Leveraging your virtual teams, both locally and overseas, to coordinate successful projects

Some of the areas he covers are:

• Why it’s important to have a clear project plan from the get-go?
• How important clearly defined roles within the team really are?
• Why it’s of benefit to have ‘specialists’ fulfilling particular roles and not expecting your VA to be a ‘jack of all trades’?
• Why investing the time in your ‘specialists’ upfront to understand you and your business can really pay off in the end?
• Making sure you have a project management system that is the ‘glue’ to ensure everyone communicates effectively
• How important is it to have clearly defined project goals and check-in points?
• Why it is paramount to lead the project team in order to set them up for success?

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

In this episode:

01:16 – Project background

03:05 – The right person for the role

03:30 – A clear project plan

05:55 – Clearly defining roles within the project team

10:06 – Different people have different skill sets

10:46 – Investing the time upfront to get it right

15:00 – Setting clearly defined project roles

16:55 – Don’t make assumptions…

17:15 – Have clear project milestones

18:52 – Don’t just have a deadline, have check-in points as well

21:19 – Driving the strategy

24:55 – Dealing with project curve balls

27:36 – Being a leader

29:27 – How to be a GREAT leader

34:57 – Wrapping things up

Matt: Good morning everyone! Excited to be here for today’s episode of the Virtual Success Show. Good morning Barbara!

Barbara: Hi Matt! How’s it going?

Matt: Going well and yourself?

Barbara: Great! Thank you, good week again.

Matt: Yes, another great week and so many great things happening. Which leads me to what I want to really focus on in today’s podcast was around an event that we, that I put on recently and how we utilized our virtual team to pretty much do the majority of the organization and setting up of the event.

Barbara: I’m so excited to talk about this topic because you know obviously, I have had a lot of experience, I have big virtual teams myself now but I haven’t put on an event yet so I’m very keen to pick your brains on how you interacted with the team and how you, because you pretty much offloaded most of the setting up of this event, didn’t you, to the virtual team.

Matt: Actually all of it! It was unbelievable, so I’ll start with how this whole thing came about and then we can go from there

Barbara: Yeah!

Project background

Matt: Like many of us, I was sitting around and came out with this concept for this event that I wanted to host. Locally, in my local area. I live in the Sutherland Shire and I thought ‘I’ve never done an event for a local business community’. I want to put something on for the local business community and as I said, I had one of those moments, light bulb, sounds great, how am I going to do it? So, I went to my whiteboard and literally white boarded up the whole event. We need a venue, we need landing pages, we need payment pages, we need marketing, all the aspects that we needed. And I looked at it and I went ‘Oh my goodness, how is all of this going to get done?!’ I set myself with this ridiculous timeline; I came up with the idea in late September and with the intension of doing this in the middle of November, so I literally gave myself 6 weeks to do this event. And then I started to think about, well who could do aspects of this? Who could do this part? Who could do that part? And that’s where I’m like, I’ve got this amazing team of people around me but there were some gaps and so I think the first thing I did was get clarity on what the whole thing needed to like and then who needed to be a part of it. And I just happened to see my sister that day who, she’s on maternity leave at the moment with her second child, and she used to be in events and I said to her ‘Do you want to make a little bit of extra money?’. She said ‘What do you mean?’ and I said, ‘Do you want to work from home and coordinate the organization of my event for me?’ and she said, ‘Yes sounds great!’, do you know what I mean?

The right person for the role

Barbara: Family member though, that’s key! That’s great, someone you trust. What I’m thinking there is you know, putting on an event I mean, maybe just for me because I don’t do events yet but, putting on an event feels like such a quite stressful thing, you know it’s a pretty big thing to do so to have someone I guess who had a background in events who could maybe coordinate with you is very handy to get things started.

A clear project plan

Matt: That was the key, more so than probably being a family was that she had the expertise so I didn’t have to hold her hand through the process. So I literally, what I did was, I took a photo of my whiteboard and I did a video, I took the photo, put it up and did a Camtasia video talking through the whiteboard and what I’d done and how I wanted the event to be, how I wanted it to look, feel etc. and that video was probably 8 minutes and I sent that to Rose and that was what she based everything that she needed to do it from, was that 8-minute video.

Barbara: And that’s key I think because a lot of people will create plans. You know or I mean even a whiteboard plan is pretty good, it’s a pretty good start but to actually put context around it because sometimes what I see people doing, and I’ve probably done this myself you know, you create a process, or you create a map of what you want something to look like, like a product launch or something but without your voice and putting context around what you mean and what you know want to portray, a lot of it gets lost in translation, a lot gets lost without the translation I guess.

