The One With A Key?
TL;DR
So later on in this newsletter, you’ll come across a stream we did last week called “Roast My Intake Form” where Kellie Parks gave me and 6 other Bookkeeping Side Hustle Community members feedback on our different forms that new clients fill out to start the process of engaging with us.
She laid out specific things I can do to improve my form. And I mean, my specific form. It is not like I listened to a podcast with some general instructions. She roasted my form in front of the whole internet.
And, y’all, I haven’t made a single change to it. I wonder if the other “roastees” have made changes to theirs?
Y’all, I’m so ashamed to admit this.
Why haven’t I made the improvements? Why don’t I just do the thing I know I need to do? Why can’t I get stuff done? I promise you that it is not for lack of time. What’s wrong with me?!?!
So as I write this morning, I’m trying to understand why it is hard for me. It is at least these two reasons:
Decision-making: Running a business is just decision after decision after decision and I’m the only one who makes those decisions. Do I stick with the free Google Form app or use a more professional tool? What exact words do I use in my questions? Do I make myself learn all those automations that are possible and if so, which do I choose? Unless I pay Kellie Parks or some other consultant to sit with me on a zoom or buy a premade template, ain’t no one else deciding but me. And it feels like death by 1,000 cuts. 🔪 🔪🔪
Execution: Even if I could overcome my moments of decision paralysis, I have to put my fingers on the keyboard and mouse to do the thing and good golly it takes so much courage to implement things because I always wonder if I’m doing the execution correctly or if I’m going to break something or omit something.
And I’ve got more on my list of things I know I need to do than just improving my intake form that I just cannot seem to do. Here is the tiniest fraction of a very long list:
I’ve got a new subcontractor that has agreed to help me on a FreshBooks cleanup, and I can’t even send the client the engagement letter because kicking off a clean up with a new subcontractor sounds hard and I don’t have good processes.
I haven’t filed my BOI report and I’ve had months to do it.
I have a BUNCH of short loom screen share videos recorded that I am supposed to upload to my FreshBooks tutorial YouTube Channel and I can’t seem to ship those.
My “Weekly Bookkeeping Checklist” lead magnet has stopped working because my email platform did something on the backend and so I’m no longer collecting emails on my firm email list. This means that I am missing out on so many marketing opportunities to those folks. Y’all, people who manage to find that checklist and want to download it are HOT for what I got, and I’m just letting them burn with bookkeeping desire in internet anonymity. This download has been broken for quite some time.
Each of those things above are stopped by either not wanting to make decisions or not wanting to do the work.
Yet simply making a decision and acting on those decisions would probably set you and me apart from 90% of people who say they want to start a business.
So maybe the key to success in bookkeeping entrepreneurship is just being able to get stuff done, over and over gain, and not stopping. It is not who is the best at the Debits and Credits. It is not about who has the best sales and marketing copy. It is not who is a ninja at a bookkeeping software. Yes, you do have to be good at all those things. And yes, those folks might make a little bit of money, maybe even a lot of money for a while. But are they going to be able to sustain it? Would they be better off just getting a really good job with their really elite skills?
But getting a job is off the table for me. So I have to look in the mirror and confront my problem, which is that red head looking right back at me. I have to figure out how to get the important stuff done.
And hats off to those of you who have figured out the key to getting stuff done. Can you comment below with your best tips for how you manage yourself?
But for the rest of us normies, maybe the first step to getting help is admitting we have a problem. If that is you, and specifically if Proposals and Pricing are paralyzing to you, you are invited to an upcoming Proposal Pricing Workshop from one of the best technical bookkeeping mentors out there, Pachira Business Solutions. You will learn about the process for diagnosing files, scoping work to identify a price, creating a plan of action, and shipping an attractive proposal that your client will accept.
Sign up. And then get ready to get stuff done.
Deals Deals Deals
💰 The Bookkeeping Business Accelerator by Serena Shoup is on sale for $500 off*. She has a very streamlined tech stack and has a lot of Xero content. And she still has a bookkeeping firm. And Xero let her sing on stage at their conference in August.
💰 There will be a founding member’s price next week for a new bookkeeping businesses coaching program by Justine Lackey*. You have to sign up here to be notified of the sale price next week.
💰 Seth David’sBulletproof Notion Operating System has a 20% off code. Use LABORDAY20.
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.
📅 September 16: The Get Organized Challenge hosted by Justine Lackey for bookkeepers starts THIS Monday! If you are feeling disorganized or scattered, this challenge is for you.
📅 +September 25 & October 3: The Value of Value-Based Pricing & Making AP Profitable. MakersHub is doing a 2 part series about accounts payable. The first one will be a more general explanation about how bookkeepers should price our services so this can be lucrative work and the second one will show how AP Services can be a profitible service line if you use the right technology. RSVP for both events HERE & HERE.
📅 September 25: Intro to Xero. Looking to grow and scale your business further? Join Xero for a demo of the platform and discover the possible efficiency gains with the power of Xero. Register HERE.
📅 +September 16 & 23: BSH Co-working Hour. Join me on Monday mornings for co-working hour to kick start your week. This is a great way to begin the work week, and see a some friendly faces. Join HERE on the 16th & HERE on the 23rd.
📅 October 16-19: I’ll be in Florida attending the Reframe Conference put on by Hector Garcia.
