you get to the steps?
Well, I was listening to you talking about the virtual assistant industry
and the outsourcing and how difficult it is.
And I am here to tell you it is extraordinarily difficult to get this right.
And the reason we have so many issues in the industry,
you know, I'm sure that every human that goes into this business is going into it
trying to do the right thing, but it is extraordinarily difficult to get it right.
You know, you're dealing with a lot of different people.
You're dealing with cultures.
You're dealing with attitude and all sorts of things.
And the interesting thing for me was how I ended up.
I accidentally stumbled into the industry.
I didn't actually plan this.
Yeah, like I have zero background in recruiting, HR training, any of that stuff.
I was in the financial markets.
So I was like in the cutthroat end of things in the trading floors for a long time.
I had very much a corporate career my entire life.
And it was only really when I wanted to have children that I thought,
I'm not sure I want to do this corporate thing anymore.
And I look, I left corporate and I had done some very cool things in my corporate career.
And I left that and I started doing some business coaching.
And like we were talking, I think we were talking either off air or just earlier
about the integrator thing and how few people in this world are integrators.
And I accidentally discovered that I was very good at that.
And all these businesses I was trying to help.
I was like, if you guys don't hire staff or you don't try to get some systems
and processes and delegation going on here, you're going to plateau and you're never going anywhere.
And some of these businesses were small and had been stuck at the same level for like 10 years.
And really, in order to break out of that.
They're surviving the 10 year, the 4% that survive.
It's so frustrating.
They get really stuck and they can't figure out how to get to that next level.
And often it's because they figured out what to sell.
It's selling, even if they're just like a solopreneur or a naturopath or any of these things.
But they don't know how to scale it.
They don't know how to scale it up.
So I started helping with that.
And of course, the natural problem was,
but how do you do that cost effectively, because a lot of the businesses wouldn't
have had the resourcing to hire locally, so they go, well, I can't hire people, so I'll just do it.
I'm like, well, actually, if you go around the world,
you can find great people that will help you and you can get your delegation muscle
strengthened. So I was doing that.
Let me pause you because we're made in America.
You know, I come from the Texan, hardcore American side of things and we hire a lot.
It's OK to be from America and it's OK to exist in the world, too.
You know, like hire the best of the best, regardless of nationality.
I'm just going to say it. Go ahead.
Or look at it this way.
If you are a patriotic American or a Brit or an Australian or a Canadian,
it doesn't matter, right?
You can be patriotic and you can be fully in support of your country.
But if you're running a business and that business is not thriving and growing
and scaling, you're doing a disservice to your country, right?
Because we are here as business owners to drive humanity forward.
That is why we do this.
We all want impact. We all have a vision.
This is why we're on vision pros.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides I'm going to launch my own business
because I really want to work seven days a week, 15 hours a day and drive myself
into the ground with stress, right? Everyone has a vision.
So what I'm saying is that sometimes the best way to ensure that the business
thrives and goes on to support your local community, your local country with taxes
and hiring the more businesses that grow, you will hire locally.
But sometimes you need to get the support layer cost effectively done such that you
can build a foundation to grow from.
And the way to do that is to uplift the rest of the world and to go.
It's OK to hire somebody not from America with a view to saying this.
I need my company to grow because I am
patriotic and I want American companies to grow or I want Australian companies
to thrive. So I would just reframe that for people to say that is how you want to
think about it and you're not selling out on yourself or your friends.
Because it's an opportunity to move from a scarcity mindset to an abundant mindset.
Right. It is it is utilizing the full
possibility of resources at your disposal to move forward.
So for the betterment of everyone, the whole world, actually, as well.
Yeah, including your own company.
So I started doing that.
And then long story short, I found myself literally woke up one morning going,
I am managing 10 people in the Philippines on behalf of clients
because they didn't really want to do it themselves.
So I was helping and I was like, I think I mean, I think I'm in a new business here.
I think this is actually a business.
