Creating great workflow processes is great for making your firm more efficient and profitable. It can do much more than that, however. In our chat with Veronica Wasek, we learn how she’s using excellent workflow to grow her company and take on the caliber of clients she’s always dreamed of working with.

The best part is you can use the same principles to grow your firm and train employees to become more responsible and reliable partners in your ever-growing organization.
In this episode of the Growing Your Firm Podcast, David Cristello and Veronica Wasek discuss:

• Having fewer but higher-ticket clients
• Growing a Business using written instructions and steps
• Training employees to build workflow documentation
• Troubleshooting the workflow when something isn’t working
• Encouraging your team to own up to their mistakes
• Training others about workflow and accounting tips
• Using marketing to reach out to potential clients

Additional Links:

• https://www.facebook.com/groups/5minutebookkeeping/
• https://5minutebookkeeping.com/

Using Workflow to Grow an Amazing Team

Just about every firm starts with a workforce of one. You may be that lone agent, burning the midnight oil to prepare deliverables for your clients, dreaming of building a larger, more powerful business in the future.

You may also be dreaming of improving the caliber of your clients. Instead of working for pennies, having to amass a laundry list of clients to make any real profit, you probably would love to have fewer clients that pay more. This is a goal many firms have these days, and for good reason. There are many benefits to positioning yourself as a premium firm instead of a bargain business.

What can help you to grow your business to the size you dream of, whether that’s only a handful of employees or dozens? How can you establish your firm as a company that is efficient, consistent, and reliable so you can attract the caliber of client you fantasize about working with?

Of course, the answer is at least partially found in the workflow systems you have in place. In today’s show, Veronica did a wonderful job of describing how she’s grown her firm and gotten the high-end clients she always planned to attract.

Using the following steps, you too can build your business to the size you have in mind while maintaining the quality of work high-end clients will expect.

Start with Self-Recording

Even as you start out on your own, you can begin recording a workflow that will help your firm for years to come. Simply make a record of everything you do. Veronica suggests monthly checklists for each client, a separate checklist for onboarding new clients, and any other process that can be documented.

This self-recording process is useful for you because it helps you think critically about the steps you take to get things done. It also will help make sure you don’t miss any important steps.

It may be best to start with higher-level steps, painting a broad picture of what you need to do on a monthly or weekly basis. Then, as those steps are written down, you can refine the process, adding more detail to the checklists, fleshing out your written workflow instructions.

Use Checklists as Training for Employees

Expanding your firm to include even one employee, perhaps an assistant, will be much easier with the written instructions from the previous step. But why would a new employee need such written instructions, especially if you’ve hired someone with a degree? Here are two reasons.

First, many workers that have come straight from school don’t have any experience working in the real world. Practical training is lacking in many schools and universities, so expect a new hire to have tons of head knowledge but no practical understanding. A written checklist of what you expect them to do will give them the guidance they need to make the transition.

Second, even if a new hire has worked with other firms in the past, this doesn’t mean they know how you want to handle matters. Remember, you’ve taken the time to refine your system. You may work differently from many others, and your workflow is based on your ideology and the needs of your specific clients. A set of written instructions, complete with checklists, will help new employees immediately understand how your firm works.

Train Employees to Make Their Own Checklists

A major step in growing and improving your company is training your employees to do more than just follow checklists you’ve written out for them. You want them to make their own checklists and add to the instructions you’ve given to them.

But doesn’t that seem like pure fantasy? How could someone get their employees to not only do the work but also record instructions and checklists to describe what they’re doing? Well, Veronica has a secret to that, as well.

People are looking for leadership experience. It looks good on their resumes, and they become more competent when they are trained to be leaders. So rebranding the making of checklists as leadership training can get many employees onboard.

Having workers make and improve checklists is essential to growing your company. And it frees you up to do the high-level things you want to do without having to write out checklist items all day.

Encourage Employees to Own their Mistakes

A key to constantly improving your company’s workflow is encouraging employees to constantly improve the checklists they use to work.

