Bookkeeping for Creatives

Speaker 2: knowing that your numbers do create emotional feelings but they're not good or bad it's what you do with your numbers that's good and bad and we have to direct our numbers and be the person that's telling our numbers and our money what to

Speaker 1: do hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie you're here because you want to experience the life and business that you crave join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it the career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in laurianne coun is a bookkeeper and the owner of a virtual bookkeeping company her goal is to bridge the gap between traditional accountants and business owners she's experienced in tax accounting personal finance and business accounting she has the insight and experience to help you uplevel your business while removing the stress and burden of managing your finances thank you for joining us laurianne in your marketing for your business you say this is what I was created to do I love seeing that share with us what you do and why you believe you were created to

Speaker 2: do it yes I own a bookkeeping and financial consulting company my parents have business is growing up I saw that I really like the financial side of things so as I was starting to go through high school I was really drawn to that um I always enjoyed math and I saw the importance of understanding your finances in order to grow your business whether you have a marketing business or a products business or you have a practice whatever it is you need to understand the finances in order to grow so I saw the importance of our family business and why we needed to understand it and of course I was like oh great I'm going to go be an accountant and go be a tax accountant and do tax went down that path and found out I hated tax I did not like tax so I left my corporate job left the firm I was working for and I decided to go back and work for my parents companies and I slowly started getting side businesses that were wanting help with understanding the numbers dayt day month to month how can they grow what is what are they actually saying so I started growing on the side a little bit and then I created my company and started bringing on more team members and now it's been two and a half years and it's been such a fun journey and joy to be able to serve my clients and see them grow their businesses and support their personal lives right now I have two clients buying their dream homes and it's been such a fun thing to do to be able to support them through that process and be able to work through them to grow their business to where they can buy those homes and that has it be so

Speaker 1: gratifying for you buying a dream home is so exciting and it's great that you found a business where you can enjoy the numbers but you also have the social element with your clients and can use those other sides of your mind that

Speaker 2: you're looking to expand exactly

Speaker 1: speaking of fun you believe in making finances fun and easy for so many business owners and people managing family finances the finance part for them is not always fun in your perspective how would you recommend we look at finances and make them easy and enjoy

Speaker 2: it all stems I would say from our educational system and the way that we grow up in schools generation over generation teaches about finances that's not always the first and foremost thing in households and parents and in our Educational Systems and so we have to reframe our mind and rewire things we have to understand it might be confusing might be hard might be scary but we need to be able to educate ourselves and it takes some courage to be able to look and see what is actually happening and knowing that your numbers do create emotional feelings but they're not good or bad it's what you do with your numbers that's good and bad and we have to direct our numbers and be the person that's telling our numbers and our money what to do so we want to be in control of that you're not going to get it right away it might take years of learning and understanding your numbers and finances whether it's a business finances or personal finances but continue to grow

Speaker 1: and educate yourself you're so right and and going back to education I've had so many examples of women running law firms they'll say I went to school to be an incredible lawyer but no one taught me the business side and the financial side of running an office once you get to the point of running and owning a law firm and then parents when you look at kids parents are so busy going through the finances that it's not always taught to the Next Generation coming up as something to think about and be mindful and to your point not be afraid of and I would say even we look at our elementary school and our high school and luckily there's more states that are requiring personal finance classes in high school but I would say like you were saying with law firms you go to be a law you're go be whatever you're going to be in college and they don't have Financial classes and I would even say in accounting programs they are focused on textbook accounting and textbook tax whenever you get to the real world there's so many different things that not taught necessarily inside of these programs so it's a lot of real life experiences and going and seeking out advice and wisdom from people that specialize in areas that you might not be as good at you fill the gap between CPA and business owners and believe we should know our numbers intimately in order to scale and grow share with us

Speaker 2: how you work with your clients yeah so we provide month-to-month bookkeeping services and also CFO Services what we do is we want to make sure that our

Speaker 1: clients have a clear understanding and know how to read the reports we are giving them and make sure that they know what the next direction of their business they need to take and base their decisions off of factual numbers a lot of times people come to us and they've started their company and it's grown really quickly and they're like I don't have time to do this or I've been doing on the side and I've had maybe a bookkeeper or so but I really don't understand what's happening we want to provide that support to them make it a clear communication communication is really big for us so we'll hop on Zoom calls on Boxer we we're always talking back and forth if they have a question we want to make sure that they understand what this line item is or why their profits different in each month or every other month and then of course at the end of every month we give them their profit and loss and balance sheet and at the end of the year whenever it gets tax season that's where a lot of the support comes in to where they don't really have to do anything we just hand it over to their tax accountant and their taxes are filed and they don't have to worry about doing a whole entire years of cleanup and that sounds nice to

Speaker 2: every business owner and you have a team of people working for you can you tell us about that and then also about the

Speaker 1: courses that you offer yes so I have bookkeepers and then I have an executive assistant it has grown over the past two years I love my team we've all meshed really well together and they will help assist me on different clients accounts so each client would get ass signed a bookkeeper and then they would do the back in and then I'm mostly client facing I have a digital product shop so

Speaker 1: and it's all on Google Sheets so that's what I currently offer and then I will be coming out with a course for learning how to manage your own business finances

Speaker 2: and I love that you said you love your team what do you think are the most important aspects in leadership and and growing a team especially as you're