And I pivoted very quickly.
And that was nine years ago now.
So I've had kids in that time as well.
So I've been very much a kind of a book, my own talk.
Amazing.
We we have literally been working on moving
in the same mountain from the opposite sides of the mountain.
And like, now I see you.
And it's so cool because I do not have corporate experience at all.
I've worked from home since 2010, since I very first got into the like
since I got married, never worked in corporate, worked from home, got four
children, and I saw this gap in opportunity at super small companies,
hired my first virtual assistant for like three dollars and thirty three cents an
hour for one hour per week, and I was terrified.
I almost went and asked my founding co-partner for permission to do it.
I was that scared.
And that funny. I was like, oh, my gosh.
And now these people wouldn't quite see
that I recognize that because of what I do, but I was terrified.
And what if I gave this guy access to my LinkedIn?
And what if he takes that from me like and I realize, wait, Jackson, not Bill Gates.
Your LinkedIn is really not that valuable.
And I was like, oh, he cares.
I guess I could. Nobody would care.
I did, you know, but I had to learn to let go of like so much garbage and so much
controlling like nature, and I was a pretty bad leader, too.
I had to unlearn a lot of habits.
And again, I can see that your company is doing certain things in relation to
the virtual assistant path that is so healthy and above and beyond what we're
doing on our side, where I'm like, oh, cool.
I can't wait to learn more about this.
So if you don't mind, let's talk about Net Promoter Score a little bit.
What is NPS to you and how to use it?
What stage does a company need to start
adopting that or will they benefit from adopting that if they've been ignoring it?
I might be guilty. Yeah.
So let's let's unpack.
OK, so NPS Net Promoter Score.
Now, interestingly, I actually saw like
the founder of the NPS score speaking at a conference about a month ago.
And he kind of blew blew blew my strategy out the window.
But I'll circle back to that and sort of lay down some points around using it,
that maybe we haven't even like nobody's nailing.
But the whole point is, like, if you ask your clients or customers and you can
also do it with your employees, you can have an E NPS, which is your employee
network, which we have as well, and you ask them on a scale of one to ten,
would you recommend us to your like, would you recommend what we're doing as a brand
or as a business to others?
And if they give you a nine and a ten, I mean, you're like outstanding.
They're like 100 percent. I would.
If they give you an eight is still pretty good.
Right. It's still like they're saying.
And it scales down.
So like seven, seven and eight is still going really well.
You know, obviously it scales down from there.
And there's metrics around it.
But if you're going to use it, I mean,
if you've only got 10 clients, you can still probably use it, actually.
I mean, I'm just thinking about that.
You can use it how many with as many clients as you want, I guess,
or employees, really.
But what you're looking for is feedback.
You're trying to encourage people to
have a quick method of saying, where would you rate us actually?
And then you can go deeper if it's the score is really bad.
Right. And you're like, OK, tell me more.
Right.
However, the first time you do it,
you know, everybody wants I mean, we all want to be liked.
Right. We're all human.
Even if you're running a big business, you want your baby.
You want people to like it.
It can be very destabilizing if the score comes back and you're not happy with it.
Because then you're so much more diplomatic and nurturing than I am.
I'm a pretty big nurturer, but I'm also very direct.
So I'm loving this. Thank you for being nurturing.
Yes, I'm being nurturing because I'm like, it is quite painful.
So the first time we did it with our clients, it was good actually with our
clients, but with our employees, it was not good.
And we were like, oh, that is so painful.
But we went to work on it and we started
doing surveys and asking people and inviting feedback.
And over the years, we've gotten it right up there.
We're now world class.
You know, we've got a couple of things to do still.
But it takes years.
It takes like two, three years to do this.
Well, we we've started that from scratch on our side, honestly.
And that wasn't because first class business, like we knew exactly what to do
because we knew out the gate, I had failed so many times before with other companies.
Right. Haven't we?
