Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today we have Ean Price Murphy. Ean, welcome.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Thanks for being here. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure. I am a profit first bookkeeper. And what that means is that I do traditional bookkeeping but I do it with a particular style based on the book, Profit First by Mike Michalowicz, which is a cash flow method that allows people to simply look at their bank balance and have an understanding of what they can actually afford. So I find that that gives a common language between the business owner, the bookkeeper, the CFO, the CEO, the CPA, all of the Cs, even when none of those people exist in the small business. So it allows this very high level of understanding of how money works for people who don’t normally think of themselves as good with numbers.
Thank you for that. I’m starting to hear more and more about this particular book and how it’s impacted businesses. What’s it done for you?
What it did for me was allow me to double my take home pay, which surprised me because I have been a bookkeeper for decades. I was a freelancer before I opened my business in 2003, and I’m an extraordinarily frugal person. I came to booking bookkeeping from a personal bankruptcy and real realisation, kind of a slap in the face by the universe, letting me know that I just was financially illiterate and you know, I was trying my best, I was working hard, I was being careful, but I just didn’t understand how money works. So when I started to dig into that, I discovered that I not only really enjoyed learning about it, but it was something that came very easy to me. So I pursued bookkeeping and found that most small business owners don’t know how to run a small business.
It wasn’t just me. This is not something that we’re taught, it’s not something that is generally spoken about in our culture, you know, so that was really important to me. And so when I first read the book, I actually dismissed it. It was introduced to me by a client who said, I think I found this, you know, perfect answer. And I read it and I thought well that’s foolish, why wouldn’t you just look at your reports? And I thought about what I just said for a second and I was like I’m probably the only one here that likes looking at reports. She, you know, she’s a designer and it’s not her thing. And so I read it again and was like, you know, gee, this sounds like exactly what I did in my personal life to manage my money and recover from a bankruptcy. And it sounds very much like the good advice that every financial person gives you, you know, divide up your money and pay yourself first. But I had always struggled with, I know that I’m supposed to pay myself first, but how do I actually make that happen?
And partly that’s because I was under earning before I started my own business. So being in control of how much I chose to bill people helped significantly. And then just being really intentional about the money that by giving every dollar a job and giving every dollar a separate home, when I looked at my operating expense account, there was no slush fund in there that was just for only what it was intended for. And so I suddenly realised that I had this habit of seeing a little bit extra in the account, getting all excited and deciding to like go on a conference somewhere that I really wanted to travel to or buy another online course or invest in my own professional development, which are all fantastic things to do that I still continue to do, but now I know if I can actually afford to do that instead of spending all of my profits, you know, “reinvesting them”, as we like to say with air quotes around them, which then turns the profit back into an expense.
Yeah, it’s a very different decision making process if you had to essentially borrow that money versus if you had it and you know that you have it. And what I didn’t realise and I think this is true for a lot of small business owners was I didn’t realise I was borrowing it because I was borrowing from myself. And so once I had a target to pay myself, that was sort of, you know, this is what a healthy business should be compensating its owner. And I was like, oh, I am not doing that, like that’s, you know, I’m being fair and taking what I need, I’m comfortable, which is all great, but it leaves this giant gap of, you know, of a reinvesting, but it also means that I’m hampering my growth. I’m not building an emergency fund for the business as well as for my own personal life, you know, and I’m just sort of overspending in a way that doesn’t address some of the underlying money issues about, you know, me not taking too much.
And it just really freed me up to say, yeah, I actually, I’m supposed to take that money home for myself. It doesn’t mean I have to keep it. You know, one of the things that we built into our business is a lot of charitable contributions. We’re actually a member of an organisation called 1% for the Planet, where we commit 1% of our gross income, not our net, to environmental causes. And so that again, just helps me say, okay, that’s just something I budget for and it’s fine now that I know what the process is for handling my money, I can do that however I want that aligns with my values and that felt very appropriate to me.
