The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

120 ⎸ [STRATEGY] Events, Team Training, & Automations with Becky Hesson

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This week we’re airing another 1-1 strategy session with one of my students, Becky Hesson, founder of ANJUDI3!

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • hiring and team training strategies
  • efficient strategies for email marketing
  • tips on managing client relationships and tax filings
  • how to streamline the conversion process
  • and SO much more!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Meet Becky:

Becky started ANJUDI3 because she wanted to show the girls she hosted that they can do whatever they want to do using their positivity! Anja, Julia and Diana will always have a special place in her heart and will always be her special daughters!

Becky’s professional background is in the tech industry. She also holds partial ownership as a shareholder of Willamette Valley Vineyards in Oregon. She's LEAD certified in the state of California, has been a member Texas Wine & Grape Growers since 2020, and even sponsored one of their virtual events. In 2023 she joined the Texas Craft Brewers Guild with the goal of learning more about the industry and creating connections with her clients and their passion. Recently, she's become the Membership Coordinator for the new Texas Hill Country Chapter of Women for Winesense.

Connect with Becky:

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For more information about the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:

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I come across that with lots of bookkeepers that are starting their businesses. They do. They feel like they are doing something wrong or they don't know something because they haven't actually been provided the whole picture and all the information that they need to be able to do their job. It's kind of like if, if you took accounting classes At least I know mine were like this. You'd get these scenarios of like the business was open with, you know, 50, 000 contributed in cash for this much stock and they have this loan and that, that, that, that, uh, and there was always a missing piece of information. And there was also extra information that you didn't need and just to throw you off. And that's what this was preparing us for is to figure out what do we need and what are we missing still that we're going to need to complete this and to learn not to To take it as, you know, something personal that you're doing wrong. Welcome back to the ambitious bookkeeper podcast today. I am doing an on air strategy session with Becky Hessen. And yeah, this is, these are always a lot of fun because. I come into the interview quote unquote strategy session with a little bit of a background of questions, but I usually, we just kind of riff on what questions the bookkeeper accountant has and, and treat it a lot like a, a coaching session with me. So welcome Becky, would you like to introduce yourself? the type of people that you help, anything relevant about your business, um, and then we'll go from there. Sure. My business is named NGV3. I named it after my three exchange students who were all here from Germany during the high school and Anya, Julia and Diana. And so that makes me smile every time I say it and we focus on breweries, wineries and distilleries primarily, but we also have some other small businesses as well. Awesome. Thank you so much for being willing to have this strategy session on the air. I know I'm a bit vulnerable, but I'm super excited to dive in. So with that, what can I help you with today? So, I'm interested to learn how you make it so that the. Emails are automated for you. And so I'm assuming they're automated for you. And so that you can keep the balance of your life, but not have to be involved so much, but make it look like, like, you're involved and also. I'm interested in, and if you've used any of those strategies, and I have an opportunity to do 1, and it is not necessarily focused on my niche, but. I'm looking to grow, so I'm wondering about whether I should do that. All right. Well, let's start with What I think is a simple question first, but we'll see, the email automation. So I'm assuming you're talking about the emails that you get from the ambitious bookkeeper, right? And right now, at the time of this recording, we've just wrapped up a promotion. So you probably got lots of extra emails, but when we do that, we try to have something in, in the body of the email or the bottom of the email. Allowing people to opt out of that promotion, but still stay on our regular newsletter. So that's 1 thing that I would, you know, if you're going to be doing marketing emails, definitely have that sort of thing in place. If you're going to be doing extra promotional emails for something, but the system we use is called Kajabi and it's the same system that we host our courses on and it's also the same system. I host my website on. So it's a. All encompassing website course hosting platform. You have a checkout, so you can take payments through it when you link stripe or PayPal and it also has the email marketing component. So, we also use the same system on our bookkeeping company side. So I have two Kajabis basically that host these things. And we do use this to send out marketing type emails to our clients and to potential clients. So Email marketing is something we've definitely done some podcast episodes on. I will try to link those in the show notes. But one for sure I did with Liz Wilcox, I may have done more than one episode with her. So if you search her in the podcast player, you'll find those. And she talks more about email marketing strategy and how to get started with that. So if this is some, a brand new topic to you, definitely. Go have a peek. I also cover it inside of the bookkeeping business accelerator. And basically the way that we handle the ambitious bookkeeper email marketing is the same, but more frequent than what we do with our bookkeeping. So we send a monthly email to our clients and to our prospects. They're very similar emails, but they're a little bit different. The messaging is a little different. Obviously, when we email to our client base, we're not asking them to become a client because they already are. It's more about like reminding them of. You know, we give them the same basic newsletter with deadlines and reminders and other tips on running your business, but in their email, it's more of a reminder at the end, their call to action is to book their monthly call if they are part of our monthly services where they receive a call. And also sometimes we do, like, a little upsell in there, like, right now is a great time of year to be pushing your clients to meet with you to do an upsell basically for a budget or forecast for the upcoming year. That's what we do for our clients and then a similar newsletter goes out to anyone who has filled out an interest form to work with us or, downloaded any of our, freebies like our KPI guide or our DIY guide. And those people get similar email with tips and reminders and things like that. And their call to action is to work with us in some capacity. So we give them options to either book a call. Or participate in a day or to engage us for monthly services, that kind of thing. So those are automated in that. I obviously still have to write them at some point. I have to sit down and write these emails. But you're able to schedule them out. it's kind of like social media, you block off some time to create a bunch of posts, and then you use a scheduling system to schedule them out. So you're not constantly having to log in and post. And then all you have to do is log in to engage with people or to share stuff that you want to share. So that's kind of how we handle the email marketing. Once a month I sit down and write a blog for my firm and the email that will go along with it to kind of promote it and the monthly newsletter. It's all kind of a one sit down thing. If I'm feeling very ambitious and I have lots of ideas, I might do one or more months at a time. And so then I have like a couple months scheduled out for the ambitious bookkeeper. We do a weekly email promoting our podcast and usually some other type of tip, right? And that one I do use Liz Wilcox's email marketing membership for inspiration. She sends a template every week, I believe on things that you can include in your monthly newsletter and her membership is only 9 a month and it's very well worth it. So we will link that also in the show notes but that has been really helpful in prompting you on what to talk about. So it doesn't take you a ton of time to do and nowadays I actually have someone on my team writing that email, but we kind of collaborate on it. She'll say, this is the topic that's in Membership this week can you provide me with, like, something, you know, for instance, one that drops this week is offering, three tips around getting something done that you don't want to really focus on. And so on our weekly team meeting, we usually talk about that and the whole team gives input in fact of like, what are the three things that we should talk about? Or like, what is, you know, depending on the topic, we all kind of, brainstorm together and co write it. But. I used to do all of these on my own. So it's taken me some time to get to this point to have someone else on the team write in my voice and, and all that kind of stuff. But even if you are doing it yourself, you can definitely set up process and procedures to have someone take it over at some point as well. And it's something that you could also outsource if you wanted, but the email marketing membership is a really great place to start. I think for a bookkeeping firm, I don't know that a weekly email is completely necessary unless you do have a lot of value that you wanna give every week I personally just don't have the bandwidth to create that much content because I'm already creating a lot of content for ambitious bookkeeper. if I was only focusing on my firm, I probably would be able to, create weekly content in that capacity. But I'm also all about repurposing stuff. So the reason I write the blog is to have. somewhere to refer clients or potential clients to to receive information on a topic, but also we repurpose the information in there into multiple social posts and into an email and all sorts of stuff. So try to make it easier on yourself. I kind of went off on a tangent on creating content. Do you use Kajabi as a CRM? No, I use Dubsado as the CRM that we track our leads and everything for the firm. I guess you could use it as a CRM. So the way that we have it handled, is if someone opts in to one of our