The One With Courage
I have been thinking about courage. You know…Chutzpah. Guts. Mettle. Intestinal Fortitude. Or, as they say where I grew up near Mexico…Cojones.
Bookkeeping entrepreneurship takes courage. Entrepreneurship in any industry does, I suppose.
I don't often feel courageous in my business. But I know I have been courageous in my life. That means I have it in me to be courageous again.
I think that courage can be built up, just like exercising muscles.
Reader, I am certain that you have done tough and courageous things in your past. Those existing courage muscles of yours are just waiting to be exercised.
So where do you feel wimpy and weak-kneed in your business skills. Wherever you are lacking courage, find analogous situations outside of your business to use as training ground to build your muscles.
Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:
Do you need to get better at setting boundaries with clients? Practice on your overbearing father-in-law or needy sister.
Do you need to practice at pricing and charging what you are worth? Facebook Marketplace is a great place to practice street-smart negotiations and value pricing.
Do you need to get experience interpreting financial reports in a concise way? Ask a Business Best Friend to let you deliver some KPIs to them. You could ask them to send you an anonymous set of financials for you to review or you could take one of your own clients and remove the name from their financials and practice that way.
Do you need help raising your prices on existing clients? Start paying attention to how everyone else in your life is raising their prices on you. Who is doing it well and who is flopping at it?
Do you need confidence to get over how you look & sound on camera and how to edit videos? Why not volunteer to script, narrate, and edit a video for your parents’ milestone anniversary party.
Do you want to get better about in-person networking that leads to a client meeting? If you are single, ask someone out on a date. If you are married, ask that cool couple you’ve been jonesing to hang out with on a double date.
These are just some low-stakes ideas. By no means exhaustive.
But basically, just take a few weeks/months and view your regular life through the lens of “how could this situation relate to my business”. Take advantage of every opportunity to build those courage muscles. Start small if you have to.
And if you need to develop some courage to implement a software like Xenett, lean hard on their support team. Don’t be shy about asking for help. It can be scary to implement such a comprehensive tool into your business, but I’ve heard such great things about their software. So many swear by it for Clean-ups. Give Xenett a shot and come into the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Group to find fellow users. They have countless die-hard fans that will help you out.
Deals Deals Deals
💰 I heard you can use code connect40 for 40% off QuickBooks Connect Tickets. 👀
💰 There is a sale for the Bookkeeping Buds Retreat being held Sept 14/15. Two days to connect with those that understand what you are going through with space for wellness and business. Tickets normally $499 on sale for $437 until 7/31. Bonus includes 2 months membership in the Bookkeeping Buds community. I will be speaking at this retreat!
💰 Fast and Easy QBO is still offering 50% off their training for the Advanced ProAdvisor Exam materials*.
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.
📅 +Mondays in July: Bookkeeping Side Hustle Community Co-working Hour. Join me on on Zoom Mondays at 11am EST. Zoom link (password: HUSTLE)
📅 August 1: Get Out! Use the QBO Mobile app. Learn how to use the QuickBooks Online Mobile App when you don’t have your computer with you. Take payments from customers, categorize expenses, and snap pictures of receipts all from your cellphone! Register for this Royalwise course.*
📅 August 1: Profitable Bookkeeping Bootcamp. If you want to get better paid for your hard work – if you want to be able to price your bookkeeping services confidently – this is the training to unlock the secrets. Mark Wickersham FCA and Teresa Slack will be showing you the precise steps you need to get higher prices for bookkeeping work, and it will be highly practical! Register HERE!
Featured Posts
🌶️ Nicole K. had a potential client ask for references (from her current clients) and ya’ll weighed in with some good advice. Have you ever had anyone ask to contact one of your clients?
🌶️ Jade L. shared about what happened when she disengaged from a client. Spoiler: they wanted the new bookkeeper to get trained on how to use QBO!
🌶️ Libby C. asked about how to choose a niche market and if it was a good idea. If you’re thinking of this, go check out the post.
🌶️ Is it possible to work at 9-5 and have a bookkeeping side hustle? Tanner C. loves his current job but is looking to grow his finances, do you think it is feasible to do both?
🌶️ Stacy A. is soliciting advice about being a US citizen wanting to relocate to Mexico. Can she take a virtual bookkeeping business with her?
Help You Hustle
💪 Freshbooks has had 2 major announcements recently:
FreshBooks released the Accountant Hub. This will serve as a dashboard to access all your clients and sign clients up for subscriptions. Think of it like how you log on to your Xero Advisor Portal or your QBO Accountant account. This is one of the biggest product features they have ever released for accounting pros.
FreshBooks sent out a call for applicants for their FreshBooks Partner Advisory Council (known as FreshPAC). Learn about it here. Apply here. You do not have to be a FreshBooks expert to be on this council (at least their current council members are not). Deadline is August 11.
💪 A group called The Accounting Alchemy Network is hosting a Game Changer Intensive in September and October. It is FREE! It looks like a cohort-based coaching and discussion group where you focus on how your business can change the world around you. Not your typical accounting mastermind group, y’all. Note, when you click on this link, Google will give you a warning, but I’ve proceeded to view the landing page and it is legit. Not sure why there is a warning.
💪 Scaling New Heights Call for Presenters is officially open. Shoot your shot.
💪 Jobber has a user conference and has opened a call for speakers. You don’t even have to be a Jobber user.
For Fun
💀 Remember this whoopsie next time you make a mistake in one of your business systems. Even this biggest fish make mistakes.
Jobs
💼 Check out the Job Guide in the BSH FaceBook Group.
💼 Here are some jobs that were added:
Construction niche who is familiar with Xero
Quite a few part-time Bookkeeper positions
Tax position
Beginner Bookkeeper position
Sales position for someone with bookkeeping knowledge
Don’t forget the standing opps on my Find A Freelance Job article. 1099 and W-2 opps.
Kate Builds In Public
🎢 In July I’ve been a part of a little cohort of accounting pros helping a software company called Syft Analytics. We have been getting private demos and feedback sessions. It has been pretty cool. These are the sorts of relationships that have potential to bear fruit, even if it is not quite clear what that “fruit” might be. At a minimum, my guess is that it could lead to top tier support if I end up using their product or perhaps some invites to dinners at future accounting conferences. But there is potential for even more upside, I think, if you get in early with software companies before they grow so big that you’re just dealing with entry level sales/support staff.
So let me tell you how it went down, so maybe YOU could try to become friends with a software (I’m not sure I’m their “friend” yet or even that I 100% want to be, but I’m on track to be their friend).
I was moseying around the vendor hall at Scaling New Heights and passed their booth. I was greeted by this nice Australian man who was positioned at the ready to engage with anyone who made eye contact. He asks about my business and I mention I am niching in FreshBooks. His eyes light up and he says “We are currently building our integration with FreshBooks and we are working with FreshBooks to get user feedback.” Well, there aren’t too many vendors building integrations with FreshBooks at this time, so it was my turn to get excited.
I take action by emailing my partner rep at FreshBooks and tell him I met Syft Analytics and would love to be in on any feedback sessions they are coordinating.
I got calendar invites for three meetings in July to meet with Syft and FreshBooks and some other FreshBooks Accounting Partners.
Who is your dream software relationship? Go get'em!
🎢 New Business plus 2 stories: In the last 2 weeks, I’ve booked 4 new 1-on-1 training clients (those are each $250 for 2 hours) and 2 other clients came back for an additional hour ($125 each). Total of $1,250 above my normal MRR. And I’m happy (because I like this work better than my MRR work).
One of these new training clients was booked via a quick email exchange instead of having them jump on my free 15 minute consultation. Part of me considers this a win, because my 15 minute free calls are never just 15 minutes, and I realize that cuts into my margins. But I did still have that client complete my prospective client form that all prospects have to complete before I have my free consultation. So I got the info I needed to make the decision about whether I could work with them or not. I really want to get to the point where I can let clients simply book me for training without having to talk to them first, BUT I still want to learn about them before I agree to help them. I have not figured out this fine line, yet.
One of these new clients was booked via my a 15 minute prospect call (my normal process). BUT, let me tell you the story about that prospect call. It had been booked on my calendar in the morning but there was nothing else booked that morning. I didn’t really want to go into town to get all officially set up to work for a short, unpaid prospect call. I wanted to take the kids fishing. So, I just decided to take the call from my phone while fishing. I knew that part of the property had a hill I could drive up where I could get fairly reliable reception (unlike the house). I didn’t mention the fishing situation to the prospect. I just said “Please excuse my background. Today I’m out in the country and I drove to the top of this hill where I know I have the most reliable reception from my phone.” Now, I could tell from this prospect’s intake form that this was going to be a 1-on-1 training client. I might not have taken the call in this fashion if I’d thought it was going to be some multi-thousand dollar clean up project. Overall, I’m pretty proud of booking an easy $250 worth of business while keeping an eye on my children casting lines into the water and my 11 year old having to step up and remove a fish for his sister since I was otherwise occupied.
🎢 I finally signed up another new client to Gusto via my own Gusto account which allows me to have my free payroll for my firm again. It has been a tough pill to swallow to have to pay for my own Gusto account because I hadn’t signed a new client to the platform in over 12 months (even though I had sent several businesses to Gusto via my referral link from people finding my YouTube videos and website content, but that method doesn’t count toward your firm free payroll). I write this as a caution for anyone who is enticed by the free firm payroll. If you want to keep a small firm, it might be tough to keep software benefits that expire if you aren’t regularly driving new business toward them. Makes me wonder if we’ll ever lose our free QBO accounts if we don’t sign up new clients (Gulp!). What other softwares remove their accountant discount if you don’t continue to bring in new clients for them?
From The Vault
⚡ It seems like questions about what bookkeeping course to choose comes up often (daily, even), so I thought I would re-share this video I created about how course creators market their courses. Give it a watch before you choose a course. Be wise to the ways of marketing.
Letters To The Editor
✉️ Kate, thanks to your encouragement, I created my first YouTube video today on Camtasia! It looks like amateur hour but I had to record something! What I learned on Camtasia thus far: How to push record and how to upload to Youtube. 🤣 ~ Rachel Dauchy
But you did it, Rachel! You can only go up from here!
✉️ “Just when I thought the art of a good email newsletter was lost.... Along comes, Kate”. ~ Shanita Jones
Thanks to Shanita for starting this post of praise for this newsletter. And to all the people that chimed in. I can’t tell you how much that encourages me to keep going.
Classifieds (Clickable)
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Keep hustling!
Kate
-Chief Hustler-
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