We haven't. Absolutely. So the vision wasn't that clear.
The culture wasn't that well defined.
Our leadership was lackluster.
And so fortunately, by the time we launched first class business out the gate,
we were really, really heavily focused on making sure that we were aligned with our
core values and we were bringing people in aligned with those core values.
Much like I call what you've done with your filtration process.
I call that the combine, which is what the NFL and the NBA and the MLB have in order
to qualify who's going to come into the league.
But I say that because all of you who are
listening, who are just getting started, please don't take this for granted.
Like, this is your opportunity.
Have we been given this information, Barbara and I on day one?
Like, can you imagine that, Barbara?
Oh, I mean, I've learned I've got so many scars like from learning all of this.
You know, people say, oh, wow, look what you've built.
I'm like, yeah, but come on, it wasn't overnight.
I mean, I had to learn how to lead.
I never led a team before.
And now I'm leading massive teams, you know,
organization of structure, dealing with people and culture, you know.
And then the bigger you get, the more problems you have.
Like, that's right.
You know, people even you know, we've even had deaths.
I was about to say I was about to ask and not be morbid.
Yes. How many deaths is the most amount of deaths you've had in a week?
Oh, God, I don't know the answer to that question.
We haven't had that many.
I think if you're up at like if you have
like 5000 staff, you're going to have there's going to be that.
That's what I think.
That's one of those things that like,
again, if you're scaling as a company or you want to scale a company,
those are things that it's it's important to prepare for.
You know, emotionally as a leader, how do you deal with that?
Because and then you've got not only that
within the company and the people themselves, but they got family members, too.
And so it's kind of a constant reality that there's it's not like.
But so for some reason, because of math,
people think point A and point B, the fastest route is a linear line.
I know that's true, but that's not how life works.
Go ahead, continue, please.
Yeah. And I mean, you know, just thinking about that people and culture element.
I mean, you know, I've had deep moments of feeling like my the only way I can
describe it is my empathy bucket is empty because you have so many people
and everybody is especially with post covid.
We've got like cost of living crisis everywhere.
There's a lot of challenges in people's lives.
You know, there's relationships breaking down.
There's you know, there's births, there's deaths.
There's all sorts of things.
And what I have found as a leader, this is a leadership thing that I'm currently
working on for myself, if I could say, I've gotten to the point where I need to find
a way to protect my to be empathetic while also protecting my own self
and my family from it bleeding into my life, right?
Which is because it can start to bleed in and then all of a sudden it's actually
impacting your life. So that's just a little you can get
out of small things.
But with large teams, I have found it really bleeding into my energy field.
And I'm my twenty twenty five goal for myself is to work out how do I not lose
my empathy, but also not lose myself. Right.
That's a that's a big one.
I appreciate you talking about it.
Something that I'm also working on heavily, too.
And as so I'm a single father for twice divorced.
So there's definitely there's a handful of challenges there if we want to keep it
up to five. Right. But the the that same exact reality.
Some of the some all of us as entrepreneurs have to balance the same reality,
whether you have three people in your company, one visionary, same thing.
But in some regards, I think our children also benefit from seeing the struggles
and the adversities that we go through when we include them in healthy fashion
on that process. I'm not going to breach going into Dr.
Jackson mode. I'm not a doctor, but I do know that I
don't want my kids to feel like every day is Disneyland.
You know, like that.
Now, actually, go ahead.
Do you know that I feel like today, if I if I ever needed to hear that message,
today was the day because I was having a moment like earlier today where I thought,
like, is this is this really a good like the other working from home things,
especially as women, we go, isn't it great that your kids see you doing this
and working and I've often thought to myself, yeah, there are days where I think
I wish my kids didn't see that day where the stress is high or whatever.
And we've all done that. So, yeah, that's yeah.
And I'm not weird like I'm the Mark Twain type person who's when everybody's going
one way like my natural instinct is to go the other way.
I'm going to start to explore why.