Matt: Correct, correct! And you know what, I think for that particular role, it was essential that it was someone local, someone that could converse directly with everyone they needed to, you know, here in Australia. And I think choosing the person to take up specific roles, you need to look at what are they going to be doing. I needed someone in that role that could take quick instruction, who I didn’t need to necessarily walk through everything in a really slow and methodical manner, I needed to give her a high level overview and then enable her to do what she does.

Barbara: And then did you connect her and I’m assuming the next step and I’m probably jumping ahead here but you obviously have a big team, I mean you’ve got a virtual stuff in the Philippines, you’ve got people in Australia, you know you’ve got people in The States. Did you then give her the list of who’s on your team and who you felt would perform what role? Talk to me about the next steps, the team that you put in place?

Clearly defining roles within the project team

Matt: Yeah, so the next step was exactly what you mentioned. What I did was, I not only gave Rose all the contacts she needed, but I then introduced her to each of them and positioned her in what her role was with this project so all of them knew she was heading the project up.

Barbara: Oh, that’s key I was about to ask that because there’s a level of, what I see people doing and I’ve seen people doing this with events as well, is they decide they want to put an event on, it might a be small or could even just be a webinar to be honest, and then they’re just flaying about their VA in the Philippines and expect them to be able to coordinate and make it all perfect without much sort of leadership I guess, we’re still leading the concept and putting all the pieces of the puzzle in place in terms of the team and deciding who’s responsible for what bit … I think that’s something a lot of people miss and I don’t know whether you see this happening, but I see people forgetting about the leadership position that you have to take even when you have a virtual team.

Matt: Correct, you know I mean the natural person that this could have gone to would have been Vanessa, my personal assistant, but the reality is as talented as Vanessa is, it still needed someone with the event expertise to be able to see it through because there’s specific questions that needed to be asked. Specific questions around the hotels, the room size etc, etc, etc. So what I did was, I sent Rose the video, she watched it and then firstly I connected Vanessa with Rose because Vanessa, being my assistant, needed to know what was going on. She needed to be across what my aspects of this were and what Vanessa did, I sent Vanessa the same video I sent to Rose asking her to get all the tasks that I mentioned and put them into Asana.

Barbara: So she was very clear because this is the other thing, it wasn’t just connecting Vanessa and Rose, it was also making sure that Vanessa’s very clear on what role she plays in this bigger project because when there’s teams involved in a project what I see happening and going wrong is each member of the team doesn’t really know what particular job or role they’re playing and then you end up in a situation where someone says, ‘Oh but I thought she was doing it.’ Or ‘I thought they were doing it’ and nothing happens.

Matt: And that’s the beauty of getting into Asana as well and so once it got to Asana, there were still some gaps as to who’d been assigned certain things. So there was, outside of Rose and Vanessa, then I’ve got Alex who helps me with my slide preparation and Alex is a virtual assistant who lives in Romania and I’ve been working with Alex for probably about 3 years now and I met him through eLance and so I’ve been testing different suppliers through eLance. We’ve done a few projects together and he’d done a great job that’s where at that point a few years ago I’d said, I’d like to keep feeding you work, let’s come up with a pre-negotiated price and delivery time. So on slide decks of 100 slides or less it’s 48 cents a slide and there’s a 48-hour turn around. And I supply Alex with, I’ll either supply him with a wire frame PowerPoint which just has literally topics in each slide or I will provide him with a mind map with each branch of the mind map being a slide in the slide deck. He understands the style that I like and the sort of template that we use and he turns it around.

Different people have different skill sets

Barbara: Now I want you to stop there for a second because I find, I have so many interesting things to say here. What I love firstly is that you’ve got different members of the team and you’re recognizing the different people have different skill sets and you’re not expecting your VA Vanessa, your personal assistant to be a jack of all trades and brilliant at everything. So Alex is obviously a specialist in building slides and presentation slide decks however you’ve, by the sound of it, still spent a lot of time with Alex making sure that he understands your style. How long did that take?

Matt: I think probably 2 or 3 projects initially.

Investing the time upfront to get it right

Barbara: Yeah, so he didn’t get right on project one. I mean it’s difficult because obviously I see a lot of people getting tripped up in this area, when it comes to slides or images for some social media. They throw hands in the air the minute the first image isn’t perfect and I sort of think, well really things that are subjective take a lot of working together, feedback, trial and error and not just assuming the other person is stupid and can’t understand your brand. It doesn’t matter who they are, even designers in Australia will take time to understand what’s in your head and what you like and that takes work.

Matt: What I found is with the mind map again I do a quick audio that goes with it, and if I rush that initially upfront then there are a lot of revisions. If I take the time to explain the presentation, the essence of it, go through quickly each slide and what the context of the slide is often now on a hundred slides slide deck there is probably less than 10 slides that I’ll need images revised, so less than 10% and he turns that around in 48-hours with unlimited revisions. But I think the important thing to note though Barb, is that I’m paying 48 cents per slide, so I’m paying less than $50 for a task that would probably take me personally two days to do.

Barbara: Yeah!

Matt: And so if it doesn’t come back right the first time or the second time or the third time, it’s still saving me so much time and money. It’s just, you’ve got to put it in the right context of what’s going on here.

Barbara: What I think there as well, I am probably laboring this point too much because I see people getting tripped up so badly in this area. You know, you’re at that point now where you go back with 10 per cent of the slides maybe needing revisions but on the first project you did, how did that one go? You would’ve spend time with him.

Matt: Yeah, correct! I think the first one, that long ago but let’s say that there was 30 or 40 percent back then but the thing was and this is why I chose him as my preferred supplier was that he got it quickly. I’ve worked with other suppliers before and they did an okay job but he really wanted to get it right. He was really open to getting it right and he was the first person that actually wanted to have a conversation with me via Skype so there was a lot of positives hence for me personally, investing the time to get it right has paid off tenfold.

Barbara: Well that’s the thing and that’s the key point, the thing you just said there. Investing the time initially upfront has paid off tenfold. Honestly that’s happened to me as well; I mean I have had to invest time in all of my team you know. Even at times when I really didn’t have the time, but it pays off so massively in the end but it may take a few months for that to pay off, it could take a year for it to really pay off but it is so worth the time investment at the time and I see people not wanting to make that initial time investment. What I hear people saying to me are things like, ‘I just don’t have time!’, and ‘I don’t have time to talk to them. I wanted them to do it straightaway.’ And I know nobody really and again let’s be honest you’re paying cents on the dollar or whatever. You’re getting someone for $8 to $9 an hour like what we do through Virtual Angel Hub you know really I’m not saying that you get what you pay for but you have to invest some time initially to get the returns that you want, and you will.

Matt: And it’s irrelevant whether you’re paying $8 or $80 but you still have to invest the time.

Barbara: You have to invest the time. I’ve worked with strategists out there… I’ve worked with designers in Australia that cost me an absolute fortune but honestly I felt like it would’ve been easier to do it myself because it took them so long to get what I wanted. It’s just the nature of working with people I think in any industry.

Matt: Correct!

Barbara: Okay, so I’ve probably labored on that one too long!

Matt: No,

Setting clearly defined project roles

Barbara: So you got Alex going with the slides, Rose was project managing, Vanessa was managing Asana and making sure all the tasks were assigned and kept moving.

Matt: Correct, yeah and so it was the end of September and I took a week off and I had set Rose up before I went away and by the time I got back within a week, I had a short list of two venues, I had an appointment in my diary to brief the copywriter, I had a sketch up like a wireframe of the landing page, and all this was in a week while I was off in Hamilton Island enjoying a family holiday. And that’s the beauty of it, I can do all of that and have it happening. I got back, I chose a venue and that was sorted. The copywriter interviewed me about the event, he then went off and did his piece. I briefed Alex after I got back so he was working on the presentation and then the gap was how are we going to fill the room, we need to put 30 people in the room.

Barbara: I want you to pause there just for one second, because I am very interested in the week-long holiday that you had and I have a couple of questions that I think are key questions that the listeners are going to miss a couple of things here potentially because I see people missing this. Before you on holiday, how did you set them all up to know what your expectation was for results when you came back? So did you say, ‘Look Rose, I need to have, you know by the time I come back, I want to have a list of venues minimum 2.’, ‘Vanessa I need to…’ you know how did you set that up or did they just intuitively know what to have done by the time you got back?

Matt: It was all in Asana!

Don’t make assumptions…

Barbara: So you were leading that weren’t you; you set them up for success? Because I see a lot of people expecting that in their head but not leading that and just going, ‘Oh well I assumed that she would know by the time I got back that she would do this, this and this.’ And I think assumptions are very dangerous.