freebies, we have that in Kajabi and what we're doing there is nurturing them with our monthly newsletters. Occasionally I'll send more frequent, but. Monthly for sure always happens. We're nurturing them there and asking them to follow us on social and, you know, reply to the emails and stuff like that. And then. Once they book a call, like once they finally say, like, yes, I they're qualifying themselves as a lead in essence, because they're not quite a qualified lead until they are ready to like, have a conversation. because we have like our filtering process, right? We have a minimum fee. We have, we're only on zero. And so people need to understand all of that before they even really reach out to us to book a call. So once they click a link in one of those emails that says, yes, book a call, it'll take them to the page where they can book a call or fill out the interest form. And it, Also, we tell them they're like, that's our, this is our minimum fee. We're only on 0. so I'm sure there's a lot of people that actually click those links and don't follow through with it because then they realize they're not qualified really for what we're doing here. But at that moment in time, once they actually book that call their information gets. Automatically popped into Dubsado, which is our CRM. And that's where we track interested leads and our proposals, engagement letter process, all of that onboarding pieces in Dubsado. So once someone raises their hand and self qualifies as a potential client, like a real potential client, then they get into that CRM. So. Being a quote unquote influencer in the bookkeeping space. I also get a lot of people joining my email list that are bookkeepers for market research valid. I don't mind at all, but I don't want all of those contacts in my, in my CRM, if that makes sense. And so it's automatically happening from to Yeah. So what happens is. the email, there's a link that directs them to an interest form or booking a call. So, the interest form is a Dubsado form. So, once they fill out their information in that interest form has it. Now we have their contact information and information about their business. And so Dubsado automatically saves that because that's a built in Dubsado form that you can embed on your website. It's also the same thing that's on our contact page on our website. If they click the link to book a call. That directs them to our scheduler, which is Acuity, and I'll just make a little side note here. Dubsado has its own scheduler. So if you don't have a scheduler yet, and you're interested in Dubsado, I'm going to do a plug here for that. You can accomplish all of this within Dubsado. I just prefer Acuity for my scheduling. So I have a zap going from if someone books a discovery call, it automatically zaps their information into Dubsado as a lead. So that's how that happens automatically. Obviously, that had to get set up. So you have to think about the different systems you're using and how you can feed information automatically. But yeah, right? And so you're using, Dubsado instead of, like, the sales funnel in Asana? Correct. So just a little background. You, you must have Kickoff with Asana. I do, I'm gonna link all these in the show notes. So in Kickoff with Asana, Alyssa gives you a template for a project that tracks your leads. So you can probably have a way to zap information in there too. If you're using a Q, what are you using for your scheduler? I have a cutie, but I'm looking at booking. Microsoft. okay. So that's something, as you're looking into something like that, I would look to see if it integrates with Zapier. I know Asana does, and I know Dubsado does, so, and I know Acuity does. So you could create a zap, if someone books a call with you in Acuity, you could zap their information into that Asana project. As a task so if you're not doing that already, you could at least do that now if you wanted, if you're getting a lot of leads and it will make your life easier. And I would, you know, as you're looking into another program, look to make sure that that can have the same capability. Right. Right. Good. Thank you. yeah, What was the program that you're thinking of using for your CRM Booking, which is a Microsoft product that comes with Office. That's the reason just to try to look at if there's already something I own and using it or not. yeah, absolutely. So that would eliminate acuity. Yes, And eliminate having that Asana project or would you keep that Asana I think I would keep this on a project. There's no reason to. Break that down. So then in your case, looking at does Booking have a Zapier integration that you can pop that information into your Asana Yeah, I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head, but Yeah, you can figure that out. yeah, otherwise it could just be a manual process. If you're not getting tons of leads, it's something that's doable. Like, I still kind of duplicate some of the information into notion where I have, like, a database and notion where I am tracking some more detailed information about my leads. So you can track this in Dubsado too, but making sure you're having a way to capture where the source of that lead is coming from. And then what I also like to track is When did they 1st contact us to start a conversation? And then when did they finally sign their engagement letter? So I can track like what's the time frame that it takes to convert a lead to an actual customer and then you start to have data to work with of like, how do we shorten that time frame? Well, I know for me, my time frame is a couple weeks because I don't have a lot of calendar availability for people to book calls. Right? fault, right? We could make that time frame a lot shorter if I collected payment on the phone call or had a larger, more widely available calendar, I guess, where things aren't as blocked off so people could book almost immediately, but. Everyone has their own situation, so right now I'm just kind of in gathering data stage of like, let's track a few leads throughout the next couple months of how long it takes to get them from point A to point B. Or point C or D or whatever, right? So those are some of the more manual things that I'm tracking in Notion, but they're all their data is, getting captured automatically. And then I go back later and kind of fill that stuff in when I'm doing my little metrics research. Are you the only one doing the selling? Currently, yes. And that's part of why I'm, doing this legwork as I'm doing the selling so that I can have a baseline of what I would expect out of someone when I offload it. And I would expect them to do better than me because they would be hired to be doing sales. They should have an open calendar. Yeah, Right. think it's mine, but lead generation via events okay. So one of the key pieces of information you mentioned is that these events are not actually for your niche. So my question to you would be, are you thinking of expanding your client base outside of the niche that you're in? If so. Then it might be worth it, but if you think you're going to get a bunch of leads that aren't good fits for you, because they're in a completely different business, or maybe it's too broad, I'm not sure, then you have to figure out, like, is that time, effort, expense going to be worth it if I'm going to turn all these people away anyway? I wouldn't turn them away, it's a question of what makes sense in the larger term. I also struggle to educate, so I don't do the bookkeeping. And I have bookkeepers that do the work, but they are nervous about clients. They come in with our niche. And so I've been trying to educate them so that they are not nervous about that. Yeah, I would say if you had to choose between putting effort towards marketing versus developing a training program and a process internally so that in the long run things can be more efficient and your bookkeepers could be more confident, which would you choose? I get your point. Yeah. Because sometimes I know for myself, sometimes the marketing seems more fun than that other stuff, but what is going to get you closer to your goal in the long run? Not in the like, yes, that doing this event is likely going to bring in clients, but is that actually going to be helpful for your team to have an more variety of workflows in the end, even if they are easier, or would it make more sense to. Really get your internal processes down, work one on one with your team, or hold group trainings and, and do some, like, develop an internal training program with them. I'm not saying you have to do all of it yourself. If you have one strong bookkeeper that is confident in your niche, and that can take on some of that responsibility, I would actually, absolutely. Work with her on that and say, okay, you have this process down. I would really love for you to create some videos and, uh, and some S. O. P. S. and take on training these other bookkeepers. Obviously, that's more responsibility. So diverting marketing funds to keeping your internal team happy and promoting and all that kind of stuff. You get to choose what you would prefer is what I'm saying. But those are kind of your, if you have to choose, maybe kind of evaluate it that way. My worry is that you go and do this, event, you have to Either have someone go for you or go yourself, which may or may not work. Like it might be fun. It might, you know, you might make some good contacts. But then if you go, you're either going to be positioning yourself towards your niche and maybe not capture a lot of attention, or maybe you will, I'm not really sure. Or you're going to have to more of a generalist, which. Might still not have the same effect that you want. So I would look at who is actually going to be at this event. Is there going to be a subset of people that actually are in your niche? Because then it would make sense to go because you could still capture all those leads. yeah, it really comes back to what's going to get you to your goal in the long term that helps me. So the other things I'd like input about, I have kicked off with is Donna and but Alyssa shows you to do, you me how. And one of the questions I had was capability to share. What you are doing as part of that training, so that how can I share bookkeepers what you are teaching so that they can see what I want to expect. You can absolutely just Send them through the program, like give them your login and I'm saying this on air because I really don't mind when my students share with their internal team. I, I, I know that there's always a possibility of someone sharing something. With someone that's not part of their team. And I just have to hope that people have integrity and don't do that. Also to incentivize you not to do that. If you're listening is if you really want to share the program with someone else that has their own business that you think would benefit from it, give them an affiliate link and you'll get commission from it. So if you can always become an affiliate and get a cut of that, if you share my links and someone joins, that would be my preference. And I just hope that everyone has integrity, but if it's part of your team and you were trying to develop your team of bookkeepers, absolutely put them through the programs that you've already purchased. Yeah. As long as it doesn't violate terms with the other programs like mine. You're good to go. I can't speak for all the other programs. Look at your, your terms and conditions. But I have to have what you're doing is what yeah, it's important for your team to understand your vision. And your goals for your business and to kind of understand your thought process on how you're trying to run your business, because that's only going to help them help you reach those goals, right? If they don't really understand the way you've developed your mindset and things around how you run your business, it's going to be harder to get them to buy in. Um, how do you deal with. Clients who don't get the information necessary to you. Well, I do a few follow ups, and then at some point, it will either get to the point where we can't wrap up the year end for them to file taxes, and they'll finally do it, or they will decide that They don't want to work with us because that's the decision that you're making, like, or they're not going to have the accurate information to file their taxes. and if it goes on long enough like that, we do end up just disengaging with clients because they're not the right fit. we give grace for things come up in their personal life, they're behind on whatnot, but if it becomes, if it's a pattern and it's consistent and it's actually. Costing us more to continue to follow up with them and we're still not able to do the work, then it's a conversation with them. After my team has followed up with them, I will jump in and say, Hey, like my team has reached out multiple times to get this information from you. We can let it keep piling up until your end, but then it's going to be even harder for you to answer these questions. And then it's going to. Prolonged you being able to actually file your taxes and the ripple effect is just not fun for any of us because then you might end up on April 14th, finally getting us everything we need. But it's not a priority for us anymore. we did what we were supposed to be doing throughout the year. And so your emergency is no longer our emergency. type of situation and your taxes will get filed late or incorrectly because your tax pro won't have all the information they need. So I prep them for that before it comes to that, but that's what I say. This is what will end up happening if this continues. So you can decide now to either give us the information or maybe we disengage and you take it back on yourself or find a bookkeeper that's gonna be willing to put up with this but good luck. Like, there's really not any other option. And those are the types of clients that actually end up switching bookkeepers frequently, and that's probably why. So one of the things that I ask when a new client comes to us is if they've had a bookkeeper or if they currently have one. And if that answer is yes, I want to know why they're leaving. And it's kind of like when you interview someone for a job, or if you're the interviewee, someone asks you, like, why are you looking to make a move from your position and you start badmouthing your previous employer or that client starts kind of like badmouthing their bookkeeper. Some of it might be valid, but I think in general, if someone. The people that aren't willing to reflect on what role they played in that situation, you can usually start to get a feel for that by kind of like asking some clarifying questions and things like that. I'm trying to, I'm trying to come up with examples, but it's like. In general, if someone's going to badmouth someone else, you probably, it's going to happen to you at some point. So you get to decide if you want to deal with that. If they don't badmouth the bookkeeper and they're like, well, you know, there's just some things that I want to have done that she's not, she or he is not able or willing to do, or they don't have time for me anymore. My business is growing. I'm outgrowing this bookkeeper. That's a very diplomatic way of Of handling things well, where you may not be able to tell if like, is it really the bookkeeper or does this person have unreasonable demands? So in that situation, I would be like, well, what is it that you expect your bookkeeper to be doing that she isn't doing? What is it that you would, would like from a bookkeeper as your business grows? And those are the type of clarifying questions that you would want to ask to try to get to the bottom of it. And also just like, trust your gut. So we have some clients. So how do Present the without all the information and utilize that to sort of educate them that they need to answer these questions. for one, we use that suspense account, right? Or ask my accountant. You're, you're a Xero user. So for you, it's suspense too. We put everything in that suspense account that they haven't answered questions on. And. By default, when you set up Xero, it makes that a balance sheet account, but I, I move it as part of onboarding. We change that to an expense account. So it shows up on the P and L, and then they can really see how not having these transactions correctly categorized. Messes with their P& L when it's on the balance sheet, clients don't even understand the balance sheet to begin with. So it's like, it doesn't even matter to them. And it's easy for us to forget it's there if you're not doing balance sheet reconciliations every month and whatnot. So we always move that to an expense account. So it shows up on the P& L. And as we're going through the P& L, we're like, okay, here's your revenue. Here's operating expenses. Your top operating expense is suspense because we don't know. What all this stuff is or whatever, you know, maybe it's not the top operating expense. Likely it won't be, but you want to call it out anyways and say, and there's like 2, 000 sitting in suspense. That could be revenue could be something that belongs on the balance sheet could be, you know, something else. But. We're not able to, you know, give you finalized reports without having this information and these reports are going to be more accurate for you. Once you do give us this information, then there's things that are balance sheet items that the clients often don't give right where like a loan statements or. Things like that. So you can't break out the loan payment versus the interest on those payments without having at least the initial loan contract. So you can create your own amortization schedule, which is my preference. I don't expect my clients to send me their SBA loan statement every month. What we do is ask for the initial. Loan agreement, and we create the amortization schedule with an Excel template and it's standard across all of our clients. And so that's 1 of our monthly entries is going into the payment and splitting the lines, or just if they have a lot of loans, we'll just do a journal entry for all of them. And that way. that is there. But if you don't have that information, that's something I would add to my meeting notes every single month and say, this is your profit and loss. However, there should be a bunch here, right in interest because you've been paying on a loan. But it's not, it's reducing your loan balance since it's inaccurate. So we can adjust it at your end when you get your interest 1099, but just know it's going to be a big hit that kind of stuff. Yeah. 1 of these clients who is really slow about answering questions. Also makes awesome referrals. Yeah, so that's a real I'm glad you bring this up because They're loving us, but it's like, and they ask specifically for the bookkeeper that they have. yeah, it's kind of the same thing with like a really low paying client that you may technically be losing money on or breaking even on the time you spend on them, but they are your biggest cheerleader and they send you clients. I would look at it as kind of like a marketing expense. You know what I mean? Where it's like, I would either be spending, but you get to decide energetically, which is more important. Like, is it more important for us to like love every single client we work with, or are we willing to make concessions and have this one bad ish client? And get lots of these other clients that are good. Now, I will say, be careful that the clients that they're referring you don't have the same personality. And I'm not saying they will, but sometimes that Sometimes they do. Yep. Yep. So maybe it would be a good thing to not have them send referrals. All those are good things to think about. Every time I get ready to tell, because I want to support the bookkeeper that has to do it. And she feels, it makes her feel less confident and confident, even though it's nothing to do with her. And that's a real thing because I come across that with lots of bookkeepers that are starting their businesses. They do. They feel like they are doing something wrong or they don't know something because they haven't actually been provided the whole picture and all the information that they need to be able to do their job. It's kind of like if, if you took accounting classes At least I know mine were like this. You'd get these scenarios of like the business was open with, you know, 50, 000 contributed in cash for this much stock and they have this loan and that, that, that, that, uh, and there was always a missing piece of information. And there was also extra information that you didn't need and just to throw you off. And that's what this was preparing us for is to figure out what do we need and what are we missing still that we're going to need to complete this and to learn not to To take it as, you know, something personal that you're doing wrong. But that is a big thing of like, do I actually not know this? Or am I missing information? And the work is only going to be so as complete as the information that they give us. And we can only do as best we can about asking for the right information. So that's 1 of the things that I. do teach in my program is what information are you going to need and should you be asking for so that you are armed with this and can build your confidence. So I think it would be very good for you to have your team at least go through like the diagnostic review lessons because That's going to help them really understand the balance sheet. And then when something does show up on the balance sheet, they know I need information for this. And then they can refer to the cheat sheet of like, what type of information do I need from this account? So yeah, that would be a great, one of the great lessons to put them through. well, did I answer all of your questions? Do you have anything left? Do we have a few more minutes if you have any other So I think that having the information about being able to share with my bookkeepers is valuable. I have had a CPA as a member of my team, but was difficult to get time with her because she had a full time job. Is there do you have any advice on how I find someone that knows zero that is a CPA? So this is where I think my opinion kind of differs from, so we're small businesses and sometimes If you have the budget for it, you're going to pay more for someone who already has experience in various softwares. That's just how it goes. But there are programs and things that you could buy and put your team through as training and then you have a bigger pool of people that if they're willing and able to learn a new system. And open to it It might be more worth it to just get a training and or have them go through the certification as part of their employment. Like, this is your goal. I want you to get through the 0 certification by your 90 day. And then you are, you know, good to go. If all the other performance things are in Yeah, Like, you can make that a requirement and so I would suggest doing that and making it part of your interview process to really understand how hungry people are for learning. you can ask questions about like, how they feel about their expertise and like, is there any areas where they would like to build skills? And if someone is not open to learning, they're going to be like, no, I'm pretty happy with where I'm at. You know what I mean? Um, so that's a big one for us. And also like part of our hiring process, we give it. Kind of a skills assessment I basically give them some financial statements that have mistakes on them and tell them there's mistakes on here. I can't remember if we told them how many mistakes there are but really, it's more to gauge. Number one, if they're able to find the mistakes, but then number two, if they're not able to find all the mistakes or just as kind of part of the interview process, the candidates that have been most successful with us are the ones that maybe didn't get everything perfectly, but when they got on the interview with me, they were very interested to know what the other mistakes were and if they got them all right and how, they had other questions about the financial statements that weren't necessarily mistakes, but things that a curious mind would want to know. So I use these things as gaining. Information that isn't explicit, if that makes sense, like just kind of how they handle the process is really all we want to know. I don't care if they don't get any of the questions, right? It's just gauging where they are in their skill level. So how much mentoring do I need to do? Because if they are the right personality, if they're hungry to learn, if they're curious, If they have the same values as us, I would rather hire that person and mentor them and teach them the skills because I am a very strong believer that these skills can be learned if you have the right like, strategic mindset, basically, like, and attention to detail. You have other qualities that are very good for bookkeeping, but you may not have any background in it doesn't mean that you can't learn it. Well, I'd be interested to see where in the tools that I purchased from you already are the inputs about about hiring and the and things that you Yeah, so I think there's some stuff in Elevate, but I am also kind of revamping that program and, and adding a little bit to it. But I will also say that my hiring process is very strongly based off of two books. And I will link them in the show notes. Number one is Beg Him to Work for You by Dr. Angela Lauria. and so that's how I handle kind of the interview recruiting process. And then the other piece of it is, is fostering, a hardworking team and, and all that kind of stuff is called, teamwork by Natalie Dawson. So those two books combined are really what have. formed the way that we recruit. We've added our own special tweaks to it. Obviously, I had to develop my own assessment but that idea came from beg him to work for you and then we run our team meetings and are like, 1 on 1s and things like that, based off of information in, teamwork. So those 2 books will get you what you need. do. Cool. I love that. yes, all all right. Well, thank you so much for being willing to be vulnerable and share your roadblocks and questions on the podcast. This is going to be very valuable one for our listeners. So if you're listening and you got some value from this, please leave a review on the podcast five stars, preferably, but honestly, just leave a review. Tell me what you liked about the episode share it on social media if you'd like and We will talk to you soon, but first, if someone wants to connect with you, Becky, where should they do that? you should email me, or they can go to my W dot N. G. A. N. J. E. P. Awesome. And we will also link those in the show notes. All right. Thank you so much. And we'll talk to you soon.

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