And so I was talking to, oh, gosh, Grant, Grant Cochran, Graham Cochran
a while back now, he's a he's a stay at home dad slash entrepreneur, too.
And I'm looking forward to the day.
I want you on this panel if you're willing to do it with us.
I want to do a panel on what it's really like to work from home.
All right. And really talk vulnerably about what those matters are, because, yes,
I do believe firmly the pros far away the cons.
I love working from home and there's still challenges.
And long before Covid there I was like with my at home work opportunity.
But trying to figure out, OK, what boundaries need to exist for my spouse
and I and for my children and I how do I help my six month old understand that I'm
not ignoring them when I'm in this room working.
Right. There's all sorts of things that now with Covid people have a better idea.
But I still think we sugar coat that experience too much or only talk about
the positives rather than helping people realize like, oh, there's there's challenges
that exist. And by the way, here are the resources I use.
What are the resources you use?
Because, you know, with working from home, because I'm like you,
I started working from home in 2014, so I left corporate in 2014.
So I've been doing this a long time, like way before Covid.
I was doing this online thing and this Covid came.
I was like, this is just what we were doing.
Everybody's joining us now. Cool.
I was like, we're not new. You guys know anyway.
But I do think I have developed strategies over the years for
creating my own trade offs is how I would put it.
Actually, a friend of mine put it that way to me yesterday.
I was trying to explain this to her.
And, you know, for me, I discovered that I'm not good with late nights,
but I'm good with early morning.
So people will say to me, are you serious?
You'll do meetings at five a.m.
I'm like, yes, because I like to take my children to school and that's my trade off.
And I can speak to people in the US from Australia at five a.m.
I will get up. I've been on podcasts at five a.m.
And people said to me, oh, my God, I don't know how you work like that.
Like, yeah, but I have the rest of the day off.
Like I get to.
So it's about.
Everyone at home is there are challenges, but you get to design your flow better
in not in every job, but in my particular job, I can do that.
And that works for me.
And you've got to find your boundaries and your trade offs.
Huge, super, super well said.
OK, so I'm going to have a new question I haven't opened to in a long time.
What's the worst leadership experience that you've ever had?
Yes.
So I I had never led teams before before this job.
So I was kind of thrown into leadership by accident.
And I guess I discovered that I have natural leadership ability in certain areas.
Right. But I am quite weak in other areas.
And there are areas that, of course, like anything in life,
the areas I'm weak in keep coming up.
I keep bumping up against that in my leadership experience.
So my worst leadership experience from myself is my inability to let go of people
who are not doing the right thing or who are clearly.
Slip siding around, I just have a habit of seeing the best in everyone,
and I've been run over by that a couple of times and the worst.
So and then me as a leader, when that happens and it happens
multiple times over and anyone listening who's led to it knows what I'm talking
about, you get run over by some people.
And when it happens over and over and over again and like the empathy bucket is low,
my the way I have handled certain of those situations in the end, I'm not proud of.
I'm like, oh, you know, I probably shouldn't have lost that person or I
probably shouldn't have just, you know, like I wish I had been had the ability to
be to be way more, you know, the leader that I'd like to be.
But but I'm also human.
And I've learned over the years to go.
That's something I can work on and to recognize in myself that there are areas
of improvement that I could love that.
Hope that I'm a very personal one for me.
Thank you for that.
That's what I appreciate.
Gary Vaynerchuk, another great leader, said almost the same thing.
He's not allowed in his HR department because he sees the potential in everybody.
So he'll hire everybody based on their potential, but he'll ignore the realities
of what you know, what actually transpires.
He said that because that that makes me feel so good because this is me.
I actually am not allowed to hire anyone.
Right. I am so bad at hiring.
And it's weird because I'm in this this thing that I built.
I was good at building the machine.
So I was very good at building the machine that the recruiting team will use.
But I am not allowed because I see the best in everyone.
I want to give everyone that.
It was one of the very few videos I've watched by him.
But I heard that and I was like, that's so me.
I got to fix that. All right.
So I started to change immediately.
I'm like how I just molded.
But one of the things that helps us with the firing process as well.
And I don't mean to call it that, but it is what it is.
I'm going to drop a comment here.
In this comment, I just gave everybody
access to our template for our performance improvement plan.
And if anybody has a desire for to tweak that or to provide some feedback on that,
by all means, feel free to.
But this thing has helped me so much with
helping people gravitate towards or away from our culture while also giving them
a chance to kind of play baseball with us.
And what I mean by that is if they hit a base hit on step one of that, it's over.
Signed off. Done.
You're out of the performance improvement plan.
And the only people who go into it, of course, there's some type of attitude
challenge or or bigger problem, not not something mechanical.
And having that track record, though,
the performance improvement plan usually inspires the super wrong people to just
quit flat out or it inspires that or it shows us that we've given them every
chance that we can and it's time to move towards a healthy exit strategy.
But I didn't start that way.
I started with like just firing people.
All right. I started with just like, all right, this is going to work.
I know how to deal with it.
Or like you said, allowing people to take advantage of our company situation,
which hurts everybody far more and not just the one person.
So I really love that.
Actually, that's the point.
Yeah. I mean, I've kind of had a discussion with our.
We've an amazing leadership team in the Philippines.
And, you know, I'm very close with all of them.
And we were talking about this few weeks ago, actually going, you know,
it is my job as the leader of this company and the person who is guiding this ship
to make sure that the ship is healthy and that the ship is not going to sink
because it feeds all the people and I cannot allow, you know, one person's
situation while it while it is, you know, we can be people for this.
Gets to this people first thing.
We can be people first in support, but not at the expense of the entire
organization that needs to be protected.
One bad apple.
Often removed.
And I was that one bad apple lifetime fitness.
The CEO of Lifetime Fitness fired me himself.
All right. So another story for another day.
We'll do that where it's at.
But I salute the man and I know he made the decision that these days I absolutely
would have made myself so there's the worst side.
Then there's the best.
What's the best leadership experience you've ever had?
I OK, so for myself, what I'm most proud of, what I sort of did
without much experience, really, I the best leadership experience I've had
personally is that I was told when I entered the Philippines, like a few years
after, I was like, what is it with this attrition rate?
Like, you know, like these companies have like 40, 50, 60 percent churn in people.
Yeah.
And I was told by the story of more or less.
I mean, it's just a revolving door of people in and out, in and out, toxic
cultures, all this kind of thing.
And my leadership team, who I love and are so with us, and if they're listening,
high five to you guys, they were like, listen, it's just a thing here.
I mean, you know, it's always like 30, 40, 50 percent.
I was like, I'm not accepting it.
I want it down.
I said, like, that's it.
We're going to go to work on this.
And I really dug my heels in.
And the other issue that happens in our industry is the concept called AWOL,
which is like somebody just ghosts you.
An employee just decides not to show up to work.
Right.
And anyone who knows what I'm talking about.
And they just post you and turn the phone off and you never hear from them again.
And I was like, I want zero AWOL.
And I want like less than 15 percent attrition.
It has taken a lot of work, a lot of study, a lot of actually, to be fair to
Vern Harnish and scaling up, there's a huge people element in that methodology
that I spent two years with our team honing and working on.
And I'm proud to say that today, if I now we do slice and dice numbers a bit,
but for our definitely on our client facing our client facing,
which is the ones our clients really care about, our attrition rate is 12 percent.
And that's people who go off to have babies, go emigrate to Canada.
Like, there's nothing in there that's like a major company.
There could be one or two.
I don't know.
But really, on the whole, I'm so proud of that.
But you're dedicating yourself to it like you're proactively looking at how do you
optimize, how do you improve this process, how do you be there for the people?
Like that's that dedication and passion.