Have clear project milestones

Matt: Absolutely, Rose knew that on the Tuesday after I got back we were going to have a phone call and that she needed to present to me the venues.

Barbara: I love that because we talked on this podcast before, I think it was our first show. You mentioned something that just so key. There’s a difference between having a meeting and having a chitchat so like, you had organized a meeting with Rose for the Tuesday when you came back and there was a very clear agenda as to what was going to be talked about and what she had to present to you, so you had set that up before.

Matt: Absolutely! It was the same with Vanessa, that was before I went away. They were the two keys that needed to happen and sorry the third person that needed to be involved was, the meeting needed to be setup with the copywriter. So that had to be done, otherwise we wouldn’t have got the event ready in time.

Barbara: So I just love there though you know, that although you weren’t doing any of the work yourself and you had somebody project managing it, it was Rose, you were still leading the project in terms of what success looks like and what are the milestones that we need to, the actual milestones that we need to check-in and what needs to be done. What your expectations are.

Matt: And I think, for the listeners in any task whether it’s a project like this that you’re putting together or just a daily or weekly task, everything that you setup with your Virtual Assistants needs to have a clear deadline and a clear description of what success looks like.

Don’t just have a deadline, have check-in points as well

Barbara: Absolutely and I would even add to that, I say to people, ‘Don’t just even have a deadline, have a check-in point as well. If it’s a very big project, you want to make sure that if the deadline is four weeks from today then you don’t want to be catching up with your VA for an update the day before the deadline or on the deadline and expecting you know you just want to rock up and it’s all done. I mean you probably need to be having milestone meetings as well during those four weeks to check in on, you know, are there issues? Do you need my help with something? Are there road blocks? Are there people not getting back to you?’ You know things like that, that can really derail projects and I see people just setting deadlines and then coming back on the deadline date and then going, ‘Okay so what’s the deal?’ and I think really if you’re going to be a leader, you need to have milestones where you’re checking in. Oversight.

Matt: Correct! So then from there where we went was, I was interviewed by the copywriter so I spent 20 minutes with him and then again clear deadlines set on when I would have the draft copy, the venue was set and then as I said we just needed to start putting some marketing in place. I wrote three emails that we were going to send to our database as well as our LinkedIn and we wanted to just target local businesses. So we also had a strategy for, I had a list of acquaintances and colleagues that I have worked with over the years in the local area and reached out to them to help me market this project. I wrote the emails, Vanessa executed and sent all of that.

Barbara: Okay so I’ve got a question here, two questions, which I think are interesting to just pause on for a second. First of all, I’m assuming that everybody involved in this project was invited to the Asana project so everyone could collaborate together in Asana or…

Matt: Correct!

Barbara: And then who was and I’m assuming that it was probably you; you know you said that you wrote the emails and then we targeted people in my LinkedIn etc, etc etc. but you set those tasks up, yeah? And how to do them and then Vanessa executed them, would that be right?

Matt: Correct!

Driving the strategy

Barbara: Yep! So you were still driving the strategy behind that and not expecting Vanessa to be a strategist in that area because that’s not her skillset, would that be right?

Matt: Absolutely! 100%, 100%.

Barbara: Yeah! So I do see people expecting, again this is expectation management, I guess. You know, at Virtual Angel Hub, we get great VA’s … I put them into businesses but where we see businesses really fail is when they mistake that person for a strategist and the expectation is that the person can come up, I mean some of them can come up with a strategy when you get to know them better and when you work with them for a long time but initially you know they really are people to help you drive your strategy forward and implement things, but as directed by you.

Matt: 100% and I couldn’t agree more and the interesting thing is, it comes down to ‘why did I employ this person in the first place and what’s their role?’. So once we get clear on their role, then the expectations become a lot simpler but when we start confusing it and trying to get everyone doing everything and not be clear on their roles, then all of a sudden you know we’re expecting super human things from them.

Barbara: Absolutely! You know, I actually had an issue earlier this year with one of my gorgeous VA’s, like love her to death and we’ve a great relationship, and I was actually doing multiple businesses at the same time and multiple projects were on and she approached me one day and she was really upset and she said to me, ‘I feel like I’m not doing a good job, I’m dropping the ball, I’m all over the place and I feel like I don’t know what my role is.’ And I thought to myself, yes, I have been throwing things at her, left, right I centre and how I had viewed her role was to help me execute whatever it was I was doing. But in doing that I was actually making her feel very uncomfortable, like she wasn’t good enough and she couldn’t keep up and actually a great person was feeling down on herself because I wasn’t clear on what her role actually was. So that was really a lesson for me as well, you know, just making sure that the person feels supported and that they know what they’re supposed to be doing every day and where they play a part.

