Why You Should Not Hire a Bookkeeper...Yet with Heather Denning

Heather got her accounting degree in 2014 and worked in corporate accounting for a few years. That’s when she realized that she was meant to be her own boss and really didn’t enjoy the corporate environment. She discovered Bookkeeping Business Launch and after giving birth to her son, she decided to dive into it and give it a shot.

[4:10] Initially she was skeptical about the program and whether she could handle it with a newborn, but something clicked once he was two months old. She took her time starting the business but after a year of working on things and landing her first client, it really took off.

[6:00] The lack of flexibility was Heather’s main issue with the corporate environment. Being able to determine her own hours and how she runs her business has been very important to her. Flexibility and freedom are very common reasons for people wanting to start their own business.

[9:05] Currently Heather has 14 clients, 2 of which she had to part ways with at the beginning of the year, because they didn’t have enough profit in their business to justify it.

[9:55] Heather would recommend the bookkeeping business to someone who has the drive and the motivation to do what they need to do to live the life they want to live. There are a lot of benefits to working for an employer but you will never have the freedom you get from building a business around your lifestyle. You should also enjoy working with numbers of course.

[11:45] Heather’s end game is to move into the CEO role and start growing her and her business’s capacity. Eventually, she would love to be able to walk away from the business for a while, without having to worry about the work getting done. Finances are a factor to achieve their dreams but it’s not the main issue right now.

[14:30] When your business is not about the dire need for money, it puts you into a better situation and puts the power in your hands. You won’t feel the pressure to do something before you are prepared for it.

[15:35] By the end of 2019, Heather is hoping to double her revenue and by the end of 2020 she hopes to triple it at least.

[16:30] Knowledge is not power, implementation is power. It’s better to take a nugget of wisdom you hear and go execute on it, rather than keep listening and do nothing with it.

[18:10] To achieve the growth that she envisions for her business, Heather will need to bring on some new team members. She’s nervous about delegating, because she’s not sure the systems and processes she has set up at the moment are up to snuff.

[20:50] Start from the results that you want, and then figure out how to make it work.

[22:30] We don’t want to throw people at a process problem, we want to have our processes down and then fit someone into them.

[23:00] Heather considers networking and creating relationships to be her unique ability. She has never advertised to find clients, they have all come from word of mouth and networking events.

[25:40] While Heather enjoys creating relationships and meeting new people, she doesn’t enjoy going out and searching for new clients and creating new leads. Sales and follow up, and social media are probably the first things that she is going to offboard to someone else.

[27:30] Your first hire is probably going to be a virtual assistant, not another bookkeeper. Figure out the tasks that you don’t want to do anymore, record them, and then find a VA to do those things for you. This can free up significant amounts of your time every single month that you can dedicate to tasks you actually like to do. Once everyone is comfortable with the task, you can start expanding the responsibilities.

[30:10] List all the tasks that you do in your business, and categorize them into things that you love to do, things that you can do well but don’t energize you, and things you actively dislike doing. Start offloading the tasks you dislike the most by creating your processes around those first.

[32:15] Processes are what make your business sellable. Once you get started you will get addicted to creating more. Start with one task and give it to one person.

[36:10] For action items, Heather is going to figure out which tasks she can offload to a VA and start creating her processes. The task audit is the first step which she is aiming to have completed by the end of April, and have her first hire by the end of June.

[41:05] Before you offboard a task, ask yourself if you should just stop doing it, or if it can simply be automated. Remember this when creating your processes, because you will see things differently when you’re in a teaching frame of mind.

Mentioned in this episode: Denning Bookkeeping Solutions