Any time a mistake is made, it’s likely that something can be adjusted in the workflow to prevent that from happening again. If the workflow isn’t the problem, it could be that you need better tools or you have a personnel problem.

But getting employees to own their mistakes and analyze ways to prevent them from repeating isn’t always easy. It’s human nature to want to cover our mistakes or throw blame on someone else. So how to do you make the kind of atmosphere where employees are okay with talking about what isn’t going well and how the workflow can change to fix it?

It all starts with how you, as the employer, see mistakes your employees make. Do you get angry and immediately threaten those that are responsible? If so, you’ll likely never get them to own their mistakes and work creatively to fix them.

Veronica also has her team meet together without her present once a week. In this “employees only” meeting, they can share their struggles and work together to fix issues by adjusting the checklists they use every day. Not having the boss around allows them to feel more comfortable opening up about how they feel things can change for the better around the company.

Constantly Evolve Your Workflow

No system is perfect. As your company continues to grow, your workflow will have to evolve, as well. This means being willing to analyze things and make necessary changes. If you can train your teammates to do the same, you’ll have a dynamic firm that is always changing, always improving, and constantly marching towards bigger and better goals.

On top of that, your written checklists will keep your company running when people inevitably leave. As employees come and go, your firm will continue to stand strong and rise because you’ll be depending on an ever-changing workflow instead of relying on the people that work for you at any given time.

As you can see, growing the business you dream of having is about more than having a workflow. It’s also about constantly evolving your workflow. Making lists and expanding them, changing them, time after time, so your company can adapt to changing circumstances.

RELATED ARTICLES:

1. How to Improve Workflow Management for Accounting Firms
2. How to Build a Team that Fuels Firm Growth: The Sandra Wiley Interview
3. Chapter 1: Increasing Efficiency to Increase Capacity

Steven Gabrielsen is the president of SLG Advising and came on the show today to talk about how you can build a book of business. He’s worked out some great modern ways to get leads and find new clients using social media and technology. With these methods, not only do you sell your services, butyou become an influencer in the process.

In this episode of the Growing Your Firm Podcast, David Cristello and Steven Gabrielsen discuss:

• How Steven got started in the fields he’s in.
• How he started his own firm.
• How to use Linkedin to find potential clients.
• How using Facebook Pages can help grow a client list.
• How Steven moved from a sell model to an influencer model

Additional Links

• Website: https://slgadvising.com/
• Email: steven@slgadvising.com
• Instagram: @stevengabrielsen
• Facebook: SLG Advising, LLC

Becoming a Niche Influencer to Build a Client List

Many modern day accountants are moving away from the old ways of building a client list. These methods include word of mouth and email campaigns. Why don’t those practices work as well as they used to, and what new client-building strategies work?

Word of Mouth and Millennials

Younger generations are more keen on instant results. That desire isn’t just about a lack of patience. We live in a world that is faster-paced than ever before, and because of that, we need to see results faster than ever. It’s not that word of mouth stopped working. It’s that “word of internet” is much faster. New technologies create new opportunities. Social media opens up new avenues for building clients lists, avenues that can be much more effective than word of mouth these days.

LinkedIn and Email

But to use the internet in the best way, you have to be on top of what the different channels of the internet have to offer. LinkedIn is a good example. There used to be a premium feature in LinkedIn that would let you build up a list of contacts and export that list for use in email campaigns for client recruitment. Unfortunately, this really useful feature got pulled, but LinkedIn is still a great way to generate leads and build up a client list. You just have to do it by hand.

However, it may be even better to leverage social media directly rather than relying on email for getting new clients. Email campaigns are less effective than they used to be thanks to new inbox structures. The most popular webmail services can now move promotional emails out of sight.

In the face of changing email effectiveness and strong social media use among businesses on sites like LinkedIn, a new method of promoting your business is growing. This is becoming an influencer in your niche.

Becoming an Influencer

Most businesses use social media by adopting a sales-based strategy. Every direct message can be a sales pitch, much like email campaigns were a few years ago. But this may not be the most effective model.

What I’ve done instead is use an influencer model. I still use social media for client recruitment, but instead of simply asking for business I look for people who have questions and solving their problems. The results have been outstanding.

How can you start doing this? Think about the following questions:

• How can your expertise help the people you’d like as clients?
• What can you teach them that would save them money, whether they hire you or not?
• How can you give more before asking for their business?

Then start looking through social media sites for people asking questions that you can answer. You don’t have to limit yourself to LinkedIn either. I’ve used YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to grow influence, among other social media sites.

If you give good information that solves problems, that creates content that people will want to share with your friends and colleagues. This is the modern-day word of mouth. The more people your content reaches, the more potential clients you have. And because you’ve helped them solve their problems, it creates trust in you and your brand.

How do you grow a following on these various channels? It does take hard work. Instagram, for example, requires a lot of time following people and interacting with them, and, of course, creating content that your ideal audience would want to see.

I have a weekly show on YouTube where I give financial advice to business owners and talk about topics like how to build a budget or how to organize your taxes. This free content is something that fills a real need many people have.

Double Down on Your Niche

There is another key you’ll need to make influencer marketing really work. You have to double down on your niche. Social media sites are open to far more people than an email list, so you have to focus on your niche to ensure you get their attention. Furthermore, by focusing your answers on specific niches you’ll gain much more attention among your audience.

I focus on two niches: gyms and real estate. I’m really into fitness and spend hours working out every week. Part of my Instagram campaign involves photos of myself working out. This shows my audience there that I don’t just market to gyms. I’m one of them. It makes the gym audience more likely to work with me because I’m passionate about the same things they’re passionate about.

Having a stronger focus for your content will help make it more shareable. Instead of simply talking about financial topics, can you get more specific? Can you talk specifically about taxes? Could you make content that helps the same niche of business that you are trying to help?

What if your niche is florists? What accounting needs might a flower shop have that other business don’t? Could you make videos or articles on Linkedin that help florists and only florists? Even though such content might seem overly specific, it also makes you unique and more searchable to your target audience.

Email campaigns do still have their place, but they simply don’t work as well as they did a few years ago. Social media is now, in my opinion, the best way to generate new clients and the best way to do that is through growing a reputation as a go-to source of information. If you can become an influencer and get people talking about your advice, you can leverage this new form of word of mouth advertising.

RELATED ARTICLES:

1. [Double Your Firm Book] Ch. 3 Driving Growth in Your Firm
2. Double Your Income by Getting Rid of Receivables in Your Firm
3. Creating the Ideal Accounting Firm: Charge 80% More, 25% Less Client Work

Ron Saharyan is the co-founder and managing partner at Profit First Professionals. He came on the show today to talk about something called the Clockwork Strategy, which is all about process and workflow and automating your business, making it more scalable, hassle-free, and a better tangible asset.

In this episode of the Growing Your Firm Podcast, David Cristello and Ron Saharyan discuss:

• Taking a four-week vacation as a business owner
• Helping employees take ownership of their assignments
• Using procedure documents to help employees take ownership
• Learning to accept mistakes
• Using a grid to prioritize service packages and clients

Additional Links

• Profit First Professionals
• Email Ron: rons@profitfirstprofessionals.com
• Mike Michalowicz
• The Clockwork Book

 The Clockwork Strategy

Imagine, as a business owner, taking a four-week vacation, a complete unplug from your company. You’d be away from the phone and email, confident that your employees are handling everything exceptionally well, leaving you to enjoy your much-needed R&R.

Does that sound like a fantasy to you? Most business owners would probably agree, but the Clockwork Strategy makes such a thing possible. Let’s look at 4 key steps Ron mentioned in this interview, as well as another hot strategy that can help business owners make better sense of the services they offer and the way they prioritize their clients’ needs.

But first, let’s talk about why a four-week vacation is such a powerful milestone for business owners.

Why a Four-Week Vacation?

Even if you don’t plan to ever take four weeks off at a time, it’s a great idea to consider if that would be possible in your company.

Why four weeks, and not one or two? Because a shorter time period wouldn’t fully display how automated your company is. In four weeks, you have a complete list cycle in your business, so to speak. Bills have to be paid. Projects have to be started and/or finished. New clients must be onboarded.

If a system is deficient in some way, it will likely break down in four weeks. Think of the business owner taking a four-week vacation as a litmus test to see how much of the company’s tasks are being bottlenecked through that one person at the top.

The whole idea of Clockwork is to remove that bottleneck, allowing the business to scale while becoming less stressful for the owner.

So what are the four steps to automating your business? It all starts will how you think of yourself as an owner.

Step 1: Rethink Your Role

Many business owners busy themselves with putting out fires, helping their employees, or giving personal care to their biggest clients. In other words, they busy themselves with things others could be doing.

If you are always running as an owner, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a control freak. As Ron admits himself, sometimes your desire to help others ends up transforming you into a human bottleneck.

The default for many businesses is task-management. That means the owner goes to work in the morning, goes to work, and figuring out what you and others in the company are going to do that day. Even though it’s unintentional, the effect is an exhausting cycle of micro-management, and the owner ends up being pulled in too many directions at once.

The solution? Move from a task-oriented managing position to an ownership-oriented system. You, as the owner, are responsible for guiding your employees to take ownership of various assignments.

In other words, you make others responsible for their jobs, allowing you to take a step back.

Step 2: Make Others Responsible

Teaching others to be personally responsible and take ownership is not easy. It’s a paradigm shift that many just aren’t used to because they are likely used to a task-oriented style of delegation.

The secret is allowing them to design systems and processes themselves. Encourage them to take the initiative. This empowers them, and they often respond by doing a much better job than they would have otherwise.

Simply let your employees know that they are responsible for an entire process. Charge them with a set of parameters. Give them an objective. Allow them to tweak the system, to make improvements, to take responsibility.

This won’t happen all at once, of course. But, as employees come to understand that they are personally responsible for a certain outcome, they will feel empowered, get creative, and leave you out of everything but the highest-level stuff.

In the episode, Ron talks in more detail about how to encourage key members of your company to take ownership, including helping them to make suggestions on how to improve how things are done.

Once that process is in place, you can further automate your business by building systems to train others as they come into the company.

Step 3: Create Systems to Train Others

To make your company more scalable, you want to have systems in place to train new employees to also take more responsibility.

In addition to that, having key members of your business create systems helps them to take ownership themselves.

It generally starts with a Word document, a list of steps, like a standard operating procedure. That written document can then be accompanied by videos explaining the system in more detail.

This really helps employees take ownership of the systems they do each day. They’re sharing their system in written and video form. They’ll want to show the very best system possible.

So if an employee has been reluctant to take ownership, if they’ve been holding back making suggestions and becoming more responsible, then having them make training documents and videos can help them make that leap. They’ll want to tweak and redo parts of the training materials so that they are sharing the best system possible.

As a side benefit, creating training materials like these really helps generate a sense of community, as members of the company share and train others. They’ll want to take more ownership of what they do because they want to impress their peers.

As your employees make suggestions and training materials, as they are empowered to take ownership of their jobs within the company, you as an owner can take a step back and stop being the bottleneck of the company.

The next step involves a temptation you’ll likely feel at this point: trying to deal with mistakes you see your employees making.

Step 4: Learn to Embrace Mistakes

Mistakes are inevitable in your company. The sooner you realize that, the better. Your employees will make mistakes, and, perhaps, they’ll make more mistakes once you leave them to work more on their own.

After all, the task-oriented system you had before was mistake-proof, right? Not at all!

It’s good to keep in mind that you, as the owner, make just as many mistakes as anyone else. In fact, because the employees you hire are more specialized, you may make even more mistakes than they do.

So it’s important to not freak out every time someone messes up in your company. Did the mistake really cause major, irreversible damage to your business? Not likely. Can your workers learn from those mistakes and improve over time? Probably.

So learn to let those small mistakes go. Seeing employees mess up will provide temptation for you as an owner. You’ll want to step in and help, micro-managing once again.

But remember, doing that will just undo all the hard work you’ve put forth to make your business run on clockwork!

Prioritize Services and Clients

A final, great tip Ron made at the end of the interview involves using a grid to prioritize both the services you provide to clients and the clients that deserve more of your attention.

You’ll have to listen to the interview to get all the details, but the grid basically details all the services your company provides and what clients make use of what services.

From there, you can decide was service packages you should be offering. What services are the most-asked-for? What services have the best systems in place, making them easier for you to provide?

By dividing up your services into set packages, you can now prioritize clients. Clients that pay more for luxury packages would take priority over those that pay less.
With systems like these, you’re better able to streamline your business, making it more scalable and hassle-free, helping it to run like clockwork!

RELATED ARTICLES:

1. Vacationing Without Losing Your Business – Kelly Christian of KC & Company
2. 3 Crucial Steps to Building an Effective Accounting Team
3. [Double Your Firm Book] Ch. 3 Driving Growth in Your Firm

This week, Growing Your Firm is staying true to its name and asking one firm owner how she grew her firm from a solo bookkeeping service to a thriving six-person team. Monique Swansen is the head of Automated Accounting Services, located in Merrimac, Massachusetts.

In this podcast, we talk about how she’s been able to double her business every year for the past five years without losing her clients or her mind. We touch on issues about technology, hiring, client relations, and much more. If you’re a small firm owner, grab a pen to take some notes and take a listen. We think you’ll enjoy this case study.

Thanks again to Monique for taking the time to talk with us.

In this episode of the Growing Your Firm Podcast, David Cristello and Monique Swansen discuss:

• How moving to a cloud-based system tripled Monique’s billable hours.
• How she got her clients to move away from the manual system
• Trusting your gut when hiring
• Dividing labor among your staff smartly
• Keeping in touch with clients after you step away
• And more!

Additional Links:

Monique’s siteMonique’s LinkeIn Profile

How Automated Accounting Services Scaled Successfully

I started my firm in 2009 after breaking my relationship with a former business partner. I took some of the smaller bookkeeping clients and created an outsourced onsite bookkeeping firm. Given the economic downturn, this wasn’t the best time to be starting a business but I felt with my existing relationships I would be able to weather the storm.

It was great being a solopreneur, but as the years passed I wanted to grow into something bigger. I made that decision in 2013 when I decided to convert my company from an onsite desktop model to a cloud-based model using QuickBooks Online and the apps in that ecosystem.

Since then, I’ve doubled the business every year at a minimum. It’s been unbelievable. And I want to share with the Jetpack audience some of the challenges and techniques I used to make it possible.

First Steps

The first thing I had to do, after learning the software, was to make a decision that all new clients would use the remote solution. My new clients didn’t have much trouble with this. The problem was with converting my old clients to the new solution. This was a major pain point. I had to convince them that moving to this new system wasn’t going to make their bookkeeping fall apart.

I caught a lucky break. A client of mine was moving far enough away that it wasn’t going to be easy to get to them and they became my Guinea pig. Once we got a system that worked well for both of us, I could turn to my other existing clients and say “Look, here’s my old client and we’ve successfully transitioned, and these new clients are jumping on board with no problems. You can stop worrying.” And they did and I stopped driving around everywhere to pick up receipts.

This tactic of getting a smaller portion of your client base to act as an early adopter to bring the rest of your base along is a powerful one. Maybe you do hourly pricing and want to move to fixed pricing. If you can get 1-3 clients on your side there, it’s much easier to get others to come along by using them as a case study.

Freeing Up Time

Getting everyone onto the cloud-based system freed up a lot of time for me. I was able to do so much more work in a shorter amount of time. Once I got my workflow locked in, I could bring on more clients and feel more comfortable about onboarding them. Driving from client to client is so risky, especially if you have more than one in a day because all it takes is one appointment to run a little long and it throws everything out of whack.

Now that the remote solution was working I could literally do three times as much work as I used to in a day. I also had the time to start taking on special projects and cleanup work during the work week rather than doing it over the weekends. So getting everyone onto the remote solution allowed me to scale up to a new level right away.

I was already turning away business from referrals because I didn’t have enough time before I moved to the cloud. It was wonderful to go back to them and tell them that I could take on their business.

First Hire

One thing I should have done far sooner than I did was bring on my first hire. I did it about 2.5 years ago and I should have done it two years prior to that. Technology enabled me to juggle 40 clients, but I reached a point again where, even with technology, a little delay in a client’s work would cause my day to get reshuffled. This was really apparent at the end of the year when I was helping my clients get their documentation ready for taxes.

And there was fear wrapped up in the decision. I worried I wouldn’t have enough time to find an employee or have enough time to train them. But once I bit the bullet things go so much easier. At this point, I wasn’t worried about paying for the hire. It was a time worry and a trust issue as well. I had anxiety about showing someone else my client’s books. Would the clients be okay with it? Will they wonder if the hire will screw up or not? I had a sticking point about giving away control when I really needed to let go and trust my gut.

Don’t kick the hiring can down the road because you think you’re too busy already. With each new hire, I’ve been able to reach another level of scaling. I now have a team of six workers, two full-time and four part-time. We’re all remote and do bi-weekly meetings on Zoom and also use Slack for day-to-day communication and continuing education. Without my team, I would not be able to have achieved the growth levels I’ve experienced in the past few years.

Growing Pains

One thing that did take me some time to build was my onboarding process. We had a team member that didn’t work out with us because they had never really worked remotely before. They were used to an office environment. Anyone who hasn’t worked from home for an extended period of time doesn’t know how isolating it can be. Some people get too distracted by what’s around them at home and their work suffers.

So when we had the exit interview, I made sure to ask them what I could have done better or if there were things that I could have explained better about expectations or about the environment. And it was through failure experiences like these that I got the most growth in improving my workflows and processes.

If you listen to the rest of the podcast, you can learn more about how I screen new hires, how I allocate them to our clients and how I stay in the loop with them throughout the year to see what services they need. It’s been an exciting ride and we’re growing quickly by word of mouth alone. One of my challenges this year is to get the sales and marketing piece in place!

RELATED ARTICLES:

1. 3 Steps To Take Your Accounting Firm To The Next Level
2. How to present value pricing and advisory service to clients?
3. Double Your Income by Getting Rid of Receivables in Your Firm

Welcome to another episode of Growing Your Firm from Jetpack Workflow. This week we’re talking with Kelly Christian, owner of KC & Company. She and her husband were able to change their business from an offline business focusing on small-town clients in Canada into a thriving and growing online business that lets them escape the Canadian winter by traveling to Mexico without losing customers.

How did she do it? Kelly will explain what she did in the summary below, but it is a masterclass on topics we’ve covered in the past, including niching down your clients, cutting clients that don’t serve your needs, leveraging technology, and so much more. We’re thankful for the time that Kelly shared with us. And if you need Canadian tax services, check out her website in the resources.

In this episode of the Growing Your Firm Podcast, David Cristello and Kelly Christian discuss:

• Why Kelly needed to change her business model in order to grow
• What she discovered by niching down her business
• How she approached groups to find her niche and gain new clients, and what happened when she hit the tipping point
• Her experience with location independence in Mexico during winter
• And much more

Additional Links:

• Kelly Christian’s website: http://kellychristianandcompany.com/
• Her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/kellychristianandcompany/
• Amber McCue’s website: https://www.ambermccue.com/

How I Spent Winter Where It’s Warm

I’m from Canada. Specifically a small resort town near Shuswap Lake. The nearest major city is Vancouver about five hours south of me. Despite living in this small town, my husband and I managed to escape down to Mexico for the winter for two months while still running our business. Here’s how we shaped our firm so we were able to do this.

First, I want to make it clear that this was a working vacation. Yes, I was at a warm and sunny beach location, but I was still working four days a week at least 6-7 hours a day. But my desk overlooked the ocean view and I was out of the terrible Canadian winter. Plus, I had the beach right there waiting for me in the afternoon where I could enjoy happy hour and some sun.

This was a specific vision that I had and it was this vision that kept me going as I made all the transitions to a location-independent bookkeeping business. It’s not enough to say that you want to be location independent. You need a specific vision to keep you motivated. Why? Because gaining location independence forced med to change my marking, my client base, my client communications and expectations, and so much more. It’s a huge mindset shift.

Where I Started

As a small-town bookkeeper, I started out working with a lot of mom-and-pop businesses around town.  My company became popular, but I soon tapped out the market. I had to find other ways to grow and I couldn’t just hop into a car and go into the next town. It would have been an hour drive each way to serve those clients and that didn’t make economic sense.

So I had to do some market research on how I could gain clients purely online. I got sucked down a rabbit hole of study trying to figure out how to go paperless and discovered that there was a huge need for someone who knew Canadian sales tax issues, which are far more complex than American sales taxes.

I also worked with a business mentor, Amber McCue, who really helped me figure out my niche and who my ideal clients were so I could focus my business. I ended up ecoming a go-to person for Canadian sales tax issues.

It took me a couple of years to really focus down as much as I needed to before jumping into location independence. A lot of companies start out severing everybody because they don’t know who they want to work with. But when you figure out your niche and your ideal client, your marketing becomes far simpler.

Digging Into A Niche

One of the reasons it took so long to niche down is because I had to build relationships online like I had built relationships with my local community. The beauty of online groups is that you can share other passions and just happen to be a bookkeeper or an accountant. It’s much easier to connect with others on a shared passion outside of your core business than to just go to networking meetings over and over again, the old way of doing things.

You absolutely cannot wade into a group and try to sell directly to them without building a relationship. You have to become part of the community first before you sell. It does not go well and you will get slammed, possibly even banned from the group. You will get called out. Instead, grow your relationships organically.

So how do you cross that boundary? I participated in the community and kept my ears open for questions that I could answer. That let me demonstrate my knowledge and get on their radar that I could help them with other accounting issues. By doing this, over time, I was able to transition my client base from offline businesses to online businesses.

Don’t Fear Losing Customers

There was a fear that I would lose a lot of business focusing on just the Canadian market. Instead, I gained about 50% more business by declaring a focus. When I would introduce myself on online groups as someone who focused on Canadian tax issues, I got a lot of business from the United States as well because a lot of accountants there didn’t want to mess with the Canadian tax system. But for me, the United State tax system is much less complex compared to the Canadian one, at least for sales tax issues.

And when I started to grow from this, I had to make hard decisions to cut clients who weren’t part of our new focus. They weren’t serving our new vision. Granted, this is a lot easier when you have business waiting in the wings, but sometimes you have to cut out the old to make space for the new.

Training Customers On Technology

Once I had my niche locked in, I could tackle the next piece of the location independence puzzle. Many businesses still run on paper and that requires bookkeepers to make trips to pick up that paper so they can do the books. But we have all this technology now for capturing that information. There’s no way I could have left for two months if I still had to pick up receipts!

So I had to train my clients to be less reliant on me and to use tools to do a lot of the heavy lifting. This was challenging, especially for my older clients who were tech-adverse. We also had to gather clients who understood that their bookkeeper could leave for three months and not destroy their business. This is why we often work with online entrepreneurs, who often have dreams of location independence. And what’s really cool is that our dreams of independence intersect, so it makes it really easy to work with them.

It’s really important to have the technology piece in process while you’re hunting up your niche clients as well. I had the unfortunate experience of not doing this. We gained about 6-7 clients in January, right in the middle of tax season and I didn’t have the assistance to carry out the workload. I lost several of those clients in the next three months because I got too much attention. So get your workflows in place while you’re building relationships.

Location Independence Is Possible

To sum up, here are the core things my company had to do in order to become location independent:

• Decide what location independence looked like for us
• Figure out exactly who we wanted to serve
• Build relationships with those people and cut those who weren’t aligned with our vision
• Create workflows that enabled us to move our clients online
• Train our clients to use our tools so we didn’t have to be present

If you listen to the full podcast, I have plenty of other tips, but we’re quickly running out of space! Remember that location independence takes time. It took a few years of thinking and working to get to this point. But it was all worth it when we could dodge winter for once.

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