Did you apply profit first to your personal life or your business life first or both?
So I had actually applied it to my business life, I had kind of accidentally done it in my personal life on my own. And this is one of the things I really think is nice about profit first is it’s not like learning how to build a rocket ship, right? It’s a very easy simple thing to do. You know, it’s kind of a pain in the butt to go open a couple of bank accounts, but once they’re open and they’re labelled – and again this is the advice that almost every personal financial book will give you right – set up a separate savings account for your long term life goals, like vacation or home buying. Set up a separate account for your recurring bills. So it wasn’t the profit first trademarked system that I was using in my personal life, but it was a system that I naturally gravitated towards envelope system, you know that that made it make a lot of sense once I applied in my business and how long before you implemented it after you read the book right away?
Very good. I wasn’t expecting you to say that.
Yeah, I mean once I was in I was in and I’m very much a learned by doing person and I really don’t like to recommend things that I haven’t tried myself because I always like to find the flaw of it, right? I mean that’s sort of classic in sales. You know if someone is selling you a thing they’ll tell you all of the wonderful things it does, but they can’t really tell you very clearly what doesn’t it do. And so when I look for a solution, I always look for a solution that will solve at least three problems without creating a new one. And I feel like those are things that I just have to do and get in and get dirty and play around with systems or software or whatever it is until I go, oh, I see it. That’s the thing it doesn’t do. I’ve spoken maybe once before about profit first. And the theme was that although people listen and people say it’s a good idea, they don’t tend to implement what’s your experience been? I think that’s true for people who are not numbers people, right? And that’s because I mean the book lays it out so clearly it has step by step instructions in it that if you are the kind of person who is a motivated self-starter, you can absolutely do it.
But the piece that’s missing from that book in particular is some of the mindset issues that present people and some of the guidance and accountability, which is why people like me have a job. So there have been more industry specific books released by Profit First professionals in the last few years. There’s a new one that just came out by a woman named Suzanne Merida, who wrote a book called Profit First for Minority Business Enterprises and she folds in lot more sort of mindset and you know, just has a different perspective on it than Mike does, who’s a great guy, very funny, but also very – you know, as we all are – very particular human who has a very particular work experience of working in corporate and having a staff of 30 that he had to lay off. That wasn’t my experience. And that wasn’t necessarily Suzanne’s either. So it’s nice to sort of get those other sides and I think that’s sort of the benefit of working with a profit first professional, especially when, you know, those of us that have actually gone through the training and certification process is we’ve seen how this works in so many businesses and we’re aware of the kind of um, mental and external roadblocks.
Like I went to the bank, you know, they want to charge me $25 a month for each bank account once I have $5000 in each. That’s overwhelming. I don’t want to do it anymore. Or my bookkeeper doesn’t understand it. It seems like a whole lot more work. That’s overwhelming. I don’t want to do it anymore. And so having someone who said, well I’ve seen that before many times and here are some options. If you choose to move forward, I can help you move forward if you want to throw in the towel on it. Listen, you’re no worse off than you were before. It’s not like you read the book and now suddenly your business won’t work. No, it’s going to work exactly the same as it did in the past. Is that what you want? Is that good enough? You know? Or maybe that’s not good enough, but this isn’t the thing to focus on yet, because there’s a lot of other things that can go wrong with the business, marketing and sales being the one you really kind of have to figure out first. It doesn’t help to have a cash management system if you know, cash coming in. So, you know, so I think I’m very open to helping people kind of figure out where they hung up, why are they hung up?
And what should they do about it? And the answer is not always me. But that’s what I like about that book. Again, it just helps clarify, is this really the problem that I want to focus upon first and in terms of implementation? I think having you do that on someone’s behalf is probably, you know, highly beneficial if you’re struggling with that. But what does that process look like because although it sounds good, I can’t picture it in my mind.
I’m a very visual person and one of the things I wanted to ask you about was, you help people get an at a glance clarity, I think is what you said, and it’s about how to be more profitable. So what does it look like?
So when we help somebody set up, one of the first things we do is choose which bank they’re going to work with. That often is sort of the biggest headache. And thankfully there are many online banks now surfacing that have no fees and allow you to have multiple bank accounts.
There’s one bank in particular in the U. S. that allows me as the bookkeeper to transfer money between your accounts within that bank but not allow me to do external transfers. And I really like that just for security, right? I mean I fraud happens all the time as your bookkeeper. I never want you to have to even consider whether it was me. So I don’t ever want signing privileges on anything. I never want to be able to touch your money. But I know that one of the services that people really like is saying can you just make sure this happens so that I don’t have to think about it. And so having this bank offer that was really great and I hope more banks offer that soon. You know in the book, Mike talks about going into your local bank if you have a relationship with them and saying, you know, listen, I’m not going to have $5000 in one bank, I’m gonna have $10,000.05 banks. Can you waive the fees for me? Sometimes they can, sometimes they won’t. So the system of setting up is picking the bank that you’re going to work with, picking the bank accounts that you need.
And the basic bank accounts are income, profit owners pay tax and operating expenses. And that’s because all of your income filters into one account and then on a regular basis, usually twice a month, you slice that pie of the income account and divide it up amongst your other accounts. So you say, okay, well I’m going to put 10% to profit and 15% to taxes and you know, I don’t know, 50% to owners pay and then the rest goes into operating expenses. And so that immediately lets you see, I think of it like water at a restaurant almost where you have a cup of water, but there’s also a picture circulating out there somewhere. And so you just want to make sure that if you’re thirsty, that you’re able to get the waiter to come refill your glass before it’s empty and just instead of water it’s money. So you can kind of gauge your own pace if you will by saying, well I’m particularly thirsty, but I’ve seen that the waiter’s nowhere nearby, so I’m not going to drink quite as fast because I’m going to wait until I catch his eye and he can come over and then I’ll finish the glass when he’s refilling it.
So by having these separate accounts and knowing exactly what the money is for and you might need additional accounts if you have inventory to repurchase or materials that you use to make whatever you make or if you pay a lot of subcontractors to perform the services that you do that, then when you look at your operating account, that’s the money that you can absolutely afford to spend. You don’t have to think back about like, oh but don’t forget, you know, payroll is going to come out of that and then rent is due and then that’s what that money is for. And so the only two numbers you have to keep your eye on our, have I hit my sales goal for the month and what’s my bank balance. And so that’s that like at a glance clarity because we know business owners check their bank balance five times a day on their phone even if nothing is changing.
So it allows you to do that. It leverages that habit and then actually turns that into useful information. Well thank you for the explanation. The at a glance is essentially the glancing at your bank account and seeing how much money you’ve got actually that’s available.
Exactly. And that actually turns into an early warning system because if you see your bank balance dropping and you don’t have plans to refill it soon or when you refill it and it doesn’t go back to its original level. That’s this like flag waving that you can’t actually afford your current commitments and have everything else in your business go sustainably. And so that allows you the opportunity to make those structural changes internally before you run out of money. Before it’s a crisis before a global pandemic hits. And you realise you have no savings.
Have you ever been in the position where I’m based on the statistics? I’m sure you have been in the position but where those numbers start to occur, meaning someone is running out of money and you have to start making those decisions where maybe you start juggling money between the accounts and that sort of thing. And how does that affect what you do?
I mean if it is a true emergency, it’s completely okay, right? So pandemic, perfect example. If you’ve got a six month emergency fund like yeah, I can’t imagine a more emergency situation, like get in there, you know, make sure that your business survives, do whatever you need to do to make sure that business survives.
And some of that is not only dramatically cutting costs. You know, negotiating with all of your vendors who are likely in the same position. It might mean for allowing staff or ideally getting a PPP Loan that we had here to help pay those people anyways. But to make some of those tough decisions so that you can come back and reopen your doors at the other end, you know, if that’s what you want to do. Some people took the pandemic as assigned to like I’m done struggling, you know, I don’t want to do this anymore and shut their doors. And it was actually what shifted for us. You know, for the last several years we’ve been sort of cheerleading this system and saying oh it’s a really good idea and we really think you should do it. Since the pandemic, we did have some businesses go out. None of them were profit first businesses. And even in the first month where things were still really unknown, the businesses that I spoke to who called me in tears or nearly in tears were not my profit first.
My profit first people already had their heads down looking for Plan B and didn’t call me until about the second month to say, hey, I just want to check in about what we’ve done and make sure that you’re on board with this. So that was when I was like, we actually won’t work with anyone that isn’t implementing profit first. You don’t have to do it with us. You can do it on your own if you want. But it just makes such a dramatic difference that I’m unwilling to allow people to do themselves a disservice of not using a cash management system. Have you? When did you decide that in the middle of the pandemic? Okay. Have you been able to change someone’s mind? So in the instance where they approach you, we want you to be bookkeeping, and then you say, well, you’re gonna have to do profit first, and they’ve actually implemented it as that scenario happened. Yeah. And I think that maybe because there’s enough about it, you know, that I there’s enough times that I speak about it that’s on our website, you know, etcetera, that people are like, I’m willing to give it a shot.
I have definitely had people say I don’t want that, I’m not interested in that, and I’m like, well then I don’t know why you would pay our rates, you know, like you’re paying for an expert opinion that’s like going to a lawyer, you know, who says you really need to create a trust for your family and being like I don’t, can you just do some other stuff for me? It’s like well, yeah no I know. So that’s kind of how I think of it.
What are your thoughts on the complexity of business, bank account and how the principles still apply? So I’m sure that you know in most cases I’m sure it’s you know a perfect system for it. But in the instances of like a massive business with thousands of transactions per day or whatever it might be, do you think that it’s still possible or what springs to mind?
Yeah. So like an e-commerce business, you know the thousands of – well half of the thousands of transactions are hopefully money coming in and depositing into the income account. And so in a larger company, I actually think it works better because it allows you to separate out in a cleaner way your accounts payable staff from your accounts receivable staff. Because now they actually can get view access to the bank account without having the full picture that business owners are often so frightened of letting their staff have, right? Instead it’s just here’s the income account. This is what you’re in charge of. If you don’t see that money come in, go after that client and ask them what’s up, you know? And so it lets you let your staff be more helpful in some ways. And then over then on the accounts payable side, the same thing right? Here’s how much you have to pay the bills with go for it. So that kind of separation also helps with things like preventing fraud because they know that everybody you know there’s more than one person looking in that bank account. It’s not just the bookkeeper. And if there is fraud, it helps protect you because they’re not tapping into your full suite of money, right?
You still have your owners pay set aside, you still have your profit set aside, you still have all of these things. And there is a regular review process built in where at least quarterly you go in and assess the bank balances and the allocation percentages and say, does this still fit or have things changed for us? Maybe we’ve set aside too much. Maybe we’ve done such a good job of reducing our expenses that we set aside too much in our operating expense account and now we can use that to bonus the staff. You know, or if there’s not enough in there, again, it just becomes an intentional decision to say, okay, we’re going to choose to tap into profit, or as the owner, I’m going to choose to reduce my salary by 20% which again happened a lot in the pandemic, right? If I’m laying everybody else off, I’m also going to roll back my salary a little bit just to protect the business because I can afford that, you know, I have my own personal reserves. That’s a nice balance between them. So I think there’s just lots of benefits to it, no matter what size the businesses.
Well, I can certainly see the, the benefits to doing it outside profit first. And let’s just say bookkeeping in general, what would you say are the main mistakes that people make in relation to bookkeeping or keeping their books?
I would say the biggest one is allowing someone else to tell you how it should look. And what I mean by that is many businesses start and use whatever the default chart of account is in the software that they’re using. And so suddenly the business owner is struggling to figure out well what should go, and do some subscriptions, instead of saying, I don’t have software subscriptions and I’ve got membership dues. But those are two different things. And feeling like they have the permission to say great, I’m going to rename that account so that it makes sense so that I know not only what does go in there, but what doesn’t go in there and when that basic framework is correct, then all of the reports make more sense.
It’s easier to know, you know when new transactions come in, where did they go? Because things are labelled how you and your institutional knowledge, think of things happening in your business. So that’s the big thing. I would say the other thing is you know relying on your tax person to catch your data entry errors. That’s just not their job. Their job is to make sure that you’re paying the least amount of tax legally possible and they are not working at that micro level, they’re working at a very macro level so they might make some large adjustments to make things look better. But that often leads the business over even more confused of like what is this why is this here? Why did we make an adjustment to accounts receivable for 100 and $20,000? And so having either a bookkeeper who really knows herself Again which is hard to find or knowing that there’s really this position that exists in corporate that doesn’t really exist in small business called the controller and the CFO.
And it’s their job to make sure that whatever the full charge bookkeeper did was correct you know and expected and fits into the plan or digs into why things are different before that information even goes to the owner and certainly before it goes to the tax person because what happens now, you know I mean again talking with my hands, you have sort of the pinky is the accounting clerk and then the full charge bookkeeper looks at them and then the you know controller and CFO take a look and then the owner reviews everything and then it goes to the accountant. But what’s happened is that we’ve sort of lost those middle zones and the owners often absent busy with other things. And so now you have essentially an accounting clerk, maybe a full charge bookkeeper giving information directly to the CPA without any verification. And I think that really messes up small business. Yeah I do know what you mean and I think the first thing you mentioned around I guess fitting in with the software rather than making the software for you it makes me think of it’s just a confidence issue.
Do you think that’s it? I think so. Yeah. Right. Because it’s like you know driving a new car and you know am I allowed to change the factory settings on this or does that mean that I’m gonna void my warranty? Kind of a thing that you know it’s your car you can do with it what you want. But it is it’s a confidence in permission you know and not being clear about what are the potential consequences that I’m unaware of. Which I think is very smart but it’s even smarter to actually get that question answered.
You mentioned in your twenties and about how your story starts off. When you look back at that, what runs through your mind? Do you think about what you would do differently, or is it actually the catalyst which made you get the skill set for what you do now?
Yeah, I mean, again, I think given the tools I had at the time, I don’t think I could have made a different decision and I feel extraordinarily lucky that it became a catalyst for something that I really loved. You know, I went to some conference somewhere and someone asked like, what did you all want to be as kids, right? And oddly enough, when I was from a very young age because I loved my teachers, I always thought I wanted to be a schoolteacher and then I taught school and I realised it was not for me.
What did you teach?
I taught in a last stop high school on the Lower east side of Manhattan, and so I essentially didn’t teach anything. I was there to teach English skills, and some basic math, but it was really, it was really just crowd control, which was awful and I tried a couple of different versions of that and just none of it fit. But I realized in that moment, you know, when people, because the follow up question was, how many of you are doing that now? And I was like, oh my gosh, I’m doing that now, like in a very different context, but um, but I feel like that’s, you know, this, this idea of empowerment through education and helping people get the confidence to make the right decisions and, you know, quote unquote graduate on past me.
I feel like that’s absolutely what I do now. So I don’t regret what happened to me, you know, there’s really no point in that, but yeah, I mean, I don’t know that I could have done it differently.
And let’s say someone is in a bit of a mess business wise, what was the first steps that you would advise them to do?
I mean, the first step is to get the support that you need in order to be able to face that, You know, I think it’s Winston Churchill who said the only way out is through. And so the longer that you sit in the mess without addressing it, the longer the mess is going to stay there. And I also know that a lot of times the reason that people do stay in really messy situations is because they aren’t sure of how to move forward. They feel like maybe they’ve already tried everything they know and it didn’t work or there’s external pressures on them that they can’t quite negotiate.
A lot of times, those are also internal pressures of, you know, not wanting to admit defeat, not wanting to let people feel disappointed in you when usually it’s, I mean, either they won’t really and it’s just you or if they feel disappointed in you because you weren’t able to manage a business like that’s not really, that’s not really fair. You gotta learn how to let go of that and that some of that mindset issue, right? I mean, I worked with a client who had two years’ worth of mail stacked up because she was so terrified to open any of it. And it was like, wow, okay, well let’s, you know, you might need more support than just me here, but let’s figure out what we can do today. Can we at least separate out the junk mail from the scary male and get rid of the junk? You know, it was very slow progress, but we made progress well then, well I can see that you’re also a business coach.
How much of your day or time is spent doing coaching versus bookkeeping?
I don’t do any bookkeeping anymore. I have a staff of ten that handle the sort of transactional pieces of it. Yeah, so I mean to me profit first is sort of coaching because again, once you start talking about systems and mindset that’s not really keeping anymore. Even though we’re talking about bookkeeping systems and bookkeeping mindset, which is why I’m a little hesitant to let go of that label. you know, I think of myself more as an accountant advisor these days, but I also know that the coaching industry is sketchy at best, that there’s a lot of really bad coaches out there who will you know, who are great salespeople, and I’ve certainly been taken in by someone who promised me the moon and then delivered me cheese. And so I don’t like over identifying with that, I mean there’s also some fabulous coaches out there, right? And I’ve also met and been transformed by some of them, so it’s not, it just feels a little a little wild west out there where without, without accountability, it’s hard to know who to trust with your money and your business and your feelings. So I was like, you know to give people opportunities to kind of sample before they buy and to give people an out even after they thought, you know, I don’t, I suggest that we work together with 12 months for 12 months. But if something happens in your life, you know, if a parent gets sick or your kid gets sick or your job changes somehow, I’m not going to say, well you signed a contract so you still owe me. And I’ve had that experience and that’s just like it blows my mind that these are people who say that their business supporters and yet what they’re doing is damaging the very businesses that they purport to help. So that’s just me. What would you say in terms of differentiating? Because you’ve done a lot of differentiation, I think you’re the first, I don’t want to call you a bookkeeper because I’m not sure what you like to be referred to as.
But I like the fact that you differentiated because I’ve not seen any bookkeeper differentiate in the way that you have. But what would you advise someone else to do if they were going through that process of looking for someone and whether it be a business coach for the bookkeeper?
Yeah. I mean I think being clear on what the job descriptions are, so really asking who you’re working with again, not just what do you do, but what don’t you do? So we’re very clear, we don’t do taxes, we don’t do any tax prep. We’ll file sales tax for you because those are based on the numbers that we recorded on your behalf likely of your sales. But when it comes to the compliance issues of, you know, what does the law say you should or shouldn’t or could do now? Those things change so fast that I really want you to have an expert and that’s why I would never step into the role of, you know, tax advisory, that it just doesn’t interest me. And some people really prefer an all in one solution where they have their bookkeeping done by their accountant.
I really prefer the balance. I really prefer us, you know, checking and balancing each other and providing maybe even different point of views. I will always defer to your tax person, but I’ll have the discussion with you about why do I think differently first? So whether you’re looking for a bookkeeper, a business coach, a tax accountant, whatever it is, I think it’s really important to be clear about what you want out of the relationship so that you can clearly and directly ask and they can say yes, I do that or that’s not really my area of expertise, but I can, or you should be talking to somebody else and to make sure that there work style fits with you. You know, if you’re someone who really does not like to be bothered, it just wants to know that things are taken care of, then you need to find someone who’s going to take care of it in the same way that you would. So one of the conversations specifically around tax people, not so much around business coaches is, you know, when it comes to one of those grey areas of could I write this off or not, you want to find someone who has roughly the same tolerance for risk that you do.
So you’re not someone who’s like, yeah, right off everything. And your account is saying absolutely not, you know, black and white by the book or the other way around where you’re like, I really don’t, you know, I want to know that if I ever were to get audited that nothing would come back, not even a $5 charge and to have an account that’s kind of making up numbers to get you a better tax rate. So how that translates to a business coach, since I think business coaches are much more personable in general, they are much more about goals, desires. That again, you just want to make sure that you’re aligned, that that not only is the person you’re working with, someone who works with the kind of business that you are in terms of size, ambition, etcetera, but communicates with you in a way that, you know, I mean if there’s so much out there now about the styles of communication and you want to find someone that clicks with you that you like because there’s so many of us out there, there’s no reason to think that someone has a particular skills that they’re the only one with the particular skill set.
And so, you know, I just wouldn’t tolerate someone that doesn’t make you feel cheered or supported. You know, like you’ve got a clear directive of what to do next, that they’re holding you accountable without making you feel punished. You know, find someone you like, peer groups really important. I have heard it referred to that often, but I think I’ve never heard it in terms of the tax people that you work with or your team, how much are they on the same wavelength as you? So I think that’s a really good point.
Have you got anything that you think would be valuable to the audience that haven’t asked you about?
That’s a great question. I would say to them, you know, if the idea tickles you, I would say likely you probably already have a bit of a savings account, a business savings account, right? Most people start with one checking account of one savings account, just start taking 1% of your income and feeding that into your savings account and watch how quickly that grows.
And if you need to tap into that or not, and that’s sort of like the smallest nibble of profit first, it doesn’t give you the full flavour of the dish, but it will sort of show you how easily it can work. You know, and I would say do it every time you run payroll or if you don’t have payroll do it twice a month just to just to test that habit out. And then the next step would be to either read or listen to the book. And then if you like all of that go find a go find a professional to work with. Is that the first piece of advice there is that because if you start to make that change you can potentially begin to regulate your behaviour. I mean I think anyone can regulate their behaviour with motivation without motivation. It is extraordinarily hard. So to me that is the simplest step of the system, right? If the whole system is separate out your money, and then use it for what it’s used for. Just by starting with that first separate out your money without opening up a bunch of other bank accounts.
It lets you see how easy it could be, right? It’s that same process just done a couple more times and so if you know you’re not ready to do all of the math calculations of where am I now and where should I be and how do I get there? Which is what you would work with a guide with to just say well 1% of income, that’s easy, I can do that math in my head and it just lets you see again, I think part of it is lets you see how quickly that pile can actually grow and you know, and then at the end of the quarter, if you have debt, take that and pay an extra thing down to your debt and if you don’t have debt, take that extra money and put it in your personal retirement fund. And so it just lets you kind of peer into the world of how being intentional with your money can help leap you forward on certain goals in a way that doesn’t feel taxing or stressful while talking of goals.
Ean, what are your goals? We are, we’re in the middle of expanding.
We just hired our first HR person. We’ve been in business nearly 20 years. We’re just a funny little bunch of bookkeepers who answer all the questions that bookkeepers normally don’t, but I’m really looking forward to supporting my own staff more fully. And so this year, in the next six months, our goal is to really outline the growth plan for each one of our staff members and to make sure that we’re taking as good care of our staff as we do of our customers. Okay, well, achievable right. Achievable time dependent, specific, measurable. Achievable relevant time.
Yeah, all those things. Where’s the best place for people to find you?
I think our website is a good hug to find us. It’s got all of the information and links to blogs and even to book an appointment if you want to chit chat and that is moxiebookkeeping.com.
Brilliant. Thank you very much for all the value today.
I’ve enjoyed it.