Like, you know, there's no reason to fake that either about about growth.
So I love you do that.
So that I'm very proud of that.
And we've lots more to do.
I mean, you know, but it's good because it just takes the work.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
We've we've had, I think, less than a handful of people
in development and total, we've we've got a pretty extensive team, but who've
left on bad terms, like we've had those sort of expenses.
But it is less than a handful.
The rest, anybody else who's moved on or moved into something else, I'm still like
really, really, really close and good friends with them.
And that that is a very welcome sign because that's kind of a new sign of life
over the last three to five years, like a reflection of the changes
we've chosen to make as leaders and now moving from we to I, it started me.
I had to make those changes.
I had to be willing to be to show up differently for people.
So we're running out of time, but this is my favorite question.
Barbara, this was the last chance you had to share with an audience.
What powerful lesson can other visionaries learn from your experience?
You can do anything you want to do.
To be honest, people told me I could never
build a company in the Philippines without being there.
I was like, watch me.
People said I couldn't be a mom and build
a scalable company without driving myself into the ground.
I was like, watch me.
So I really feel like what I would share is that I think if I could distill it down
to one thing, I always was very strong on my own
personal vision for my life and how I want to live.
And I think a lot of people don't start there.
They start with business vision or they start with career vision or they start
with what they want to achieve, right?
Start with your personal vision for your life and allow that to be the lighthouse
from which every other decision is made.
So, for example, I knew that I wanted to be able.
I live in Australia, but my family's in Ireland.
I knew that I wanted to be able to at the drop of a hat, change my mind and move to
Europe, therefore the business model that I chose had to be one I can put in my
pocket and take with me.
And this was before I launched the business.
So I started from that position and there
were business ideas that I struck off the list because they didn't suit my personal
vision for my life.
And I think if you start from that position, that has been very powerful for me.
And I could go on for two hours about it.
But that's really the point I would make.
Start there.
I would love to go on for two hours about it.
I'd love to have you come back.
I'd also love you to come on our other show, the Be Your Best Show.
Dot com.
I just did the prologue for the show.
It's going to, you know, we're going to build it up just like we did
on the show, Vision Pros from absolute scratch, raw, real.
And the types of guests that I'm going to have on that show, Vision Pros, are the ones
who pass some elite tests of authenticity and credibility that are willing to dive
into the things that Barbara dove into without any fear or scare or shame.
We need leaders like you, Barbara,
that are willing to dive in and be real and help people see that, you know,
success is not some rosy golden path that, you know, you have to get right or you have
to get perfect. There's so many different angles and realities about it.
So you shared a depth that I really appreciate.
We've got about five minutes left or so.
What questions should I be asking you that we haven't discussed?
What are the things that you wish?
Like, man, I wish people would would ask me about this or talk more about this.
Well, in terms of leadership.
I guess, how do you listen to people at scale?
I mean, there's so many things I could say here, but
how do you hear how do you hear everyone at scale?
That's something I actually have achieved, but it's been a long journey to get there.
And I had a commitment to doing it and I'm still refining it.
But, you know, OK, we've only got 350.
Some people have two, three thousand people, but it works at scale
and making everyone making your
every decision we make at the virtual hub is actually driven by the entire
organization, because their voice comes through in all our we run all sorts
of polling and surveys and fun stuff, all that sort of thing.
Like we make we gamify it as well.
So we don't just make it a boring survey.
We sort of gamify lots of things through the year.
And twice a year we run these massive town halls where we present the results.
And then from that, the results and the voice and the comments and everything
that they rate us on is NPS as well.
But we develop our three rock strategy from that.
And what are we actually going to focus on now based on the voice of the people?
What are we going to go and fix?
What are we going to go to work on and where are we going next?
And what are we going to do about it?
Right. And then we go to work for the people.
And that's what we do.
And, you know, when people say to me, what should we do about this?
I go, I have no idea. Why don't we ask the people?
