The One With A Posture Check
TL;DR
In the last Bookkeeping Side Hustle Pub, I shared a “Letter to the Editor” where I was asked for my advice about what steps I would take if I wanted to quickly scale a large bookkeeping firm bringing in $1 million in revenue instead of operating a (serious) side hustle.
I gave my full response here in this video entitled “Want a million dollar bookkeeping business? Do This.”. You can listen to this on 2x while you are driving to your Black Friday shopping destination or turning that left over turkey into a pot pie.
In that video, I offer
a warning,
2 things to most important things to focus your efforts on, and
2 options to invest in EARLY if you want to avoid misery that I see many folks on the path to big firms suffer from.
I believe if you select ONE option from the laundry list of support options I mention, you’ll increase you chances of hitting your goals.
Because you will be handed the exact steps to follow by folks who have done it before.
After you watch that video, comment below if you think I left out any other similar franchises or masterminds.
Otherwise, you have to cobble together resources on your own. It won’t be as smooth, but there are fantastic free resources, you just have to pay attention and learn how to weed out the bad stuff (which reading this newsletter every other Saturday will help you do…so why not formally subscribe if you aren’t already! 😎).
Speaking of fantastic free resources, when I took the new Gusto Payroll Certification, this Onboarding Checklist for new payroll clients was by far the most tactically useful part of the training. Not having all the pesky necessary info is absolutely killer to moving quickly with getting payroll set up. That helpful resource is found in “Onboarding Clients to Gusto” elective at Gusto Academy.
Click the image below to learn how to efficiently onboard your payroll clients. 👇
Deals Deals Deals
💰 There are so many deals happening right now - check out my Black Friday post for all the deals in one place. Some are even going through next week! Here are a few on the list.
MY STORE 😁 for your baller t-account mousepad (15% off entire store)
Bookkeeper Launch* ($1000 off)
Fast & Easy QBO* (Basic, Advanced, and Payroll bundled)
5MB Academy* (all courses 15% off)
Booming Bookkeeping Business* (50% off)
Bulletproof Bookkeeping Nerd Enterprises* (all courses 30% off)
Workflow Queen’s Kick Off With Asana For Accountants and Bookkeepers* (50% off)
Royalwise* (50% off all courses and membership deals)
Media Books (30% off accounting website templates)
And MamáCounts course, Cloud Accounting Templates, conference tickets, and funny accounting gifts/swag
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.
📅 December 8: Should You Niche In Real Estate Clients with QuickBooks Real Estate expert Gita Faust.
📅 +Mondays in November: Office hours at 11am EST on zoom. Here is link, and the password is HUSTLE. Plan on doing whatever task you’ve been putting off. It is a little easier with friends.
📅 November 29-December: 1 QBO Certification Bootcamps with Tracks for Basic, Advanced, or Payroll Certs.
📅 November 30: Xero Hour: Crypto 101 for Accountants and Bookkeepers. Register HERE
📅 December 6: Prepare 1099s: Best Practices in Xero. Get more information and register HERE.
📅 December 13: Royalwise is have a Full Service Payroll in QBO class. Join them to learn Payroll Subscription options, settings, and even how to do a payroll run. Register HERE.*
📅 December 14: Intro to Xero. Looking to grow and scale your business further? Join us for a demo of the platform and discover the possible efficiency gains with the power of Xero. Register HERE.
Featured Posts
🌶️ YourBookkeeper Barb gives all the details about the red flags that led her to walking away from a client. Take heed. 🚩🚩🚩
Help You Hustle
💪 In our house, one common refrain that all 5 of us say is “Posture Check”. We don’t say it in a judgmental way. Just with a “oh, I’m mostly talking to myself, but we can all benefit” tone. Put that phrase on a sticky note in several places around your house and office. Say it aloud to yourself, too. Say it at the computer. Say it table. Say it when you go for a walk. We are a slouchy society. It is unhealthy and unattractive. Hearing those two words can do a world of good for you and your family.
💪Watch the replays of the Day In The Life interviews with panels of employees at 🎥 QuickBooks Live and with 🎥 TurboTax Live. These positions might help you hustle if you need a base level of income as you consider bookkeeping entrepreneurship.
Each interview has a senior person (both CPAs) and a junior person.
I required all panelists answer the question “what DON’T you like or what is one thing you would change about working at Intuit” because I try to conduct unbiased interviews.
Intuit did not tell me who to interview for these panels. I personally rounded up these panelists except for Russ Seney on the QB Live interview because it is important to me to have men in my content. I did ask my contact at Intuit to help me track down a man.
💪 This thread asked about how much self-employed are spending on health care. Good information for those of you who need to solve for the health insurance obstacle that some entrepreneurs face.
💪 So Intuit Academy* is in now full swing with their FREE bookkeeping training and a second, higher level tax course now fully launched on the platform. You know I love sharing accounting training because I think accounting is hard and takes a lot lot lot of study. Free is also a great price, amiright?
Bookkeeping Professional course (think Accounting 101 more than software training that you get with their ProAdvisor Cert)
Tax Level 1 - Federal individual tax returns
Tax Level 2 - Rental owners, self-employed, and investors
Employers, you could use this training and their free proctored tests (👀) in your firm to educate or vet staff, however, remember that this is (unashamedly) a funnel for their QuickBooks Live and TurboTax Live jobs, so make sure your offer package and your work environment is better than the Intuit jobs.
Jobs
Make sure you use “jobopportunity” on your posts so I can search and feature them here
💼 Intuit is hiring, hiring, hiring for QuickBooks Live and TurboTax Live. Apply here. And please be sure to tell me if you get hired so I can send you your “Accounting T-Account Cheat Sheet Mousepad” so I can celebrate with you (and so Intuit can track the hires from people who benefited the job fair).
💼 Sheri Radler’s firm is looking for a part-time admin, but this could turn into a permanent job - go check it out.
💼 Shana Brown shared that her employer “Fit For Profit” is hiring for a part-time, virtual role.
💼 Carry Werdier shared the she is hiring for a part time role. You have to submit a 90 second video for this application which means SHE IS SMART AT RUNNING A BUSINESS.
Don’t forget the standing opps on my Find A Freelance Job article. 1099 and W-2 opps.
Kate Builds In Public
🎢 Parents, your children are about to be out of school! Not sure what emotion that evokes for you, but if you need kid-free time, don’t forget to schedule some “kid swaps” with a friend that also could use some kid free time. During the summer I normally I suggest kid swaps with your friends who are also business owners, but you could probably find some swaps with friends who just want to do Christmas shopping without their children. (Pro tip: you might even get work done on the day that you have the extra kids because they all just play together and forget about you).
🎢 So, last newsletter I revealed that I had not done my own bookkeeping in too long so I put myself in “time out” from talking to new clients until I did it. Well, this week I get to reveal the embarrassment of admitting that I clicked a link from scammer email impersonating Facebook.
Thankfully nothing bad happened before I could rectify the situation. All the details of this debacle can be found in this post including ways I should have known it was fake. None of us are perfect and anyone who pretends otherwise is some to avoid. The Bookkeeping Side Hustle Community is a place where we can come and get support during our missteps and learn from each other to reduce the number of missteps we take.
🎢 Got the Roth IRA account account opened for my 11 year old now that he works for me. It was about as painful as I thought it would be (I ended up calling support to be walked through because I couldn’t figure out how to do a custodial account for a minor). I made the squirt sit by me the entire time this was happening so he heard me talk to customer support on speaker phone and watch how to fill out in depth personal info forms. We talked about whether he wanted to reinvest his dividends or not (of course he does…K.I.S.S).
I talk about my own internal debate about how much of of his paycheck to require he invests and whether or not to stuff the account to the full allowable amount in this edition of the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Pub. What do you think is the wisest course of action here?
🎢 Since I like to share all my mistakes so people feel better about themselves, I shut down my old BB&T biz bank account without downloading all my statements and history and turns out my account was disconnected from my bookkeeping file. Freaking headache. And I know better than this! I talked about how you could at least turn my poor judgement into content creation for your own platforms.
From The Vault
⚡ 3 years ago I built my own business website over Christmas holidays while my children watched Christmas movies. If anyone else wants to to the same and finish a website by the end of the year, you can watch this video I made entitled “What To Put On Your Website”. The printable template is on sale at the BSH store, but I give you all the info in the video.
Letters To The Editor
To submit a letter to the editor, please comment RIGHT ON SUBSTACK. You can also email bookkeepingsidehustle AT gmail DOT com (but I’d sure rather you comment directly on this platform).
✉️ Serena Shoup responded to last edition’s analysis of how we can use the pricing of the giant tech companies providing bookkeeping services as our “price floor”. She writes:
I think part of why these big accounting companies are able to charge so little (and we shouldn’t be pricing like them):
1. They are venture-backed. Meaning they don’t NEED to be profitable yet. They’re just trying to build the value of the company. The way startup tech companies work may blow your mind but they’re not always very concerned with profitability which brings me to point
2. They are TECH companies. They rely heavily on AI and offshore work to get the job done cheaper. We can’t compete with that if we don’t have the same model
So good for thought…. Price your services in the way that will make you profitable and happy with the amount of effort you’re putting in. If that means you have to find a different client base that can afford it, that’s what’s necessary.
Keep hustling!
Kate
-Chief Hustler-
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I am down right rabid about transparency and full disclosure. If a link has a * beside it, it means it is either an affiliate link where I might receive compensation if you make a purchase, at no additional charge to you. Or it could be a tracking link that another business provided me to see how many readers click on that link.
Hi Kate! How do we learn more about the Gita Faust training on December 8th? I looked for it in a number of places but didn't have any luck.