Featured Posts
🌶️ How a very NOT Advanced Bookkeeper (me) passed the QBO ProAdvisor Advanced Cert very early in her bookkeeping career. Lots of good advice here for Kara J.,, but I give my very detailed advice in the comments that explain how I personally did it.
🌶️ A cautionary tale about hourly pricing when you are a really good bookkeeper and technologist.
🌶️ Tanya P is updating her website and asked if folks put pricing on their website? Which side do you land on? I share how I do it on my own biz site, too.
Help You Hustle
💪 This Roast My Intake Form was such a great discussion.I 100% guarantee you will get at least 5 good ideas to improve your own form. Getting to see what so many other forms looked like was incredibly eye opening. You must watch this one with a pencil in your hand.
And please visit Kellie’s Cloud Accounting Templates site to see if any of the consulting or pre-made templates might help get you through any points of paralysis you are facing.
💪 Erica Goode is doing a 5-day series on LinkedIn called “How To Quit Corporate”. Starting here. Silent Lurkers welcome.
💪 If you are ALL IN on getting all the certifications that QuickBooks has to offer, but don’t know if you should attempt the QBO Advanced Cert or the QBP Payroll Cert*, Margie Remmers Davis wrote a blog article about how to decide which to attempt next. I tend to agree with her. It depends on whether the Basic Cert was tough or easy for you. And I’ll take this moment to remind new folks that learning QBO does not mean you know accounting fundamentals. Accounting fundamentals come BEFORE you learn a bookkeeping software. Please, please, please don’t go out of order.
💪 Justine Lackey’s Get Organized Challenge is next week*, and as a part of that, she will let folks know about a course she will be releasing to help people build their bookkeeping business.
One of my consistent pieces of advice about how to pick from the many bookkeeping business coaches is to pick the one that will motivate you when you feel like quitting. And then block everyone else out and just DO the stuff your chosen instructor/program tells you to do. No better way to find out if Justine is your #1 support than by watching her deliver her free masterclass next week.
Jobs
💼 More jobs were added to the BSH Job Opportunity Guide! 4 part time jobs were added to the list.
Don’t forget the standing opps on my Find A Freelance Job article. 1099 and W-2 opps.
My Family Circus
One the goals I started last school year was to read the books that my children are assigned in school. Our particular school that we just joined last year makes that very easy because they only read full books (no excerpts) and have a published handy list of the books for each grade level called “Classics to Keep.”
Here is my Google Doc of how I’m tracking my progress. Thankfully I was able to already give myself credit for quite a few of these from my own school days.
The benefit of this goal is that books really do bring people together. It is a way that I can be involved in my children’s education and have common experiences as they become more and more independent. And, as the reading list gets even tougher as they move through middle and high school, I hope to model “rising to the challenge”.
The drawbacks of this goal are that I had to read Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night's Dream last spring. I mean, by Act 5 I kind of was able to see that maybe this was a good story, but it was such a slog! I, of course, didn’t really voice my complaints to my 7th grader who was having to read it, too. I’m a smarter parent than that!
Families that read together stay together!
Kate Builds In Public
🎢 Honing Diagnostic Review Process: I’ve signed 5 FreshBooks Diagnostic Reviews at $275 a pop in the last 3 weeks. My trouble is that I don’t have a great way to figure out how to handle this much clean up volume if they all want clean ups, but, well, I’ll cross that bridge later (the veterans in this group are playing doomsday music in their heads reading that last sentence). The benefit I see to cranking out these diagnostics is that it is allowing me to refine my FreshBooks diagnostic review template and process. I hope to get it perfectly polished and then one day I hope to sell it to other accounting pros (perhaps to some of you).
🎢 Avoiding the drama: Y’all, I almost began work on one of these diagnostic reviews before I had been paid. I was about 10% into the project and my gut told me to check on the payment. Thankfully I stopped and sent an email to the two people I had talked to on the intake call. At that point I received a private reply from the woman (not the owner) and apparently there are some romantic issues falling apart between them and I got way more detail than I needed and this is not my drama. This is bookkeeping. Gotta keep that radar on for the joy-suckers, y’all.
🎢 Hiring my first employee update: In the last edition of this newsletter I shared the text of my very first job description that I finally worked up the courage to advertise. Well, turns out unicorns don’t just appear on doorsteps. Especially when the email address in the job description has a typo in it. 🤡 Y’all, I’m not kidding. Can you please moan and groan for me right now? Thankfully someone pointed it out to me so I could fix it. I’ve since shared it in a military spouse job group, a couple DFW bookkeeping Facebook groups, and also texted 30 people local to Fort Worth (since this is a hybrid role) and shared the link to the job description and asked them to forward it to anyone they knew who might be looking for a part time job. I’m very scared to share it with the true general public.
🎢 Remembering that I want to work part time: I had a day date yesterday with my husband because he has some “use or lose” vacation days with the Navy. I walked for an hour with a friendish/neighborish woman and I’m really hoping we can make it a weekly affair. I attended the kick off sessions for 2 Bible studies that started this week. One at my church and one called Bible Study Fellowship (BSF). By the way, BSF would have a group near you in your town! I love it!
From The Vault
If the opening section of this resonated with you, another possible solution to the problem of YOU is to be in an accountability group. Not sure where to start? Check out this video about building your own mastermind group! These 4 successful bookkeeping business owners shared all the details about how they run their group.
Classifieds (Clickable)
Keep hustling!
Kate
-Chief Hustler-
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