How would I know? I mean, you know, do we want to have.
You know, is it like things that matter
for the people and for the employee experience? That's basically it.
I love that.
For those of you who feel like that may be oversimplified or like a giant shift
from where you're at, Barbara is right here. Right.
Good. Call her and go check out the virtual hub dot com and see what's there.
In the below the show, of course,
we're going to put the action steps that you guys can take with Barbara.
You've also got the resources down below that so you can dive into the resources
that we listed out today.
I'll just kind of stick with this this process a little bit because
one, now I do want you to talk for like another four hours and lay this out.
I believe in exactly what you're saying.
And I'm like, OK,
I've got to get in P.S. score, you know, that are in P.S.
incorporated into what we're doing.
I've got to I got to make sure that we're gamifying this process well enough.
And I don't want to be like Wells Fargo or the other big companies out there
that are constantly asking you for surveys and you're like, oh, the F away
because you don't do anything with this anyway.
Right. So there's there's that hindrance.
But those of you who have that in your brain right now, I'm saying, like,
don't do that. Go to Barbara, like, go to somebody who's doing it the right way.
That's getting the types of results that you would want to get out of that.
We don't have to be mad at the process
because of how poorly other companies and other other organizations implement said
process, we need to recognize that there's a reflection there of what would we want
to happen in that case of giving feedback and then implement it at our companies.
You said based on the voice and we go to work for the people,
you might shed a little bit more light on that because those are big concepts.
I love them. And I'm like, any tips I can get ready to implement.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's a lot of it to do with the employee experience.
I mean, I guess if you want to scale a company, I mean, let's let's bring it back
up to, you know, 10,000 foot view for a second.
If you want to scale a company successfully,
the two the two heads of the beast that you have to get right are the client
experience or the customer experience and the employee experience.
And loads of people just focus on the client experience.
We have client experience managers and we've all that sort of thing.
But the employee, the employee experience or the people and culture experience
matters just as much as the other one.
Now, we're growth experts, right?
That's that's kind of what we do.
And everybody that comes to us absolutely hates what we talk about unless they're
like the two percent, because we tell them, stop worrying about your prospect funnel.
Yes, building your team funnel.
We literally go the opposite way.
I say, no, it's more important to my I'm just going to double down on what you're
saying, I believe firmly that it is the most important funnel and experience to have.
And I'm sorry, I love that you're talking about it.
Yeah, I mean, you know, oh, gosh, we could like I could go down all sorts of rabbit
holes and trying to keep it quite high level here.
And but the employee experience and then, you know, the things that you're asking
the people, if you're trying to build culture, you know,
culture is something that kind of happens whether you like it or not.
And if you don't involve everyone, right,
if you don't have a culture of involving everyone, your culture is going to build
whatever way it's going to build, whether you like it or not.
It'll be divided, fragmented, split.
And then you can shift culture, but it's much harder to fix it later.
So it's you've got to kind of start hiring for it then.
So eventually you got to build what you want on the inside.
There is a great tip, actually.
It's called the mission to Mars, which I think is a Jim Collins
concept that I heard Vern speak about.
But it's the mission to Mars concept is like if we have to go and start a new
civilization, I'm sure Elon Musk has a lot to say about this.
But if we had to start a new civilization
on Mars and you had to pick the best of your civilization to go and start this
new place, this new civilization on Mars, who would you pick?
Right. You want to pick the best of the best.
So you got to look at your people and go, who's getting on the ship?
Right. And then you figure out what is it about them
that makes them the ones that you want to take to the on the mission to Mars?
And then you've got to bottle that and hire for that.
Right. That's the call.
That's what it is.
Right. What are the core values they embody?
Right. And what are they?
What's the thing that they embody?
Because you can't decide that as a leader, you have to have buy in from
everywhere, you can't just make up core values.
You've got to find out what it is in your
current culture that makes it tick.
You can set them from the start, though.
And that's a job.