Speaker 1: scaling yeah humility and always being able to learn and know that your team is there to support you and they are helping you in your business and you are the one that is ultimately responsible for things anytime something goes wrong there's a miscommunication it comes back to you as a leader and you need to change and adjust and shift that's one thing that I've learned there's different things that haven't worked well as we continue to grow our team and we are continually changing and adjusting and I'm changing and growing as a leader but it would come back down

Speaker 2: to humility not being too prideful yeah I love that you say that because we always have room for growth oh yeah 100% what do you believe is the most important element in growing a

Speaker 1: sustainable company culture communication whether it's communication internally or it's communication with your clients or people you're serving without communication it's going to be very difficult you're going to come up with a lot of problems and a lot of struggles and I would say that internally too you need to have a good communication system especially whenever you are digital and online my whole team I do have two people local to me but the rest of us are all over the East Coast we try to have weekly team check-ins we are always communicating back and forth sometimes it might seem like a little bit of overc communicating but that way nothing gets missed and we are all on the same page yeah I think we have to overc communicate a bit when we're communicating digitally and things aren't always easily explained in an email yeah so I see the over communication and also staying in communication because when you're not seeing the person it can be hard to explain things from a distance yeah and I would say if we are talking specifically to people that are in the online space and have a team virtually just being quick to hop on Zoom calls because like you said talking through email or slack there can be so many misread emotions and communication where it's just so much easier to be face to face and obviously it's still on a computer but we can see each other and it helps a lot yeah it's so true and

Speaker 2: it's so fun to build virtual teams yes I love it you are a mom who works from home with two kids under three I have been there I joke that my multitasking skills went to an entirely new level when my twins were born what advice do you have for women who manage a family

Speaker 1: and a busy lifestyle oh man I feel like I'm still continuing to learn how old

Speaker 2: are your kids now so my daughter she's

Speaker 1: three and a half and my son is one

Speaker 2: you're in it for sure yeah we're past

Speaker 1: the newborn stage but he's getting into everything it's a lot I'll never forget when I was in the bedroom with my twins and they were just starting to walk and I did all the baby proofing but I didn't do a baby proofing on a door and with twins I might be doing something with one and I don't want the other one to run down the hallway and I remember thinking oh no I need more baby proofing

Speaker 2: this is not enough yeah twin moms you guys are

Speaker 1: amazing oh thank you it's busy yeah you just got to find what works best for you everyone has different schedules they constantly changing and adjusting also knowing that getting outside help is not bad for the longest time I pushed that outside because I'm like okay I I can clean out clean my own house I can do all the things I don't need to hire a sitter I can just work during nap times or whenever they're sleeping and that just leads to burnout yeah you're exhausted even at the end of the day if if you do that yeah we're in the middle of renovating a Farmhouse and living practically at two different houses continually taking care of yourself and changing things up if something's not working it's okay to change it up we remodeled the house too and thinking back to those moments the things that I remember is I should probably have given myself a little bit more grace and also said it's not going to be the end of the world if this isn't done till tomorrow I'm going to take care of myself and then it will get done looking back there were probably things where I could have given a little bit more time to myself when my kids were younger

Speaker 2: yeah that's really good I'm an INR three so I'm always like a really high achieving needing to get everything done and crossed off my list it's a constant battle for me to just it's okay things are fine if everything's not done it's G

Speaker 1: to be okay so are many of our listeners so I know that a lot of listeners whether kids or or not can definitely relate the busier we become the harder it is to put oursel first and make sure that we get that self time whatever it is that fills us with joy it's going to look different in every season what is

Speaker 2: your me time and I haven't been doing it but for me I love running and that's something that I have been pushing aside since Liam's been born so for like a year and a half now almost it's a balance I can so relate to that cuz I was running marathons and half marathons right before the Twins were born and then it was just so hard because someone would get a cold but I had to learn that it's okay cuz I was used to those really long hourong 2hour long workouts I had to learn it's okay if I do 20 minutes you can do short 20 minutes throughout the day and different things because I had the mindset of if I don't go for a run I'm not going to get the workout that I want but I learned that I could do 20 minutes here and there and still feel so much

Speaker 1: better yeah it's really good too because even just a little bit is good and I would be the same I haven't done a marathon but I've done half marathon I want to go out and run for an hour and a half well now I couldn't go out and run for an hour hour and a half if I wanted to just little bits here in there and sometimes I schedule it into my calendar I'll put it in for 20 minutes and then in a couple hours I'll do another 20 minutes doesn't have to be you know all at one time that it was hard for me to learn that was someone that's just used to oh if if I can't get an hour in then I'm not going to do it with younger kids that was really helpful to say okay I got a really good workout in in 20 minutes yeah I should put it on my Google Calendar I always write it down to do but I never put it in like a meeting with myself if it's in my Google Calendar I will do it

Speaker 2: but yeah it might not

Speaker 1: happen yeah I love buy that thing magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one way that you make sure to find and live your joy each day

Speaker 2: being outside right now it's kind of cold and with the renovations it hasn't really happened as much but I really do enjoy being outside and getting fresh air and being outside with the kids the most seeing them explore and going out to the woods or something is always fun to see them learn about different things yeah and when we get outside we feel

Speaker 1: grounded there's something that reminds us of life brings us back to what's important please share with us how and where we can find you find me on Instagram at lauan c.co or my website lan.com

Speaker 2: thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our shiled website or at Sheed on social thank you to my editor Rich draino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave