The One About "Want To"
Sometimes you just have to turn on that switch inside you
TL;DR
Though we all have different talents, backgrounds, and interests, I believe that one thing we all have in common is that we have a switch inside us that I call our “want to” switch.
When we know there is something we should do to make our lives better or something that we need to do but don’t want to do, we have to choose whether or not to turn on our “want to” switch.
At home this plays out with my children and with myself in moments like these:
You can’t get the 4th corner of the fitted sheet on the bed but your younger (and shorter and weaker) sibling can? Turn on your “want to” switch.
Mom takes you shoe shopping and you make little helpless grunts about getting the new (correctly-sized) shoe on your feet because you won’t loosen the laces, yet there are people in the world with one arm that can successfully figure out how to put on their new shoes? Turn on your “want to” switch.
When I really don’t want to make a phone call but I know in my heart that I should? I have to visualize myself turning on my “want to” switch.
These are all recent examples from my own home where someone had to make a choice to turn on their “want to” switch.
Why do I tell you this?
Because in entrepreneurship, the times where I have turned on my “want to” switch in the face of a task that I knew was going to be really challenging for me are the moments that have propelled me the farthest forward. The moments that have allowed me to steadily rise in the competitive business landscape.
How can you assess what moments you need to make the choice to turn on your “want to” switch or not? I think it is the moments when you feel whiney and moany. Like a child sulking or throwing a tantrum. Where you know you aren’t reaching and stretching as far as you can because it is going to be uncomfortable.
The big payoffs are likely juuuust out of easy reach for most people. That has been my experience. The biggest moves have happened when my natural instincts were to whine like a child and wilt in my desk chair like a delicate flower, but I instead chose to turn on my “want to” switch and did the dang thing and didn’t quit.
Things like…
Delivering my first presentation about bookkeeping to a little local group of entrepreneurs.
Building my own business website (which is admittedly terrible, BUT I got the job done AND what it taught me about an online business was invaluable and let me to do other computer-based things that I’d never have dreamed that I could do).
Creating my first FreshBooks tutorial videos (which are not beautiful to watch, but looking fancy doesn't matter if the viewer can tell your brain is big in your video).
Every person has different things that are hard for them. Just like some of my kids can put on a fitted sheet with more ease than some of my other kids.
But when something needs to be done, are you going to visualize turning on your “want to” switch and push yourself just a little farther than you thought you could? That is where the big payoffs will happen. And it feels really, really good.
But (there is always a but…), there is also truth to the idea that people can go farther together than alone. Sometimes it helps to have a coach pushing you to keep striving and doing the next uncomfortable thing that will have a big payoff. That is what The Workflow Queen is all about. Bang that graphic and peek at the titles of all her resources. As you find yourself in a moment of whining about that hard thing you are trying to do, one of her wide variety of programs might be that little boost that you need to do the dang thing.
Deals Deals Deals
💰 The Breakthrough coaching program* from the Workflow Queen is $1,000 off. Expires this weekend!
💰 Get 20% off your first 3 months of Keeper* when you use the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Community referral link.
💰 Over 30% off all 3 QBO Certification Courses* from Akadian (formerly Fast & Easy QBO) and $700 off the QBO Clean Up Course.
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 4 - Live Q&A With Kate - I'm going to be hosting a WRITTEN Q&A inside the private Bookkeeping Side Hustle group where you can ask me any questions you have. For one hour, I'm going to be available and answering questions as fast as my little fingers can type. Whether it’s about bookkeeping, growing your business, or anything else on your mind, I’m here to help!
📅 March 4 - Banking Center in QuickBooks Online. This QBO Banking tutorial shows how to add bank accounts, import transactions, categorize expenses, attach receipts, and do bank reconciliations. Register for the RoyalWise class HERE*.
📅 +March 12 - How To Stay Organized As A Bookkeeper. Justine Lackey will share tips to get and stay organized. RSVP so you don’t forget! And while you are at it - REGISTER* for Justine’s Get Organized Challenge that starts on March 17th!
📅 March 19 - Free Keeper Q&A with Hughes & Strong Consulting. Register today and get it on your monthly calendar!
📅 +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.
Featured Posts
🌶️ Some people (myself included) pay their contractors by a % of the billing rather than by the hour. I wanted to know what kinds of percentages people pay, so I took a poll. Oh my goodness. What wild results and comments. ALSO, can I just say it feels good to pay someone a great wage. Here is the post.
If this feels overwhelming for you, please know that THERE IS NO ONE RIGHT ANSWER. We are all making it up as we go. Owning a business is just making the next hard decision and then the next and then another one after that until you shut it down. 🙃
🌶️ The consensus was almost unanimous when Kelllyann G asked our community about how to respond to a prospect that asked for a resume. Probably a 🚩🚩🚩.
Help You Hustle
💪 On our most recent community live stream, Tom Norton gives detailed advice about whether or not a bookkeeper should become an Enrolled Agent and add taxes to their bookkeeping businesses. Such a refreshing conversation. No fluff. He just gives great facts about what it takes to get the credential and offers several ways to find out for free if you are going to love taxes. 🤓
💪 I was a guest on the School of Bookkeeping live stream called QuickBooks vs FreshBooks: Battle of the Books. If you've ever been curious about what it would look like to serve clients that use FreshBooks, this would be a good listen.
💪 This post from Tom Z on LinkedIn is singing my song. Before you worry about the fancy stuff like AI, make sure you and your team members have mastered basic efficiency tools like keyboard shortcuts. His post got me so jazzed I shared my list of what I consider the minimum keyboard shortcuts.
💪 Running a successful bookkeeping or accounting firm requires more than technical skills. Without the right systems in place, managing clients, meeting deadlines, and staying organized can feel overwhelming. Justine Lackey is hosting The Get Organized! Challenge which will teach you how to implement workflows that create consistency and ease in your business. If you are ready to stop feeling scattered, register HERE.*
Jobs
💼 A couple of jobs were added to the Job Guide and one of them is a full-time job! Check out the posts for more info on the jobs. Check it out HERE.
My Family Circus (43F, 40M, 13M, 11F, 10M)
🎪 Long live the checkbook:
Note: Lest I get roasted as a dinosaur, I do not have a checkbook for my business. The HORROR! It is 2025 after all.
Checkbooks play an important role in our home, and I will tell you why…
So my children can see me putting something in the offering plate at church.
Last newsletter I shared 2 videos from my client-facing channel about tithing (or charitable giving if you don’t gattend a church). But I have more to say about giving…so here goes.
Most of our giving (church and other non-profits) is automated. We’ve set it (and honestly kind of forget it), and the auto-drafts just come out of our checking account as soon as we get our paychecks because that helps us not accidentally spend the money that we decided we want to give.
But we still have a checkbook that we use for some of our church tithe (the part of our tithe that is on my owner’s distributions) so my children see our money leaving our hands, and so they can take turns holding it and then giving it away.
More is caught than taught. Telling them our beliefs about giving money to our church won’t be nearly as meaningful or memorable than them seeing us do it.
They are not going to comprehend an auto-draft from a bank account. Even if I do remember to talk about it (which, let’s be honest, I won’t remember to talk about it very often, if ever), phantom ACHs are just going to be pretend money to them.
As a rule of thumb, when something is important for personal character formation, make it as analog as possible. This applies to adults and children.
Long live that old fashioned checkbook!
Kate Builds In Public
🎢 Speaking of turning on my “want to” switch, this past week I totally turned it on and was a freaking HERO inside of my zoom account. Zoom did everything it could to thwart me, and I said “Not today!”.
See, I have a monthly free Q&A for FreshBooks users. This is like my “lead magnet". There were 34 registrations for the February meeting last week! It is pretty popular.
Well, the problem is that I really wasn’t doing much to proactively follow up with the people who registered. I was happy as long as some attendees booked some sort of service with me, which always happened. But I knew that there was more I could be doing. If I could capture more info from these very warm leads, I could try to market to them in the future.
So, I asked myself “what would a smart person do?” and then I tried to do that. I knew that I have personally registered for zoom meetings that required that I answer a few questions. By golly, I was going to figure this out.
After much, much, much wailing and gnashing of teach, I finally have this 👇
A recurring meeting template, with required registration questions that will give me a lot more info about the person (I put my required questions inside this viewable Google Doc in case anyone wants to read them).
The next step would be to create some sort of automation that uses Zapier to push these registrants into some sort of automated email sequence inside my email platform based on how they answer the questions. But I can only stretch myself so far. That is out of reach for me at this time.
🎢 This past week I sent an email to my entire firm email list (700+ emails) telling people that there would be a $75 cancellation charge for cancelling a meeting with less than 24 hours notice. In the last 2 weeks this has happened twice, and I was real ticked. Especially at this time of year because I have more FreshBooks users that want 1-on-1 meetings with me than I allow time slots for, so these cancellations were a real loss of money for me. Someone else would have booked the slot if there had been more notice. Here is the text of the email I sent if you want to read it.
From The Vault
⚡ There have been a few posts in the Facebook group about websites - do you need one? What do you include? Should you build it or someone else?
All of these are great questions - check out this video where I share a little cheat sheet to help you know what you should include on your website.
Here are some more videos that can help:
Classifieds (Clickable)
Keep hustling!
Kate
-Chief Hustler-
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