Matt: 100% absolutely! I think also to add; it all comes with experience. Like this case study that I’ve been giving around this event, if you’d ask me three years ago to do this, it certainly wouldn’t have been done with a level of precision and leverage that I can do it today back then, simply for the fact that now I am clear on who can do what, I am clear on, I guess, I talk about it in my book, they’re genius, the things that they love doing, that they’re exceptionally good at that and have a great return for themselves and the business and when you get each person in your team on a project playing in their genius, it’s amazing what happens.

Barbara: Well it’s like an orchestra, it actually is beautiful, it’s like music! Because I’ve had that experience. So the event happened, tell us about any hiccups. Were there any curve balls that happened along the way? And how did you deal with those?

Dealing with project curve balls

Matt: The only curve ball, actually there wasn’t. The only “hiccup” was that the original room that we had booked was smaller than the number of people that actually taken up tickets.

Barbara: Good problem! Great curve ball.

Matt: Great problem! Again, I said to Rose, ‘What can we do here?’ and she took care of it. She said, we’ve got this option or this option, and she solved the problem. And what was nice was you know just to give … Rose was confirming with me the whole way through so I knew that we had the room booked. She even wrote me this email telling me, and I’ve done many events so I wasn’t expecting this but, when you have someone that’s a professional in their position, this is what you get. She sent me an email the day before saying, ‘You’ll arrive at this time, this person will come to meet with you, this is the room you’re going to, this is what you should see when you get setup in there, this is the breakfast, this is the …’ I was just like, I was blown away, you know what I mean? The level of detail and precision she had gone to.

Barbara: That’s her experience though, you know I’ve seen people expecting their VA to be able to do that for them when they’ve got no experience with events.

Matt: That’s exactly right! That’s again putting someone who has the experience into that position makes it so much easier and to the point Barbara, three days before when I was practicing my presentation, get there on the day, everything’s there, everything’s setup, I plug in, I present, I leave and we had an amazing event, so there weren’t any hiccups as such and I think that was because each person in their role was playing to their strengths and here’s the really interesting thing about this whole thing and I wanted to highlight this for everyone, the investment, what this actually was in real cash terms in Australian dollars, to put the labor part of that event together, so forgetting that I had to engage a copywriter and that was, that’s a different expense. Just the organization, right, of the whole event; the investment was $230.

Barbara: Ah right, okay! Yep, that’s great.

Matt: Because again, Rose is working from home so she’s, so that was $30 an hour. I paid her $30 an hour.

Being a leader

Barbara: What I’m noticing here though and I really want to make sure that I highlight this point though because what I’m hearing and I want to make sure that the listeners are hearing this as well, is that although again, I’m going to labor it. You had the team in place and you went on a holiday, but you didn’t just fling the whiteboard picture at a group of people and say, ‘Hey! I’ll be back in 3 weeks and I’ll show up for the event’, you know. You really were the person who was driving the strategic end of it and you need to take that role. I think a lot of people feel that delegating, and I know we talk about how delegating frees of your time, unless you have a strategist who’s going to take that role for you and your business, you are the person who takes that role and that’s a role that is like the conductor of an orchestra. You know you’ve got all of your team doing their thing but you still need to conduct the orchestra.

Matt: Correct! And in conducting the orchestra, it’s such a minimal amount of effort and time.

Barbara: If you know how to do it right though, because I think a lot of people underestimate the expertise and experience you actually need to be a good conductor and that’s something I’m really committed to in trying to get more business owners to learn how to do that because in the beginning actually, there’s a bit of time investment and sometimes when you start delegating at first, it can be more work initially but the investment, the return comes later in freeing up your time. I think a lot of people think that they’re going to free up their time in week one, when actually the workload can almost double when you start delegating first. But you know, it’s a future, you’re looking down the barrel of a couple of months or whatever to get it right and then you start to see your time free up.

How to be a GREAT leader

Matt: Correct, so I guess if I give a quick bullet point list on this and how to be a great conductor fast. Number one is you have to have clarity on what success looks like. As the conductor you’ve got to get clear in your head what the tasks are…

Barbara: What you actually want and then what it looks like to be successful in all that.

