Shifting from a One-Person Operation to a Team of 5

I cannot believe I have been in business for almost TWO years. It's been a wild a crazy journey and to say it's been easy would be a lie. But I finally feel like I am not in the weeds of just starting my business. Instead we have now grown into a team of 5 people, plus myself, and I truly couldn't be where I am at without my incredible team. 

In early 2020, I had this vision. A vision to provide small business owners with quality bookkeeping services that would empower them to grow their businesses and achieve the goals and dreams they had. Both in personal and business.

I had no idea what the steps were, but I knew it was possible. I invested in Katie Ferro's course, Life by the Books (aka LIBBY), that taught me how to build a part-time, profitable bookkeeping business. This course is for those who are confident in their bookkeeping skills but need support in the business side of things. Become a Bookkeeper (aka BABS) is her course that teaches you all about how to be a bookkeeper. Both I highly recommend!

Okay back to the team. When I first started, I was a one person show, as many are. But I quickly reached capacity. At the time, I had a one year old girl and was pregnant so I was maxed out in all areas. I remembering Katie telling me to hire, hire, hire because she saw what was coming.

I was so caught up with the mindset of "No one could do this the way I could." It was really a pride issue of me thinking I was the only one with those skills. Once I overcame those thoughts and realized I could let go of things and serve my clients better, the options were endless. More people on my team meant more eyes on the books, which meant the quality is higher and reports are sent out quicker. All resulting in serving our clients better.

As I continued to bring on more and more clients and my first two bookkeepers began to hit their cap. I didn't want to grow so fast that I couldn't give my clients quality service and not maintain a personal relationship with them all. Insert SOP's and my best friends, ClickUp and Slack!

With my business growing so fast, I knew I needed to take a step back and work on behind the scenes stuff. If you have a team I highly recommend ClickUp and Slack to manage it all. It helps keep me sane. We have processes for EVERY SINGLE THING so nothing get's missed. We also have a team Slack workspace that has specific channels based on different divisions of our company.

If you want me to go more in detail on how we have things set up, feel free to DM me on IG!

The biggest thing for me was to continue to provide QUALITY service EFFICIENTLY to give our clients a CLEAR and SIMPLE picture of their finances. And I would say I am pretty d*** proud of the our systems.

Another thing I worked hard on at the beginning of this year was our org chart of our team. This will continue to grow and change as we evolve, but I'm always able to refer back to that when I am assigning project to team members.

We are now a team of 6. Three assistant bookkeepers, admin assistant, marketing director and of course, me! By growing my team and putting systems in place, I have freed up some of my personal time that I am now putting to creating a whole new division of my company that will support those who are in their beginning stages of their business so stay tuned. 😉