Conquering Workflows & Systems For Bookkeepers & Accountants | with Alyssa Lang (Workflow Queen)

100th Episode Special: Ask Me Anything About Scaling a Bookkeeping Firm

• Season 1 • Episode 100

Share episode

In this solo episode, Alyssa Lang covers your top questions for our special 100th episode of the podcast. It includes common challenges and strategies for hiring and team management tailored for bookkeepers and accountants. Alyssa dives into the nuances of capacity planning, proactive hiring processes, and innovative methods like project-based assessments, providing listeners with actionable insights to make informed decisions and foster a thriving work environment!

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • How to determine the right timing for hiring by using capacity planning
  • What options exist for hiring, such as improving efficiency and implementing better systems
  • Why maintaining a hiring pipeline and proactive onboarding are vital for team growth
  • How to use a project-based assessment for hiring to evaluate problem-solving skills
  • What pricing strategies can be set for bookkeeping services


Resources mentioned in this episode:

🎙️ Listen to Episode 90: Pricing for Profitability: How to Make Sure Every Client is Worth It

🎙️ Listen to Episode 76: Pricing for Growth: Aligning Client Fees with Your Business Goals

🎙️ Listen to Episode 75: Unstoppable Mindset: Conquering Fear, Embracing Success, & Elevating Your Business

🎙️ Listen to Episode 35: What I Would Do Differently If I Had To Start All Over Again

🎙️ Listen to Episode 53: Building Your Dream Team: Hiring and Management Tips for Bookkeepers

🎙️ Listen to Episode 89: Exciting News: The New Direction of Workflow Queen – What’s Coming Next!

📚 Read to Blog: How to Build an Internal Training Program for New (and Existing) Team Members

🎙️ Listen to Episode 38: What To Do When Your Clients Don’t Get You Everything You Need
💻 Client Profitability Tracker
💻 Effortless Client Requests program
⚙️ Hubdoc
⚙️ Google Drive
⚙️ Content Snare
⚙️ Asana
⚙️ Loom
💻 Bookkeeper Launch
💻 Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants group coaching program


Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me, @workflowqueen

For more information about the Conquering Workflows & Systems for Bookkeepers & Accountants Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:

Visit our website: workflowqueen.com

Check out our courses:

💸 Are you ready to take control of your firm’s profitability?
The Client Profitability Tracker helps you analyze margins, adjust rates, and streamline for more profit—all for $97! Stop guessing and start making data-driven decisions.

👉🏼 Grab your Client Profitability Tracker now: workflowqueen.com/profitcheck

Alyssa:

It is finally the hundredth episode here at the conquering workflows and systems freaking podcast. And I am so stoked to dive in today's episode because I'm doing a fun, different, I kind of wanted to mix it up on the way that we were going to do this episode today. I actually got this idea from my bestie Serena Shoup by the ambitious bookkeeper. So shout out to her. this episode is all about ask me anything. So we pulled you guys and you guys submitted and you guys asked, and I'm answering a lot of your things today on the episode, or when you talked about hiring, we're going to be talking about what I would do different. If I started my firm differently, what are some wins and things that were implemented in 2024, that made an impact. How is your training program set up? There's so many great questions in today's episode. It is a long one. I will preface, but just stick around, maybe listen to it while you're cooking or you're doing some cleaning or whatever makes you feel good. I just think this episode has so many golden nuggets and I also recommend a lot of my different podcasts episodes that really expand upon your guys's questions and also point you over to different programs or resources that we have that will support you along the way. I hope you guys have the best 20, 25. And I cannot believe this is the last week of 2024. And enjoy this week's episode. A big warm welcome to the hundredth episode of the podcast. I still can not believe that we finally hit our hundredth episode and it happens to be the last episode of 2024. This is such a huge, massive milestone. So I wanted to cook up something a little bit special for today's episode. So what I ended up doing is we went ahead and posted on our community groups. We sent out an email to all of y'all. Asking you to ask me anything that you want to know for me to answer on today's episode, it is going to be a very special episode. We've actually never done anything like this. So you're going to want to stay tuned. So today I'm answering some of your most burning questions from our community. And trust me guys, there is something for everyone here, wondering how to feel, build confidence in your bookkeeping skills with zero experience. I've got resources for you. Curious about when it's time to actually hire someone for your firm without overextending your budget. We'll dive into that today. And if you've ever really been frustrated by clients who just take forever to respond to your requests, I'll share some of my big and best strategies to fix that once. And for all. But that's not all, we're also talking about how to train new employees, set your prices for 20, 25 and even how to streamline your firm's receipt management process. So whether you're just starting out or you're looking to level up your business, you won't want to miss these answers, stick around. It's going to be a good one. And I can't wait to dive in. So, like I mentioned, this is the hundredth episode. It's so crazy to me because we started this journey last February. I want to say it was last February and it's been such a really cool experience to be able to record the podcast. There's definitely been some. Some ups and downs, a love, hate relationship. I don't want to like paint this picture that like having a podcast is like the best thing in the whole world. I love it. I think it's great. But at the same time, It comes with its own battles with having this podcast, I've had to sit down and actually record things, make sure that we had the right content ready. There was a lot of weeks guys where like, I was literally recording a couple of days before because I just couldn't come up with new concepts. And new things. And sometimes I was torn between things that were already pre-planned out. And I was like, you know what? That doesn't seem relevant. It's a lot. But at the same time, it has really been worth the journey. I've interviewed some incredible humans on this podcast. I've also been able to talk about some crazy good episodes on really helping you guys to streamline your firm. That's the whole purpose of this podcast is help you guys get to that next level version of yourself within your firm. Uh, whether that means mentally within your business also means like taking care of yourself, like all these different things as students just been so, so fun. I've also gotten to experience. Some amazing reviews on the podcast. At one point we were number 28 in the business management section within all podcasts in the world, which is so freaking cool. And it's just been so much fun to just. Be a part of this experience. And I know that there's so many other things that you could be doing with your time, and I just greatly appreciate every single one of you for being here. For the hundredth episode, we're not going away. It's going to be quite exciting. There's going to be some much more fun and goodness coming into 2025 and the next hundred episodes in the next hundred episodes. After that. So if at any point you're like, what episodes do you have? What do you have available? You can go to workflow, queen.com, backslash podcast, and there's a little search bar in there. You can search pretty much any topic. And I'm sure that we probably have something for you guys. So I'm really excited because today I pulled you guys, like I said, not today. Today, I want to be talking about things that we pulled you guys on, but throughout the last couple of weeks, we sent out an email. We sent out some social media posts asking you guys what you want me to answer for you here on this special episode. And so we got a lot of really great submissions. So I'm going to be highlighting a couple of submissions that were sent in. I think we have about seven of them. That I want to highlight today. So I will be saying who actually submitted them. So thank you so much for whoever submitted each of these. I'll not only be giving my own insight answering this question, but if we do have any other resources for you guys, I will also be mentioning them as well as we deep dive into all the fun things. So the fun part is I'm actually going to go in order of the way that the questions were submitted to us over time. So I'm super excited. This first question is actually from Jessica Diaz. So thank you, Jessica. For submitting this Jessica said, what is the easiest way to handle receipts? And what does the average price a bookkeeper should charge in 2025? So there's two separate questions here. So I'm going to start off with the first question, which is what is the easiest way to handle receipts? So it really just depends on what makes the most sense for you. I do know that in Canada, you guys are required to actually keep every single receipt. It is very strict that something that you guys have to do, I'm not in Canada. So I don't really know the intricacies of certain countries that require receipts. Now in the U S Tennessee, the IRS wants you to have receipts, but at the same time as a bookkeeper or accountant, we are not required essentially to like receive those receipts. It is a responsibility of the business owner To have them. To like, be able to submit them in case of an audit, stuff like that. So I do want to preface, depending on your country, this might change a little bit on the process itself, but I'm here in the United States. So I'm just going to kind of lean into the way that we do things. But like I said, just be mindful of your country specific. So for me, we use Hubdoc at our firm. So Hubdoc has always just been our go-to resource, our go-to software that we use. We actually pay for hub dock for each of our clients. Some clients like don't even care to give us receipts. And then we just don't cover hub dock. Then we're just like, okay, well we don't want to waste the money. If you're never going to use the app, or sometimes we purchase Hubdoc for them because they're like, oh yeah, I totally want to do the receipt management. Then it'll be like five months and they still haven't ever like uploaded anything. That happens. And we usually will tell them like, Hey, we're just going to knock off like a certain fee off your , monthly bookkeeping fee. Because it did include this software, but you never use it. So we're just going to lower your fee a little bit. And I think we charge them like an extra, like $15. Like it's not even that significant of an amount, but at the same time, like why waste the money if they're not even using it. Right. So that's kind of like why we do that. But for us, we've always used hub dock. There are other softwares out there, like Dext. Dext is another great option. That's D E X T. So Dext is great. So it was Hubdoc I think it just depends on your preference. I mean, I've just been using Hubdoc for so many years since my first firm. That that's just what I've always stuck to. Plus we have SOPs and processes around that. So there was no reason to add on another tech or try to get distracted. So, like I said, depending on the country, That you're in. My thing that I like to ask people, especially here in the us is, do you even need the receipts? I think there's like a lot of this like online pressure that like, In order to be a successful bookkeeper or in order to be in a successful account. When you have to ask your clients for receipts. speaking specifically to the U S guy. So anybody of our Canadians, like, I know this is a little different for you guys, but for here, it's like, do you even need them? And I know that it depends on the industry. So for example, one of my friends, she has a firm that actually specializes in