Then you have to do exactly what Barbara is talking about.
And, you know, if you're blessed to set it from the start, awesome.
And, you know,
I highly recommend all the different types of assessments that you can get out there
to understand what your core values truly are, because there's what we say and there's
what we do. Right.
Those two things can be very different.
And, you know, we're not whimsical at all with our core values at first class
business and still takes cultivation and practice, but love, patience, persistence,
consistency and reliability.
We talk about those to the nth degree all the time.
We live by them and we don't really let people in our environment that don't also
showcase on the front end very healthily that they've already got those as part of
who they are. The other big piece here, I'll go back to that higher view.
You talked about the two realities.
Visionaries out there, we are building something for, I would say,
the seven components, the seven relationships that need to be built out
at scale, and we may be a few years away, we may be a few months away,
but we're building out a funnel system over 44,000 variables in relation to this.
And why is that?
Because there's the prospect funnel.
You have to know how to talk to prospects.
Just like Barbara talked about.
You have the candidate funnel, people who might want to come and work with you.
But you talk to your clients typically,
then you talk to your prospects, by the way.
That's a different type of procedure,
which is in templates, that's number three.
Then you got vendors, you got investors,
you got PR and media relations personnel, and you got employees.
And every single one of those are relationships
that you're going to have to deal with at scale.
And unfortunately, it costs an arm and a leg to build those things.
And there aren't very many people out there who even understand the depth of why
it's so important to be ready to talk to each one of those individuals.
So looking for companies.
The voice needs to be right for the audience,
because I always say to our leaders, when we're doing what the town holds,
and sometimes I see the slides and I see what we're about to talk about.
And I just go, just remember your audience.
Why should they care about this?
Right. So it's always remembering what audience are we speaking to now?
Is it the employees or is this the clients or are these the leads or the vendors or
who are we speaking to? Because the messaging and the core values stay the same,
but the messaging can shift and the positioning shifts.
Yeah, I love what you say.
I've met very few leaders who understand
those two components and paying attention. Visionaries, those you're listening in,
you're looking to hire people, looking to have people move your vision forward with
you. Last secret tip for me, go to their website,
look to see if they have a join our team tab.
If they don't have a join our team tab and they don't have a careers process
and a way for taking care of their people, it's probably a great reflection
that they're not going to do a great job of taking care of you.
We need to look for companies.
I will say that we don't have a join our team tab because we actually have
a completely different employee brand in the Philippines where we don't complicate
because they're two different websites.
So we tend to have our website that you guys see is our client side.
And then because our people we're hiring, our candidates and so they care about
different things than what we're talking to clients about.
So we actually have completely.
They do and they don't, though.
I'd agree to disagree.
You just launched your website pretty recently again, right?
Yeah. Right.
And so that's that's a process of right optimization.
Right. So the processes that we optimize, no business is perfect.
So by all means, Keller Williams got me beat hand over fist in terms of the
the employee outline and grunt style as well.
They got millions of followers.
Why? Because they understand that there's a depth and a harmony that exists with all
of this. You and I are still very much in the building process of all of that.
So I wouldn't follow either one of our examples, visionaries in terms of like
where the depth of our scale has landed.
If you want to if you want to compare with scale, look at Snapchat, look at
Instagram, look at Facebook, look at Upwork, look at Fiverr.
Those are companies to plan your scale based on.
But the leadership principles that Barbara has thrown down today and helped us with
and the reality of like what we can do to improve to our own position of scale
and taking care of our people, I do believe wholeheartedly in everything
that she shared. So vision pros we will see on the next episode.
Barbara, before I wrap up today, any final thoughts for the audience?
No, I think we covered a lot of ground there.
You know, I think just take on board the things that I'm saying.
I've learned it from the trenches and with experience.
So, you know.
Absolutely.
I've actually lived it and continue to live it.
Vision pros of your experience and we will see you on the next episode.
Take care, everybody. Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision.