The One About Recognition
How I satisfied my craving
TL;DR
I have many desires that I know are not healthy and can really become toxic traits if I am not careful.
And one of those things about me is that I really desire recognition. For most of my life, if there was a prize, I was likely to go after it. If there was a stage, I wanted to be on it. I am wired that way. Plenty of trophies, certificates, accolades, accomplishments, and countless newspaper articles in the world famous, weekly Devine News, thank you very much.
How I long to hear, “Kate, you are great. Here is the evidence. Let us all now pause and bask in the glow of your greatness.”
And I’ve been working pretty hard in my business, y’all. But there are not a lot of moments of pausing to bask in my greatness. I do something amazing and then I look over my shoulder…ain’t no one there giving me applause. Poor me!
I still crave that recognition.
But I will never get an “Employee of the Month” award. No free, all expense paid trip to Cabo because I was the top salesman of the year. No gold watch for 10 years of service. No Christmas bonus because I had a great annual evaluation. Shoot, I don’t even get a promotion!
All those things would be so exciting to come home and talk to my kids about. Or to call and tell my dad. Or dream about secretly with my husband and then know that he would make a big hoopla about it if I told him that I hit that professional milestone that we’d both been hoping for.
So I have to manufacture these milestones if I want to satisfy the “Everyone look at what I did” cravings. (oh so humbly, of course).
To that end, here is what I recently did to try to create some celebrations and recognition of my own hard work and also to redeem this natural craving so that it is more edifying to others than obnoxious.
See, I’ve been wanting an Oura Ring. It is one of those bio-tracking wearable devices. You know what I’m talking about. The devices that track your steps and your sleep and your heart rate and tell you all sorts of things about your body.
These rings are not cheap. And I wanted the most expensive gold one.
So I decided that I would make myself earn this ring. I’d track my progress in a visible way inside my house and then make a big deal when I achieved it.
Currently, my number one business goal is to sell more of my FreshBooks Office Hours membership program. So I found a picture of an Oura ring and pasted it into a Google Doc and then wrote “7 New Office Hours members = 1 Oura Ring” and added 7 blank lines to fill in people’s names.
I printed it off and taped it near our dining table so that everyone in my house could see it every day.
Hitting the goal took me longer than I was hoping, but I slowly filled it in over about 5 weeks. One of my precious children noted more than once that it was sure taking me a while. Little twerp!
Y’all. I did it. 10 days ago, everyone in my house gathered around when I did the unboxing after picking it up from Best Buy.
I got my recognition in a non-toxic way. Even that slightly twerpy child will hopefully recognize that I am working hard and that hard work pays off and can be celebrated. And they have a mom that is a prize-winning mom, by golly!
And ya know, I swear all these people I live with have this slight glow of greatness radiating off of them, even 10 days later. 😎
Celebrations of your accomplishments are important. Even if you don’t crave them as much as I do, I encourage you to find a way to make sure you are getting the recognition you deserve for all your hard work as a business owner.
If you need ideas about how to celebrate business milestones, then you need to follow The Workflow Queen, Alyssa Lang! For real. She is great at celebrating! Spend just 1 minute poking around her website and you can see it. I have literally watched her set goals and give herself prizes, both large and small. And she celebrates her students as she equips them and pushes them to reach their goals, too. Hit that graphic to learn more about this sponsor.
Deals Deals Deals
💰 Megan Tarnow is known in the accounting world for her experience serving the nonprofit sector. She has started a community called the Nonprofit Krewe. Use discount code EARLY to enroll in the program for only $79/mo. Don’t sleep on the nonprofit sector, y’all. There is big money to be made serving the nonprofits, but you have to know what you are doing.
💰 The Ambitious Bookkeeper, Serena Shoup, recently updated her mini-course “The Bookkeeping Client Closer”*. This is all about getting clients. I was especially struck by the bonus section called 12 Ways to Find Your Perfect Client. Priced at only $37.
💰 Mariette Martinez is hosting her Tax Ready Books training where she teaches how to create tax-ready books with rock solid bookkeeping systems. Sign up with this link to get $100 off*.
Please always send me any news of deals that you hear of that others might benefit from.
Be There or Be Square
Items with a “+” are hosted by me. All these events can be viewed and registered for in the DESCRIPTIONS of each event on the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Calendar.
📅 +March 17 - Get Organized Challenge* - Justine Lackey is hosting a FREE challenge to help you get organized and get systems in place to run your business better. It starts Monday - sign up HERE*.
📅 March 19 - Free Keeper Q&A with Hughes & Strong Consulting. This month they are covering "Creative uses of Keeper's new Organizer Forms" - sign up NOW!
📅 March 20 - Free QBO Cleanup workshop* (and they are providing replays, too). Clean ups are hard, but they can be extremely lucrative if you have a system and know what you are doing. If you go into them with no framework, they will kick your butt!
📅 +March 25 - Beyond Basic Bookkeeping: Lessons From A Nonprofit Niche. Megan Tarnow is going to take her experience from serving the nonprofit sector to illustrate why bookkeeping is so much more than just coding transactions from the bank feed. And she’ll share a lot of info about nonprofits, too. RSVP in the FB group.
📅 April 1 - Applications for The Accounting Cornerstone Foundation first round of scholarships are due April 1. If you don’t know what this organization is, you need to pay closer attention to my newsletter, folks! Make sure you are subscribed!
Featured Posts
🌶️ Corry J. (who is no slouch at accounting) shared how a T-Account Cheat Sheet rescued her in a moment of accounting confusion. You don’t have to have a pretty version, but every serious accounting and bookkeeping professional has a cheat sheet like this handy. Draw it out with a pencil if you have to. That works just as well.
🌶️ Taylor E. told us in this post how a client fired her because she did her first price increase. And then less than month later she tells us she got an $8,000 clean up and ongoing monthly service. Comment below if you are a person that needs to hear this story. We can encourage you to drop the terrible client and get a more profitable and peaceful one!
🌶️ More war stories about firing clients. And these people kiss their mama with that mouth! Can you add a story to this thread?
🌶️ Great questions were asked during the community Monthly Q&A Lunch with Kate - Check it out HERE and be sure to join for the one on the first Tuesday in April!
Help You Hustle
💪 Catch the replay of How To Stay Organized As A Bookkeeper. Y’all, I’m 7 years into my business and haven't prioritized being organized until this year. Please DO NOT be like me! Even if you want to be small, you can be organized and have systems.
And sign up for this more-detailed free Get Organized Challenge*. I can’t attend all 3 live because of spring break, but I’m registering for the replays so I can watch from my car while driving home from camping.
💪 I think bookkeepers are the unsung heroes of business. And I want to tell those stories so more people know how important our work is. On April 10, I’m going to do a live stream where I share examples of bookkeepers being heroes. Please fill out this form to tell me about a time where you were a hero for one of your clients.
💪 It is time to vote for the Top 100 QuickBooks ProAdvisors of the year. To be clear, I am not on this list. I don't care if you cast a vote or not. But I think this list would be handy as a tool to investigate how you stack up. Look at what these people are doing and learn from them. And make a mental note and take action if this is a recognition you’d like to receive one day. You can self-nominate. I know many of these people self-nominate.
💪 How do you even begin to think about how to systematically approach clean up projects when things are such a mess? And what words do you use to sell them to clients? This free clean up workshop* from Akadian Accounting Education (formerly Fast & Easy QBO) will teach you how you can get started taking on clean up projects in QBO.
Jobs
💼 A few jobs were added to the Job Guide including one that has one of the most fun jobs posts I’ve seen! Check out the posts for more info on the jobs. Check it out HERE.
My Family Circus (43F, 40M, 13M, 11F, 10M)
🎪 My husband recently turned 40.
He has never really been one to exercise much. He will go for a run and do pushups occasionally. But that usually coincides with him having to pass his Physical Readiness Test for the Navy. He makes sure to exercise a couple of weeks before the test day.
But turning 40 and the fact that he is going on a 2 week intense boy scout hike this summer and does not want to be the weak link of the group has motivated him to exercise more.
And here is how he is doing it as someone who doesn’t have a lot of interest in working out.
He made a little chart that he taped up inside our kitchen cabinets. It has 2 columns - Exercise and Alcohol. And all he does is write the date that he exercises (for him, a run) and that buys him a night where he can drink a beer. When he drinks alcohol, he writes that date in the second column and that “spends” the exercise currency.
Tit for tat. Sweat for beer.
He has never been a big drinker anyway. He is a one-beer kind of guy. So this is more of a tool to help him work out than to reduce alcohol consumption. But I was thinking it could also be beneficial for folks who wanted to drink less.
He is over 75 days into this method. So it is probably getting close to sticking. I asked him if he was going to give it up after the big hike this summer and he says he intends to keep it going. And then he said that in 2026 he might add ice cream (which is waaayy more of a vice for him than beer) in addition to alcohol. So he would have to choose which he wanted more: Cookies & Cream or Shiner Bock.
Kate Builds In Public
🎢 I’d say last year was the first time I ever had the seed of an idea that one day I’d like to have a business that I could sell. That idea is slowly starting to grow and take root. Right now the thoughts have the form of “I think I’d feel disappointed if I just shuttered one day and just told my clients to find someone else.” I will probably need a stronger motivating idea to actually build a business I could sell. So hopefully I start to really, really want this. But I know one thing for sure. Right now, I am 100% certain that no one would pay a single cent for Heritage Business Services. I have no strong systems and my income is too skewed to me being a 1-on-1 trainer. So I have years of work ahead of me.
I must focus, focus, focus on organization. I need to be able to be “hit by a bus” and someone else could run the business.
I must stop avoiding monthly recurring clients. I need to have less training income and cleanup income. I need more MRR. And I hate MRR monthly client work, so I know that means I will have to utilize team members who like that sort of thing. There are people out there who thrive on that.
🎢 I had my Operations Coordinator (hired 4 months ago, 15 hours per week) email clients on my behalf. Whaaatttt! Look at me! In a way, the emails she has sent have been small (follow ups with prospects that have not completed my intake form and follow ups with the members of the public who attended my latest free monthly FreshBooks Q&A). But at the same time, it feels so big. And I can feel in my bones that client communication is only going to expand.
From The Vault
⚡ We have Spring Break this week - and that also means summer is just around the corner. I did a panel last year with folks who take their business on the road. Check out Accounting Nomads and get inspired to leave your desk.
You can also check out My Mobile Office to see how I get work done from inside my car.
Letters To The Editor
✉️ Sometimes just a little note brings a smile to my face and encourages me to keep writing.
Thank you Kate! I needed this today. Have a great Sunday! Natascia O.
Classifieds (Clickable)
Keep hustling!
Kate
-Chief Hustler-
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