a lot of contractors. So it's a little bit different because there was job costing and they kind of need those receipts. However, if you're working with like a social media manager or you're working with a service-based business, like. You're not really doing job costing. So a lot of times it's like, do you actually need it? Does it make our life easy when we receive receipts from our clients, abso-freaking-lutely because then we know exactly what they're purchasing these things from, but at the end of the day, It is the responsibility of my client to make sure that they keep their receipts. Does it make her life easy to see like why they were eating out and what they were eating out for? Who were they meeting with? Sure. But I tell the clients, like when you signed on to work with us, it is not our responsibility. We're going to cover Hubdoc for you. If you choose not to upload anything that's on you. But if you also choose not to upload receipts, we are going to ask you each month, what was this? What was this for? If you went to target, like, we obviously need to know what you got from target, because you can buy bedding from target. You can buy electronics, you can buy groceries, you can buy medication. There's so many different things that can be purchased in different places. So we will make it very clear to them. It will make your life so much easier. If not, you're going to receive an annoying list of questions. Every single month about certain transactions. So for us. What we do, like I said, is we do pay for this on behalf of our clients. They essentially will take a picture of their receipt though, right on the top of it, for what it was specifically for, this really helps us. But then once we received those receipts, we actually push those receipts through our accounting system for us as QuickBooks online. And this just makes it a lot easier for us to be able to code it directly within Hubdoc. The downfall for us with using Hubdoc is that Hubdoc essentially. Like you can have like all these sub accounts and these subclasses. But they don't like tell you, like, Like when you're searching to push a receipt through to QBO, it doesn't really tell you easily. Which sub accounts for. So like you could have, like, I don't know, a direct cost for like retreats and then like direct and then other regular expenses for, I don't know, office supplies, but like there could be like supplies that are both for retreat and then office supplies. And so you can't really see which sub-account, it is. I don't know if Dex is like that, but it's kind of a pain in the ass to be honest, but it is what it is. So for us, once we do it, you push it over to QBO and it brings a receipt over. Now, if you don't want to use some sort of a software like this or what your clients are refusing to do. So then what we do is we can just do a simple Google drive folder where the client is uploading receipts. No matter what at the end of the day, They need to upload them somewhere for Hubdoc for us, it's easier because we do have an app. And so within onboarding, when we do pay for Hubdoc for them, we actually shoot them over a YouTube video that shows them how to actually use Hubdoc, which is really cool. So that's kind of like my answer for easiest way to actually handle receipts for clients. And then the second part of Jessica's question was, and what is the average price? A bookkeeper should charge into 2025. So really the pricing that you provide to your clients, and it doesn't matter about 2025, 2027, 2020. Whatever years are coming into the future. It does not matter. All that matters is what niche are you serving? what services do you offer? What are your countries? What are your business goals? There's so many different factors, but a lot of times I think people just over-complicate this whole process when really it just is at the end of the day, what is the goal in the business? Like what are you trying to achieve? What type of profit margin are you trying to achieve for your own business. What are you trying to pay yourself? These simple calculations, just knowing what you want to pay yourself can actually work these numbers backwards to know. Okay, well, what do I actually need to charge for our clients? Everybody's over-complicating this. And I really genuinely don't think it needs to be super complicated. It's just knowing your end goal. And then how do we work that number backwards also, are you planning to have a team? If you're not planning to have a team? I will still say to give yourself buffer. I was the person who said I would never hire anybody in here. We are with a full blown team and I will never go back because it's like so much better to not have to do all the work. It's great. Right. So my thing is though, no matter what your pricing is to start out at, I do re I do want to say that you guys need to at least start with some sort of a baseline. I would say going into 2025, that the baseline or minimum should be anywhere from $400 to $500 minimum for basic bookkeeping. That's not even like, including any calls. That's just like you category categorizing transactions, reconciling accounts, and handing over reports, something super basic. And that's not even factoring in volume guys, like just because our rates. It starts at four or $500 a month. That's our minimum does not mean that that's where our clients are priced at it's. We have so many different variables that we attend to use, and we have a calculator that we essentially use in order to price our clients. But I do recommend at least giving yourself a minimum. And I don't care if you are calculating out someone's thing and based off the volume of their business, it lands underneath four or $500, whatever your minimum is. I would not sway. Like, if you give them that price and there's someone who can't afford it, they're not your client. And I know that sounds really harsh, but for me, I stopped playing this game of like, someone's going to go under $400. Like. It is what it is. Our starting minimum is $400 a month. If they can't afford to go $400 a month or higher, we're just not a good fit. And like I'm more than happy to recommend them to someone who's maybe more budget friendly. I just can't stand behind. If they're going to be a successful firm, if they're going to take them to the next level, what type of service that they offer, like, and I tell our clients, I'm very transparent about that. So my recommendation is to give yourself an aim of anywhere from 400,$500 a month, minimum going into 2025. But one thing I will say is that one of the most helpful things that I do for myself is I use this tracker. It's, it's actually something I started selling recently because so many people asked me about this. Is our client profitability tracker. So essentially what this is is every month you would fill this out and every month it's pulling your time tracking data, your team's time tracking data, how much money are you paying your team members per hour or salary? Whatever. Breaking that down by hour. How much are you paying the admin person per client? So that way you could see what are you charging the client and then minus out your direct labor costs and then minus sing out any direct software costs. And it will help you to see like if you're profitable or not, but not only does it do that high level, cause that doesn't really give you a lot of info. What we do inside the client profitability. It's like a resource, but we give it, you guys a video with it within the video. We also help you to set your gross profit margin goal, and then your company profit margin goal. So that way you can work that number backwards, because at the very beginning, I kind of told you guys. That a lot of our numbers of like what we should charge our clients is based off of what goal do you have in the business. And so if you're interested in it, I will drop it below. It's called the client profitability checker. You can go to workflow, queen.com backslash profit check. And I will drop that link below for you guys. If you want to check out that resource it's $97 and a lot of people love it. It's also available inside of our breakthrough program. For any of you who are listening, who are breakthrough students, you can find it in the offers module. So there's a couple of other podcast episodes. I'm going to link below as well for you guys to listen to, if you're curious about more expansion around what to price your services at, if you're profitable or not. There's episode number 90, which is all about pricing for profitability, how to make sure every client is worth it. Then you can go to workflow. queen.com backslash podcast dash nine zero. And so I'll link that below as well for you guys to easily click on that link to take you to pot episode number 90. Another thing too, as another episode is episode number 76, and this one's all about pricing for growth, aligning client fees with your business goals. So that will really help you in that episode where I deep dive into aligning your, your pricing with your actual goals. And you can also go to our workflow. queen.com backslash podcast page, and look for episode number 76. So let's move on to the next question. So our next question was actually submitted by Alison Lasiter. I believe if I said your name wrong, please let me know. But this was via Instagram. And Alison pretty much asked best resources to be confident in bookkeeping skills, no matter the experience. So one big thing is online courses are definitely gonna be supportive or in-person courses. It doesn't really matter. Like for me, I took bookkeeper launch and it was so great because it taught me from the very beginning. Of how to get really immersed into this space, not only of how to build my bookkeeping business, but also gave me the tools and tactics. To actually learn how to do bookkeeping itself. I would also say like using free or low cost practice platforms like QuickBooks online does have a demo company feature. So maybe playing around with the demo. The demo companies, that way you can like mess around and not have to worry about messing up a real client's books. Another thing too, that I will tell you guys is that there's a difference between being overly confident, but not actually knowing the skill and then being not as confident, but knowing the skill. The reason why I'm bringing this up is because I see so many people like on the online Facebook groups and stuff for bookkeepers and accountants who will take on some freaking crazy freaking clients. But then like not know what they're doing, and then they're asking all these. Insane questions. About like certain inventory and this and that. And they're not doing things correctly, things that are just like, oh my gosh, like you should not be doing the books a complicated client like that. I am all for trial and error and trying things out and trying a new and more intense client. But you guys, we are not messing with fake monopoly money. We are playing with real money with people's livelihood. Like if you are not skilled in bookkeeping and accounting, it is so crucial and so important that you get the right skillset. That you get the right experience to take on those larger clients. I'm not saying don't take clients at all. But what I will say is maybe start with smaller companies or some that are, service-based something that are really easy to get into and not super complicated. It doesn't mean you can't expand over time, but if you just go straight into these. I see this all the time. People are so desperate to get a client that the first client they'll take is like a construction company or a restaurant like, and she's complicated clients that people with a lot of inventory. And then they ask all these questions in these free Facebook communities like that. You're going to get so many different responses to when sometimes if you take those official bookkeeping programs, you'll actually learn the tactics and the information that you need in order to be successful. Plus, you're paying for mentorship when you're going to these free groups. I see it all the time where I like the same person watched the same questions. Like. Expecting like thorough answers and consistency, but because you're posting in a free Facebook community, like you need to be paying for a mentor, in my opinion. So work with other firm owners is another option too. So there's a lot of this out there. So if you want go get a job as someone working for someone else's bookkeeping firm. you can learn under them. I will say that. Try to be transparent that you do want a bookkeeping firm eventually one day, just because like, I think it's like not cool if someone comes to work with my firm and just pretend like they never wanted to would just be transparent with me. If I know that I'm helping you work through that, that's a different story. I will say that there are certain from owners who will not work with people or hire people who want to build their own firm. Because a lot of those times they'll just come in and take all the knowledge and leave. That's actually something that for me at my firm, I've just chosen not to hire people who are running their own firm. I have chosen to, hire people that essentially want to be my full-time employee. I'm not looking for contractors and that's just how I do it. So I just wanted to be really transparent with that. I would offer maybe to your friends, if you have any friends or family that do own their own business, to see if you can offer to do their books for free or to do it at a very low price, you can also do it full price. I wouldn't say lower your pricing, just because you're new. I definitely believe that like you should price however you need to. But if you want to be really transparent with friends and family, I will say friends and family that are the biggest pain when you're working with them mostly because they kind of expect things for free. And so just make sure to like put your foot in the sand with whatever feels good. For you. Like I said, use your own company as a test dummy. There are those options too. I know it's hard to use your own company if you're not really bringing in revenue, but like every time you have an expense, I would go manually put it into the books. I would look at scenarios, go use online platforms that help you like scenario base. If this company is an escort, how would you handle it? So on and so forth. So bookkeeping courses working with someone else and just going, maybe at school. And just getting support and overall at the end of the day, be confident. It's really, really such a. Overwhelming things sometimes to see how many ads and how many people feed to everyone, that bookkeeping is so easy that anybody can do it. And I don't believe that everybody should do it. And I think it's really downplayed of how easy it is. I think that, yes, it's really easy to categorize stuff. That's super simple, super straightforward. It is not rocket science to go in and click a transaction and put it somewhere into like a bucket. Right. That part is not rocket science. What starts to get a little bit more complicated is when you start to put in advanced entries assets on the books inventory, making sure that the way that things are set up is correct based off of their entity type. I think that's when it gets a little bit complicated. So depending on where your gap is and your knowledge gap is, and if you don't know if you're doing it right or not, like I said, this is where you need to pay for a mentor. Do not expect things for free. You're going to get 50 million different answers. I will say that having a mentor, really a supportive, even if it's not a paid mentor, maybe. It's like a really good friend. Who's super wicked smart. Who's willing to help you or take you under their wing. So if you're looking to build your confidence as a new bookkeeper, check out episode number 75, which is unstoppable mindset. Conquering fear, embracing success and elevating your business. This is on our podcast for you to listen to. If you need to. it's all about the confidence of like really building the business up. So our next question was actually submitted by from our Instagram account. And this is from Liz Toshez, I think is how you say your Instagram name. So Liz's question is number one piece of advice for starting a bookkeeping firm. And so here's the thing. There are so many different things that people will say as far as what is the best, what's the best option when you're starting your firm? I will start off by saying, check out episode number 35, which is all about what I would do differently. If I had to start all over again. So fun fact about me. I've actually now ran two different firms. One was a bookkeeping and tax firm, and now we run a bookkeeping and consulting firm. So I have ran gone through this twice, so I actually did get to start it all over again. And so in that episode, I deep dive into all the different things I did differently as I started my firm again. Because you really like once you've done it one time, you're just like, oh my God, I would've gone back and fixed this. I would have invested in this. I would have done that, whatever that looks like. So a couple of things just to give you some quick hints, but I will point you to that episode. Number 35 for you to be able to see an expansion. What I would have done differently if I started all over again, but number one is niches are in the riches, but sometimes it won't be found right away and I let your niche find you. And so a lot of people were like, oh, I had a niche, like, you know, work with only construction or work with only real estate or do this, or do that one niches do not have to be an industry. It could be a type of person, a niche can also be a type of software that you only work with. So for example, we've all been known to. Starting our business with. Only like woodworking in every single accounting software, a client could come to you with WAV or QB desktop or QuickBooks online or zero, but you're willing to just learn it all because you're just desperate to make the money. I will say that that does serve its time and place, because then you can understand which software do you like and what do you not like? But at the end of the day, you got to pick something because I know that it sounds counterintuitive because this was my thought process. Wait, if I offer more services or more availability for all these different softwares that everyone will want to work with me. No, because then you're, just known as someone as a Jack of all trades, but not really a master of one. Right? So niches are in the riches 100%. Niching down we'll serve you really, really well, but a lot of times it will not just fall into you. let it find, you start taking on different clients and seeing what feels good, what feels right. But do a pulse check with yourself and say, okay, I've been doing this for six months. What clients do I currently have that I absolutely love. What do I love about working with them that will help you to solidify over time? Where should you actually focus your attention on another thing that I would do differently? Is investing in systems and processes early. This means documenting everything. You might think you don't want a team. Uh, team does not need to be full-time team members. It can literally be someone who works five hours a month. There is something to be said about someone just supporting you in a couple of hours. You still need systems and processes. So I invested, like when I started my firm, again, I went right into setting up our sauna, which I use my own program kickoff with a sauna, which I'll link below for you guys and kick off with the sauna. We give all the templates. I use those same templates to start my second from guys. Like I don't mess around when I say I use these same things for my own business as well, but systems and documentation. So that's something that was really big for me. And also, I invested in the right software that I knew was going to be supportive for me. So things like content snare, there were things like notion. I just knew immediately that I was going to implement those things. But I will say if you've never been in the game and use those things. Don't try to go down the rabbit hole and figure out all these new softwares. There's a lot of resources online. Like I said, there's people like me who have programs that teach content snare that teach us Ana. The content center program is called effortless client requests. And then we also have kickoff with a sauna, which essentially those two programs will help you to set them up. But all in all, just document stuff, it can be on a Google doc. It doesn't have to be complicated. Another thing too, is make sure to pay yourself and maybe potentially follow profit first. So profit first is one of my favorite books. It's by Mike and essentially that changed my life when it came to my business, how I spend money. And also how I pay myself is I think we all get into this trap of like constantly reinvesting in the business, but for getting to pay ourselves. So it's really important that you remember that you need to set aside money because it's the reason you started this business. Another thing I would recommend is get support sooner rather than later. And so this could be a team. This could be like just a mentorship. This could be in a lot of different ways. It could also be in your life, getting support sooner rather than later, and stop being so scared to ask people for help. Like it could be helping a group. It could be help in, with a mentor. It could be helped with family. It could be asking someone to watch your kids for you while you get some work done, or you go to a networking event, just ask for support. naturally humans love to support people. I will say that you do pay for what you get depending on where you're asking for support. So especially in business. If you're going to these free Facebook communities about bookkeeping. And you're expecting like these amazing, intense responses that are going to be able to be willing to get on calls with you and be really supportive. That's great. But at the end of the day, you're going to get conflicting answers and not a lot of people will give you everything because they're not being paid to support you. When you do pay for a paid mentor, it's going to be a lot easier because you can get direct access to them, ask them direct questions and get your responses from one person rather than everyone else. And so I know that a lot of times when you're first starting your business, you don't have the right funding for that. Like I said that mentorship can also come from working for another firm, as long as you're transparent. Another thing is focused on delivering value and not just lowering your prices for clients. We've all made this mistake. At the very beginning of our business, we were so focused on just getting clients that we low-balled ourself, and then you get yourself. I just see this all the time. People who have been in business for 3, 4, 5, 10 years, who were like, I still priced the same way I did the very beginning when I didn't value myself. And so value yourself from the beginning and price yourself correctly from and charge what you're worth. Joined networking groups or Facebook communities for bookkeepers and accountants. And this is not necessarily to like maybe get all your questions answered in these free communities. What I mean by that is that this is a really great opportunity to start making friends. And that way you can maybe get on zoom calls with these other bookkeepers and accountants and see what they do and like how they run things. Joining networking groups is great for me. Having my people like I have my biz bestie, Serena Shupe. My other best friend, Brooke Swan, all in the industry. And I can call them about like, Hey. You know, how are you guys solving this? Or like, what are you guys doing here? I also am part of this like unofficial mastermind group where we're in a slack channel together. Like these types of support go a really, really long way. The next question is actually from Lori Dewitt and I love Lori. She's so great. She's in one of our, a couple of our programs actually. Here at workflow queen, which is super exciting, but Lori's question was when to hire, what is the sweet spot of knowing you need to hire an onboard someone before the rest of the team is drowning in work. But if you hire too soon, You're paying salaries without the client work to keep everyone busy, and the revenue to sustain it. Great question. I actually really, really enjoy this. So a couple of things, Lori, if you are listening to this podcast, number one, we support you in our fullest capacity inside of breakthrough. I know you're a part of breakthrough. Our program. And so my recommendation is bring this to a coaching call. Also feel free to email and reach out to our team, post it in the Facebook group for breakthrough, we are here to support you. We can give you all the things that you need in order to help you to understand this. But the reason why I wanted to say this, Lori, is that we also have capacity planning within breakthrough. So inside of breakthrough, we do give you the spreadsheet and the resource in order to understand and how I actually go through and. Do capacity planning for my team. And now one of our managers actually does the capacity planning for our team. And so essentially what this means is capacity planning for us is just looking at how much time each of our team members. By minimum need to be working a certain number of hours and a maximum number of hours that they can work. And then what we do is we, every single week we actually take their time and we put it into the spreadsheet to see if they're actually starting to hit their time and capacity. Now if anybody listening is not tracking their team's time, that's your first mistake? How can you capacity plan if you don't know how much time everything's taking for everyone? So what we typically do is that when everybody's at 85% capacity on our team, That's what we know. It might be time to start hiring, but I will also say Lori, that sometimes the solution isn't just hiring it can also mean that like, look back at the data and say, why is this taking so long? Is there a way we could be more efficient? Is there a way that we could make space for more systems? Like it doesn't always have to be the solution of hiring, but if the hiring is the solution and that's okay too, but typically if they're hitting about 85% of capacity, we start paying attention. But I wouldn't say like, if you have three team members, let's just say. And that you have some that are hitting 50% capacity, 50%. And then you have someone at 85%. Then why hire, if you actually have your other team members who both are at only 50%, they still have room to each fulfill their 35 additional percent each before you start having to think about hiring. So it depends on the role. There's a lot of different factors, but 100% Lori come to breakthrough because I know that you're a student in there and we're more than happy to support you on all of this and really help you break this down. Another thing too, for anyone listening is weekly meetings to ask your team how they feel. Feel about their capacity. So just because their time is actually a certain number, that's great. It gives us like black and white data, but sometimes the way the team feels is maybe they're overwhelmed, even though they might not actually be fulfilling all their time. So weekly team meetings, we actually give up, ask for a pulse check on the team. And we ask them how they're feeling. What's their capacity. What's their space. You know, we want to, , move into year end and bring on some new clients. Is everyone feel good about that? At the end of the day, my new thing coming into 2025, my phrase of the year is, but how could we? And so my phrase of the year to repeat it is, but how could we, because it's gotten to a point where I think a lot of times we're like, well, the team doesn't want it. Well, they can't handle it. Oh my gosh. It's everybody else. But what about you? Do you want to take on more clients? If so, but how could we, does that mean that we could hire a new team member? Does that mean that we could, you know, shift our team around to make sure that we can adhere that? Can I step in as the leader to make it happen? So weekly team meetings to get a pulse check is really going to help with capacity. Also hire proactively to allow time for onboarding. So for us, it's about a four week onboarding and a four week experience for our team to get fully trained shadowing. Someone else shadowing them. And also doing the full training and stuff like that. So for us, we need to make sure to be proactive because it's gonna take us a month. In order to bring that person on to onboard them to go down the rabbit hole of actually hiring. I will say that for anyone listening, who does want to hire a team to always keep your hiring pipeline open, that could mean like a simple job description on your website that says. Careers. That's just like, if you are interested in working with us, please email us here and send us your resume and this, and what role you'd like to be. Here's some typical roles that we hire for. Account managers, bookkeepers, onboarding specialists, whatever makes sense for you. We constantly have a cycle of people that are constantly trying to apply at my firm. We have a lot of people that are here at workflow queen that do want to work for my firm. But like I mentioned earlier in the episode, I don't hire people who are also running their own firm, but I do obviously like acknowledge them and say, thank you so much for applying. But unfortunately I just don't hire people that are running their own firm. Just because of conflict of interest. And I just know how it goes that people don't balance really well working for another firm plus their selves a lot. And so I need full-time team members. And so it's just not easy for me. So hire proactively keep that pipeline constantly open. Then also considering outsourcing non-client facing tasks to contractors. For quick solution. So maybe hiring a quick VA. To get some non-client facing stuff off people's plates, depending on the role. An episode that I'd love for anybody who's listening to check out is episode number 53, building your dream team, hiring and management tips for bookkeepers. And this will be really great for any of you that are listening. Who are trying to figure out actually bringing someone on how to know when it's time, so on and so forth. So the next question is actually from Virginia Steed. So Virginia says, what is your favorite thing that you've learned or created in 2024? I freaking love this question because I, before I recorded, I actually wanted to write down some of the things that I accomplished, because if you're anything like me, I tend to have an easier time remembering the things that didn't go right. Rather than the things that went. Right. And so I just, it's just something that's really hard for. I think everybody, I have a thing called a wind wall and it's like a sticky note. So every time something happens. Big or small. I write down on a sticky note and I put it on the wall so I can remember this stuff. Right. Because I want to be able to look at this wall and be like, holy crap. I hired that person. I like one thing that happened this year, though, a big lesson learned was I had to fire someone this year. It was the first time I had to like fire a full-time employee. And that was hard. And a lot of lessons were learned there. But I definitely want to say that some of the things that I did learn with letting that person go is definitely that when people are being hired and brought on, a lot of people can have a lot of really good confidence in an interview and make you feel like a certain way, but actions speak louder than words. And so the newest thing that I am actually layering into our hiring, like we're literally hiring right now. At workflow queen technically it's workflow queen and magnetic, like I'm hiring one role. That's going to cross over both companies, but we're hiring a marketing and content strategist. And so essentially it's a full-time role. They're going to be doing all the marketing for not only workflow queen, but also my firm as well. But they're going to spend about five, 10 hours at magnetic, which is my firm. And then the rest of the hours are going to be at workflow queen. So their predominant company they're going to work in is workflow queen, but they're also going to be supporting it magnetic. But one of the things that I'm doing is, PS people would nail an interview. I know that I'm one of those people who can nail an interview. So well, like I'm a super confident person. I go in like I don't waiver, like, and I know that people are like that as well. And so I think that she really fed me this idea of what, like the experience would be like working with her. And so coming out of that, I realized that, I just need to make sure I layer in some like testing. And so what I'm now doing is a paid project. So when someone is like, Come in. And they're a great, like a great applicant. We've gone through the interview process. They're really nailing it. They followed all of our rules and followed all our stuff. We get down to the actual hiring part. I actually want to compare them against another person. I'll pay them for a project so I can pay them for a cleanup. If they're a bookkeeper, I can pay them to like review a couple of clients, set of books, and I have them sign an NDA like, so. The lesson I learned there was someone can bullshit me in an interview, but what I'm going to do now is forced them to do a project that needs to be due by a certain time. And I'm going to purposely lack a little bit of information there to make sure that they know how to ask the right questions, because that was a big thing that that team member also didn't do very well. Was she was not great at actually asking the right questions in the right way, even though I tried for over four months to help her with that, it just wasn't clicking for her. And so I want to be able to test someone, but I am paying them for that project. And so that was a big lesson. Another thing that I learned this year was the 80, 80, 20 rule with my team. This has been so helpful, and this is something that like came to me like three months ago, ish. So it's quite new still, but the 80 20 rule means that instead of putting the pressure on myself to think I have to create everything because I want it to be perfect coming out. Instead, the team is taking over 80% of that, work. And then I'm coming in for the last 20% not to do the work, but instead to like oversee to say, oh, I don't like that. This needs to be changed. Do that, do this. And it needs to be fixed. And then they would go back to the team. The team would fix it and then it would be at a hundred percent and it could be shifted off to the clients. And so this has been really helpful for us because there's this pressure that like, oh my God, I need to hire this person. And then they need to take over. But what did they send the wrong email to the client? Or what if they do this or. But what if they do and what if you just didn't allow them to send the email to the client or send the reports to the clients? Why not have them take it up to 80%? You review the last 20% give feedback have them fix it. And then submit whatever it is that needs to be submitted to the client or whatever. So the 80 20 rule has actually been working really well for us on our team. So it's definitely something that was implemented in 2024. Also another big thing too is in 2024, I really slowed down and I honored my body. I've went through this whole, like I need to fix my body and go through this wellness journey. And I also took the pressure off myself to think I had to do all the things. My energy finally hit for me to be motivated at the very last couple of months of this year. Because as I'm recording this, this is, the very end of December and it's just been. A year of like not wanting to work. I felt no motivation. And then all of a sudden I was like, I want to do all the things. So I'm finally re motivated. It's been so great. But like also I think, because I slowed down to actually speed up. Personal strategy is important, more important than a business strategy is the next thing I learned this year. I think a lot of times we think like Alyssa, just give me the strategy of the business and I can do it. I can't tell you guys how many times you've even had people sign up for programs. And we literally give them a to Z how to run a successful firm, how to hire people, how to like have the right job description in the right things instead of break. That's what we do. But yet the person still won't hire. And the reason why is because a lot of the times they haven't worked on themselves to work through the mindset issues that they're experiencing. So I can give you all the strategy in the world, but you might not still implement it. And it's because your personal strategy of how you need to get through these barriers is more important than the business strategy. In my opinion, Also another thing that we did at my firm this year was we implemented a new service, which is our like business strategy planning. And essentially it's like this audit, but it's not, we can't call it an audit because we are not. CPAs, but essentially like what we do is like we like high level look at our appliance whole entire business, not just from the financial perspective. We're talking to operations, we're talking to sales. And marketing. We're looking at the client deliverables. We're looking at the operations, we're looking at all different components of the business and essentially creating them a strategic business plan that also ties to revenue. And this is a new offer that we started selling at my firm. Magnetic profits. It is something that you can't find on our website because it is like invite only, but for this specific service, and I know you guys are gonna think I'm crazy, but like, I don't think I am, because I know it's worth this. It's we charge $7,000 for this and it's a one week experience, but two weeks prior to our business strategy plan, execution. We actually go and have them like, submit like a crap ton of information to us. So at 7,000, we actually are going to up it to 10,000, but essentially we can give someone the whole entire plan of what they need to do in their business. From the operation standpoint. From the team standpoint, everywhere. It is actually something that our clients have absolutely loved and someone doesn't have to be our client specifically at magnetic to get this offer. It could be someone who's not one of our clients, but we do need to make sure that they do have financials for us to be able to back the data off of. And so that's just all that we require. They can have a messy books, we don't care, but we're only going to be able to guide them as much as the strategy. But essentially, this really sparked me on, some people here at workflow queen who were like, can you do this for me for my whole entire firm? Which means like all go into your firm. And you'll also submit a bunch of stuff to see all the different parts of the business to see what needs to get fixed. And essentially it's this big mapped up strategy plan that you need to implement in order to change the business. A couple of tweaks here and there. So it's been really fun to actually implement that. At my firm. And so it's definitely a higher tiered service and it's something that does heavily rely on me at this time. But I am trying to train one of our team members to actually help me with, executing the strategy plan for our clients. So another thing we went through this year was at my firm. We rebranded, we are originally magnetic bookkeeping consulting, but we turned into magnetic profits. I hate the word bookkeeping. I just think it's so downplayed people think that their sister, their mom, their cousin, their dog can literally do, bookkeeping that, like, it just gets like such a, like, Like not the best name to it. Like you're not the best I'm like you know? I don't know. I think you guys know what I'm trying to say. So I really disconnected with the word bookkeeping. So I wanted to create some sort of a name that kind of elevates what we actually do. So our whole goal in our firm is to really help people to create more profit. So that's why we called ourselves magnetic profits. And so that was a new rebrand that we went through this year. So new programs and offers that we actually created here at workflow queen, which is super fun. We have a whole new direction with, I just got a lot of clarity over the past couple of months, like I said, I got kind of motivated. And so we started creating more offers. We're going to create some more micro offers with like one quick punch, like literally sign up for the program, implement the stuff. It could be ready in a weekend type stuff. And so one of them was called gold client profitability tracker, and that is all about seeing and understanding the different profits within your business to see which clients are actually not profitable. So that way you can either increase their rates and also back in into your goals. Overall, the other program that we just actually released this month was effortless client requests. I'll link all these new programs. In this episode for you guys. But effortless client requests. Is a program that actually co-created with one of my really good friends in the industry, Brooke Swan. She's also one of our coaches in my breakthrough program. And essentially what this program is all about content snare, which is how we actually request information from our clients. And it just goes above and beyond, like your basic softwares that do request things from clients, but they're very generic. Content center really does elevate that. So we actually gave you guys our whole entire content center set up how to use it, the exact request we use, the emails, the schedules, everything that you need in order to get information from your clients. The other thing that we also implemented this year at workflow queen was in in-person boardroom strategy sessions. And so these were in group settings. And this was really fun. We just hosted our first one in Scottsdale, Arizona. And it was a one day experience for people to come down and, and we only did four students, which was really cool. We did four students and we broke through their major strategy issues that they were. Feeling. Or facing in their firm, we also did a networking dinner. The networking dinner was free. And if this is something that interests you. You can email us@supportatworkflowqueen.com and let us know in what city and state that you live in. So that way we know that when we're coming to that area, we can personally invite you to our in-person boardroom sessions or free networking dinners. We also, did a very last minute breakthrough retreat, which was only available to our breakthrough students. So for the 30 of you out there who signed up for this, I'm super excited. We have over 300 students inside a breakthrough, but we ended up only having 30 spots available at a in-person retreat. That will be hosted in end of March. I believe in Zion, Utah, which is super exciting. So our breakthrough students have been begging, literally begging me to put together a retreat that's only available to breakthrough students because they've all built some incredible bonds. And that was really cool. So we sold out all 30 spots, which is exciting. If you're curious about the new direction of workflow queen, we've also changed the way that we do the podcast, the direction of the company, then go listen to episode number 89. Which is exciting news, the new direction of workflow queen what's coming next. So feel free to pop into that episode. So I only got two more questions left. I know this is a longer episode than usual, but I knew it was going to be, cause I'm trying to answer all these questions. The next one that was submitted was from Ann Percoco. I think it's how to say your last name. If I said that incorrectly, please let me know. So Ann says, what does your training programs for new employees involve? Does it have videos, reading quizzes, homework, essentially what Anne's asking if you guys are new to the. podcast or new to in my world. We have an internal training program that we put our bookkeepers and accountants through. We also have one here at workflow queen for our team as well. And essentially it's a prerecorded training program that I literally do not have to train anybody. Am I a manager? Doesn't have to train them. And I don't have to train them. It's great. It's very hands-off so we can continue to do the work that we need to, while this person's going through this internal training program. So our internal training program is four weeks total. So the team member gets onboarded. Then they go through four weeks of training, they go through shadowing and they also are then being shadowed by the manager to make sure that they're doing things correctly. But our structure is a blend of videos, reading materials, quizzes, and shadowing. And so they do have quizzes mostly that. Like, I'll just give you an example. In our internal training program, we have some resources on like the values of the company or like the direction of the company or, this is how we take care of our clients or this, how we communicate with our clients to make sure that the team is actually understanding what we're saying. We do have quizzes at the bottom of each lesson for their internal training programs. That way we can quiz them. And then what our manager does is they follow behind them one day behind them to look at their quiz responses and they give them feedback to say, Hey, that actually wasn't correct, but here's why can you also explain to me where the disconnect was? Like, we're not shaming you for anything. It's just, we want to know. So that way we can make sure to incorporate that into the training for the future. And so we do quizzes. We also do, what's called a daily outtake form. This is such a cool concept, but the daily outtake form is like after each day of their training, we essentially have them fill out this form that just says, how was your training today? What did you learn? Were there any gaps in your learning? Was there something that you wish you learned more about? What is some wins that you. You know, did or whatever that looks like. And so they fill that out every day. And once again, our manager comes behind them each day this is where our manager will typically know that like the team members actually overwhelmed through the training or whatever that looks like. And so for us, it includes videos, not everything has a video. Sometimes it's reading materials. You guys would be really surprised that you don't need like a professionally films, like. Internal training program. We literally did it with like sweat suits on not sweatsuits. That sounds so weird. Like a sweatshirt on like a hunched over looking crazy, doing it on a loom video. Like you don't have to be on video for these things. You don't even have to do a video. You probably already have so many resources available. Plus, for example, like we use Last Pass at my firm. And if I want the team to learn how to use last pass. Sometimes I'll just link out to YouTube videos about how do we freaking use Last Pass? Why would I reinvent the wheel? If I don't need to? What I might do is link out the videos on how to use Last Pass, but then beneath the video, I'll say you did learn how to use Last Pass, but here's the specifics that we do. We organize our folders and X structure. We expect X and we do Y. Like, and so I do always say like, you probably have all these things available. And so intern in our internal training program for new employees and team members is this covers our values of the company, processes, softwares, client expectations, our service deliverables, our whole process from month end to our 10 99 process. It covers literally everything. And so if you're listening in near inside of breakthrough, make sure that you guys go into the systems part of the program, because we do have the notion set up that gives you guys the structure of the training. And then also you can see in the. team module. We also have inside of breakthrough. All the details, how to put together a training agenda, how to onboard your team. So we got you. And if you're interested in joining us in something like breakthrough, we do give all these resources for everyone. We do not give you a training program that your team can go through. Because the way I run my firm is wildly different from every other firm. And so we just teach you how to actually create these resources. But if you don't have the time to create an internal training program, we do give you resources on how to create the right agenda. So when you're physically training your team, maybe via zoom or in-person. You have an agenda that's structured. Also, we do have a blog on this. It's called how to build an internal training program for new and existing team members. I'll link that below this episode for you guys. If you want to check that out and read that blog that does have some resources. So the last question that was submitted to us. was from Janet Lewis. Janet says, what are some good ways to encourage clients to engage promptly and respond to questions and requests for documents? I have two large clients who are extremely busy and not good at responding to requests. Sometimes I have to ask repeatedly to get what I need from them to do their work. It can take weeks to get the information that I need. So, first off my question back to Janet, I know this is not like a two way conversation, but if you are listening, Email me and let me know, how are you actually asking your clients for information? Because I see a lot of people who are, we've actually pulled you guys and asked the majority of people said that. You guys were actually asking for information from your clients via email. If you're doing that via email, that might be your first mistake because your email, you have to manually follow up. It's really hard to keep track of what's open. What's not open. Did you get what you needed to That massive thread of things that you need to go through. And so my recommendation for you is first see where the disconnect is coming from your clients. And this is where having just an open communication with your clients and saying, Hey, Look, I have a question for you. My question is why is it that you don't get us? What we need? Can you tell us where the gap is coming from? Asking your clients for this, like feedback goes a long way because you might not realize that you make it really complicated for them to submit information. And so for us, what we use is called content snare. Content stairs. Great. I've been using it for years. Rook swamp was the one who introduced it to me and she's been using it since like forever. So this is like the new program we create. It's called effortless client requests. If you're having a problem with actually getting everything that you need from your clients. Content center will help a lot, but at the end of the day, We can only do so much for our clients. We can only force them so much, but the beauty of content snare is it actually automates. Nudging the client for specific requests. So the downfall of using something like keeper or Xanax for this is that they just send generic emails every single week that say, Hey, don't forget to upload everything that's missing. And here's your list. Like it's very redundant. The email subject lines are the same. It's the same request. People start ignoring it. With content snare, we can actually customize the actual schedules and then customize the wording because how we talk to our clients and onboarding is going to be different than how we talk to them in month end. So on and so forth. So effortless client requests is one of our new programs and I'll have it linked below for you guys. If you're interested in, this is a big pain point for you. Definitely check that out, but we can't always fix the clients on getting us stuff. I will say that you need to set very clear expectations upfront. Not only in your contract, but also during the sales call of how crucial it is for them to get you what you need. I would also say, what are you asking for them to submit? Because if you're asking for them to submit, let's just say receipts, and you're here in the U S do you actually need the receipts? Are you just making their life more complicated? It is not my responsibility to make sure my client is saving their receipts here in the U S it is up to them in the case of an audit, they have to be able to prove it to the IRS and send over the receipts for us, I don't need it unless we were doing some sort of job costing, something like that. So setting those clear expectations. Another thing that we recently did this year, which I probably should. I said, when someone asked me about changes, we made in 2020 for one big thing that we did this year was we readjusted our contract to pretty much state that if, it's been, I think it's three months and you still haven't gotten us everything that we need, we will automatically disengage. And I know people are going to be like, that's freaking crazy. Like, why would you do that one? I'm tired of my team asking for them. I'm tired of our team having to worry about it. And when we do that, we let them know during the onboarding call, that if you are the type of person who will not get us, what we need, you're not the right fit for us. We will disengage. And unfortunately I'll have to find another bookkeeping firm who will tolerate that because it's not going to be us. And so we give them a warning at month two that like, Hey, you still haven't given us information. And by next month, if you still won't get it to us and we are going to disengage and a lot of the times what we do. It was like after the third month that they still haven't done it, we'll send them the email that we're going to start disengaging. And that's a really easy way to get your clients to actually do stuff. Like at that point you're like, oh my God, they're going to literally drop me as a client because I'm so terrible. I better respond and like that he usually will respond and then we'll stop disengaging. It's great. So try other ways as well to get stuff from them. So if you're constantly sending them emails, Maybe the client prefers. If you text them. And ask him for info to remind him to email it to you. Maybe you try things like content snare, things like keeper. What are other ways that you can reach out to your clients? Because that also might be another thing. Offer maybe, some penalties if they give you things late. So maybe it's a penalty fee for us. Anything that we go past three months and let's just say, the client finally submits everything by that third month. And we're about to disengage. They finally give it to us. We actually pay, we actually charged them for a cleanup fee to go back to the past three months and apply all the changes that we need to, from the things they gave us. Three months later, it's transparent. We tell them that inside the contract, we also stated in that email that reminds them that like we're going to disengage. And by the way, when you finally. We submit this. We are going to charge you a cleanup fee to go back and fix these things, but we're still charging them on a regular monthly fee, but we are charging them an additional fee to go back and fix past stuff. Another thing too, that might be. What most people don't want to do, but it is an option. It schedule a monthly check-in call with your clients. Like if you have a pain in the ass client who just doesn't get you what you need, and you're willing to, maybe it's a 15 minute call every single month where you get on the call and you say, give me this, this, this, this, and it's done. And that's another option as well. If you're really struggling with this, I do recommend checking out episode number 38, what to do when your clients don't get you. Everything you need here on the podcast. Also check out effortless client requests. It is a program that you guys can sign up for that essentially will give you everything that you need. In order to request the things that you need from your clients. Via content snare is how we teach it. So that is our last submitted question for the a hundred episode. This is a quite a long episode for today. And that's mostly because I knew I was going to have a lot of time needed per question. So I just can't believe that we're at the a hundred episode and that we're at the last week of 2024. I think that 20, 25 is going to be so incredible. Going into January, we're going to do a whole entire month theme here on the podcast, all about hiring team onboarding like onboarding your team members, all that fun stuff. So if that is something that interests you, this coming month is going to be all about team and I'm so, so beyond excited and so pumped and so grateful for every single one of you listening. And for those of you who submitted questions,