“It is really important for people to feel like, ‘I’m in touch with people I trust.'" –Karen Wickre  Building meaningful connections isn’t easy, especially online. We have all felt an internal cringe at connecting with someone on LinkedIn only to be hard-sold their product or service. Some of us may even be a little guilty of doing that too! But networking is about more than having the confidence to make demands of strangers. Building a network is about connecting with people you share similar interests with, people you not only think may help you, but people you know you can help.  ..read more

“But the problem was, I was the one who knew how to do everything, and I didn’t get it out to my staff very well.”  -Heidi Adams      Stepping out on your own can be scary, but if you have a real love for what you do, you’ll never really work a day in your life. Sometimes our own successes can overwhelm us. Afraid we will never get a referral again, we take on as many as we can. Many of us run this way for years, unable to shift our mindset toward a more sustainable way of doing business. The toll a business takes on our time and energy is massive, so much so we hardly even ..read more

“If you can say your 30-second commercial while you’re holding marbles and a glass of water, you can say it at a networking event much more easily.”  -Mindy Morrison It can sometimes feel like we have a never-ending checklist of things to do before we can even begin to start our business or follow our dreams. We build an idea in our head of what success is, not realizing we are often creating unnecessary barriers instead, ones that block us from just taking the leap and doing the work that really matters. Self-made obstacles and the belief that we have to do it on our own, are two of the ..read more

“It seems slightly daunting, but at the end of the day, it is pretty straightforward, and man can bookkeepers add a lot of value to a manufacturing business.” -Shawn Coultice   Have you ever considered a manufacturing bookkeeping niche for your business? Some bookkeepers focus on dentists or lawyers, but why not manufacturing companies? In this episode, our host, Louie Prosperi will explore further with the Head of Channel Partnerships at Katana, Shawn Coultice. Katana is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that helps manufacturers track their inventory, manage their sales plus ..read more

You don’t know what you didn’t know. And everything that’s living in your head, we’ve got to get it out of there! -Melissa Morris It is often easy to feel like no one can do what we can do and yet, we rely on hastily written to-do lists or checklists quickly passed off to our employees. If things in your bookkeeping business aren’t running smoothly, it is unlikely to be because of employees being underqualified and intentionally doing things wrong. It is far more likely that we haven’t explained to them or trained them in how things need to be done. Getting everything out of your head and down ..read more

“If you’re going to work with someone and they’re going to give you access to their client base, they’re really going to have to trust you.” -Jeff Jacobs Trust is fundamental to any relationship and yet so many of us struggle to build long-lasting and trusting relationships. Expectation plays a key role in how trust is formed. When someone lets us down or fails to deliver on a promise, it shakes our faith in them. But more deeply, it shakes our faith in ourselves. After all, we put our faith and trust in that person or organization to deliver. When they don’t, we question our ability to make t ..read more

“You really need to identify your target audience. If you don’t know what market you’re in and who your ideal client is then how can you even begin marketing?” -Amy Anderson Marketing ourselves isn’t easy and in the bookkeeping industry especially, where we tend to be more introverted, it can be hard to build an exciting and outgoing profile. Fortunately, marketing ourselves doesn’t have to be all or nothing. There is room for us to find ways of doing it that play to our strengths. It's easy to get discouraged when you spent a lot of time on a marketing strategy that had few returns. This does ..read more

“They depend on us to relate to them important information on how to minimize tax, how to reach their financial goals. If we do it in a more structured way, our clients are going to see the value in that expertise.” -Nadia Rodriguez    Expanding your bookkeeping business to include advisory capacity is scary for many. We are our own worst enemies when it comes to self-belief and self-confidence. But consider this... how many times have you been talking with a client, answering all of their questions in a fun and relaxed way only to realize later that it took you years of training and ..read more

“I would say, if you are never really wrong, you are never really right either, you need to put things down (on paper) to get clarity, to move work forward and make things happen.” -Adrienne Bellehumeur   Getting good at effective documentation isn’t easy. Whether because we find it hard to take notes while actively listening or we are afraid of losing face in a room full of people who aren’t taking notes. So much valuable information is lost, miscommunicated or inaccessible as it exists only in one person's head.   So much of our value is tied to the things we think we do best. It i ..read more

“That’s the beauty of this industry, you can be as big or as little as you want to be, it’s so scalable.”  -Kim Wolfe   This is the question that has paralyzed more than a few good people when it comes to wanting to start their own bookkeeping business. It can be difficult to trust ourselves, and not judge ourselves too harshly for previous failures. Often, it is the expectation more than the outcome that hurts or makes us feel uncomfortable when things haven’t gone the way we hoped. What would happen if instead, you focused on being okay where you are and building a different realit ..read more