Matt: Correct, correct! Secondly is then you’ve got to look at who’s doing what and does it require specialist skills because if it requires specialist skills then you’ve got to make sure the right person is sitting in the right seats. Hence, Rose being the project manager in this instance, right, was perfect for me to be able to sit at the conductor level, and I don’t have to worry about any of the detail because she had the expert knowledge.

Barbara: And I guess if you can’t afford to get someone for that role, let’s say you’re just starting with your small business, then you need to accept that you need to take that role.

Matt: Correct, correct! Third is making sure that you have a project management system that is the glue to get everyone communicating together. So if you’ve got multiple people, in this case we did, that were all important to the orchestra and have to play in harmony, they all have to have their sheet music, to use the metaphor.

Barbara: And it can’t be email, let’s be clear email is not a project management system. You’re setting yourself for total failure if you use email. So Asana or Trello or one of these project management tools.

Matt: And then lastly is having clear milestones and check-in points, you know what I mean? So there’s got to be, rather than just giving them the project in its entirety, you need to break it down to smaller pieces. For instance, I gave the tasks that needed to be done in that week when I was away and then I was coming back with a definitive ‘here’s we’re going to meet and this is what we’re going to talk about’, and if you break the project up like that then all of a sudden you move with immense speed and everyone works in harmony.

Barbara: It’s good! Everyone feels good then.

Matt: It doesn’t always work perfectly and I want to really stress that because where I think it becomes, when the problems tend to arise, either it’s going to be one of two things. One, the person doing the task has the right skillset so they’re going to require more of your time or secondly is as more and more people get involved with this, that’s when it can become harder but those things we just spoke about particularly around the project management system, they are critical for the success.

Barbara: Critical, I mean I’m thinking as your talking going, I really feel in the last year or two I have totally stepped into that orchestra role and we were talking before the show about this where I just feel like it’s such an amazing feeling when you get it right, but the only way I can do it is by having very clear roles for each person. Project management system is absolutely key and very clear, clearly defined tasks list with proper milestones, due dates and responsibilities for each person and then each person reporting it to me on their progress.

Matt: So I just want to add one last thing on this. I think it will give the listeners all the … I’m going to open the hood up massively!

Barbara: Go for it!

Matt: A few years ago I was terrible at lists, terrible at milestones, terrible at meetings, and I bring that up because I’ve learned the skill and this is a skill, I don’t believe people are born this way, it’s a learnable skill. You have to commit to learning the skill, you have to commit to the growth because if you want to be successful in your business and take it to the next level, these are the skills you need to master in order to grow and scale your business.

Barbara: Absolutely! I mean I was lucky, I suppose, because I spent so long in the corporate world where you’re almost put in a straight jacket when it comes to things like meetings. I mean you have no choice but to be organized. There’s meetings, there’s milestones, there’s strategic plans so I learnt a lot of that through my corporate days and I was quite amazed, actually, when I started working with the entrepreneurial, small business community I guess, how people are so not lacking in that area but not even knowledgeable about how important and pivotal it is to your success. You know, knowing how to run a meeting, knowing how to direct traffic in terms of projects and stuff like that, how to create processes and really if you’re not willing to, I don’t know if you remember when we had Dan Norris on the show, he said something quite controversial, he actually said, ‘If you’re not willing to create systems, processes and lead teams, you’re not an entrepreneur. Go work for someone else!’. And I thought, ok it was a bit controversial, but actually there’s a lot of truth in that, people don’t want to hear that but it’s actually true!

Matt: Exactly and that is the differentiator between mediocre results and outstanding results.

Wrapping things up

Barbara: And I think that’s a great point to finish on Matt because so many people are getting mediocre results and they’re blaming everything under the sun but the reality is, if you want outstanding results, the formula is actually not difficult, it’s there! It’s just people don’t want to follow it, they don’t want to take the pain and actually get good at this stuff. But I know if I can impart anything that I’ve learned over the last few years doing my own thing is, commit to it because when you get it right, the sky’s the limit.

Matt: 100%! I hope it’s been helpful for everyone today. Just to give a little bit of insight into a real life project and how you can utilize your virtual teams both locally and overseas to coordinate and how cost effective and time effective it can really be when you master this.

Barbara: Absolutely!

Matt: Thanks for sharing that with to me today Barb, it’s been really a great show.

Barbara: Yes, as always, I learned a lot again from you so I’m going to be implementing some of that stuff whenever I get to events. Until next week Matt, have a great week and listeners enjoy your week and remember to come back next week for more virtual success

Matt: You too Barb, have a great week, and to everyone!

The Hosts

Matt Malouf

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing and systems automation space.