This week, I’m re-airing a solo episode where I chat about how I recommend going about starting a bookkeeping business without any experience in bookkeeping.
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Welcome back to the Ambitious Bookkeeper podcast. This is Serena Shoup, CPA, and I am here with a short and sweet, hopefully short and sweet episode. I've just returned from the Workflow Queen Breakthrough Retreat, and of course I'm like super fired up and have all these ideas in my business. I'm not really going to talk about what we talked about on the retreat other than if you have ever, felt like you'd need to be in a community of women or men or both that are really trying to level up their bookkeeping business. I highly recommend watching out for the Breakthrough Program that Alyssa is doing. So there's my little ad for you guys. This is not sponsored by her, but if you've been in my world for a while, you know that Alyssa, the Workflow Queen, is my biz bestie and I just love supporting everything she's doing. I was Super honored to be able to speak at her retreat and talked about money mindset, talked about pricing and offers, and I just got to connect with so many amazing bookkeepers and accountants, and it was just an incredible experience. So I highly encourage you to seek out something like that, if not that one, but go in person, meet other bookkeepers, talk to other bookkeepers. Get ideas, work together, co work online, on Zoom, whatever. It makes such a huge difference to have a community of people going through the same thing that you're going through or just a few steps ahead and being in the room with the people that are where you want to be. Or where you are currently heading. So that was like a big takeaway for the week. So we went to Nashville, Tennessee, which I had never been. Also, if you've been around for a while, you might know that I like, I'm a musician. So of course I was all about it. Pretty much every night we would go to dinner after we did our sessions during the day. And almost every night we were like, yeah, we're going to go home early. And then of course we didn't because we would, pop into little venues and little bars with. Live music and everyone had amazing music because all the musicians there are just incredible. It was like, just so awesome to be there in that energy and I'm not even a city person, but I really liked, really liked Nashville. I'm also kind of losing my voice. I think most of us there were losing our voices from talking so much, but I wanted to give a quick update. That's where I've been the past week. I was not really on social media. I will start to be coming back now, but my children are on fall break this week. So I will be spending a lot of time with them. So I may not be on social as much either, but I wanted to give an update about where I've been and what we were doing. And to let you guys know to keep an eye out for the next retreat and keep an eye out for Alyssa's Breakthrough Program, I will link it in the show notes as well. But what I actually really wanted to talk about today was starting a bookkeeping business with no experience. A few times a year I open up the workshops, the Bookkeeping Biz Workshops, to basically get people off the fence of wanting to start a business and on the path to starting and growing a bookkeeping business. A lot of people come from corporate. And I kind of do that on purpose because I want to bring people out of that cubicle and feeling like they don't have a purpose to doing something that they are extremely fulfilled in with the talents and the experience they already have. But there's always some people that come into those that have heard about bookkeeping and want to start a bookkeeping business, but they haven't actually. any experience, which is totally fine. It's totally fine. I appreciate that they come to those because you can still learn a ton because I don't actually teach bookkeeping in those workshops. But what happens when you come into a new space as an entrepreneur and you don't have any experience in the craft, your brain is stretched because you're trying to learn your craft. Bookkeeping or tax or whatever it is that you're deciding you want to do. And you're trying to learn how to start and grow a business. So those two things are extremely taxing. So a lot of people get really discouraged and, want to give up. or they just think they're not cut out for it. So today's episode is really just a little bit of advice for anyone in that position of being brand new, wanting to be a bookkeeper, and wanting to start a business. And my piece of advice for you today is to start Learning bookkeeping and try to work for someone else first. And I know that advice gets thrown around a lot, but it truly is important work for someone else, even if it's as a contractor. You don't have to be an employee. You can do it freelance, but to start to get that experience under your belt and start to learn how to be a good bookkeeper before you start trying to learn how to. Be a good business owner, . I see that happen a lot. I will link some recommendations below on courses that are designed for brand new no experience bookkeepers and. I truly think that you need to understand accounting, the basics, debits and credits and T accounts. Understand the balance sheet. That's what we talked about last week on the podcast. But there's some stuff you just won't learn out of a textbook until you come across it in, in real life. And so you've got to really be able to Have integrity and do the research necessary and get the help necessary. And my mission here is to elevate our profession, the bookkeeping profession, and make sure that all of our clients are served extremely well. And so that requires. out of a lot of bookkeepers and not everyone has it. So if you don't have integrity and you don't have experience, please don't do it. Just kidding. But really go work for someone else. Build your confidence before you go out on your own because it'll make it, it's already really difficult to be an entrepreneur, but to be trying to figure out. a new skill and figure out how to be an entrepreneur. That's lots and lots and lots of skills built into one, title. It's really important to, to have that experience and have someone to ask questions of and things like that. So like I said, I will link below some recommendations on brand new bookkeepers, but even with those courses and those recommendations, I still stand behind my recommendation to work for someone. Even if it's just as a contractor, a couple hours a week. All right. I hope you all have a great rest of your week. This is a really short episode, just an update with my raspy voice and I will see you on the interwebs.