Understanding Your Why - What That Does for Your Business

Over the last couple of years, I have been soul searching for why I do what I do. Going down that path has led me to learn many things about myself and ultimately what I want out of my business.

I talk to other accountants and bookkeeping professionals on a daily basis and ask them the question of “Why do you do what you do?” Most answers are “I want to help my clients have successful businesses.”

I get it. That was me - until I really understood the underlying reason. Having parents that were self-employed and seeing their pain of running a business made me want to help people as well. But the problem was, I was falling into their same pattern. Working all the time, missing family functions, always busy and not really there even if I was there.

Then I had a revelation of “What the HECK am I doing?” You are letting clients run your business, you're letting them devalue you, you are letting your family down, and so on.

Most of you will know exactly what I am talking about. You go on vacation but you aren't really on vacation. You are working from wherever you are because a client needs something LIKE YESTERDAY! Even though you are on vacation, you just do it because it is easier than saying NO. They have been avoiding you for weeks or months, but NOW it is important to them. You let it be your fire, because after all our why is to help our clients have successful businesses.

My question for you is this. Who is helping you have a successful business?”

My guess is no one is helping you, because you have put your business on the back burner for your clients' businesses. Right? That was me.

My soul searching led to a realization. My why should not be about my clients' businesses. My why should be about why I even wanted to take over my mom's bookkeeping business in the first place. I had to think back to the past and think hard about how things worked out the way they did. I had left my mom's bookkeeping business to work for a bank. Why did I not stay at the bank where it was easy hours AND easy work? I went to work and came home. Work NEVER came home with me. Why did I want to have to worry about the clients' businesses, my payroll, my bookkeeping, my marketing, my staff, deadline after deadline (and I could just keep going). Why did I do that?

It was because I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. NOT just clients' lives, but my teams' lives as well. I did not want to have to sit in a cubicle until it was time to go home. I wanted operational and financial freedom not only for myself, but also for my clients AND my team!

Did this happen when I took over this business? HECK NO! I worked 12-hour days, weekends and holidays and made less money than I did at the bank especially if you looked at the hourly pay. There were times when I didn't even get paid. What the HECK was I thinking?

As business owners, we forget the actual reason why we do things and get stuck in the black hole we call OUR business. We think that it will eventually get better. If I can just get a couple more “ideal” clients, it will be better. The issue is that it just gets worse. We have a firm full of non-ideal clients that we completely undercharge and we do not put boundaries in place. We are just putting out fire after fire.

I don’t know about you but I have spent a ton of money on education to know how to do bookkeeping, taxes, advisory and all that other fun stuff we do. So why are we pricing ourselves so cheap and letting clients dictate what and how we do it? My why was not to educate myself so I can just completely undercharge and devalue myself. Otherwise, I would never have operational and financial freedom. My team wouldn't either!

Remember my why. I didn’t want to work all the time, I wanted to travel, and I wanted to take off on a regular basis. I also figured out I absolutely HATE tax and compliance work. I love helping people build better businesses that they love so why was I doing tax and compliance work? I wanted to do advisory work.

Remember the non-ideal clients we hear about? We hear “do a client analysis and grade them and get rid of the bad ones.” Blah, blah, blah. It is REALLY HARD!! You have a team that depends on you to get paid so if you fire clients, you have less money.

But when I started looking at my why, it made me look at my clients in a different way. Look at your clients by the amount of revenue they generate month after month. Do they pay on time or do you chase them for payment? Do they send documents timely? When I looked at the ones that I only worked on yearly, they were the first to go if they would not move bookkeeping to monthly. I looked at how much I charged them all year and broke that down by month. Were they worth it? They did not help me make payroll month to month. They just gave me extra work during my busy time, and they were usually bad clients anyway. They were ones that paid late, argued about the bill, and always sent their stuff in right at tax deadline. They were the clients that just needed it for a tax return. They found no value in what we do. I then kept a running total of how much revenue I needed to generate to replace them or would just cut another expense that I didn’t need anyway.

Let’s think about this. You have someone that pays you $1,500 for a year's worth of work. That is $125 per month. Is that client worth it? Mine were not. I then moved on to the next group of clients and year after year I dwindled them down. You do not have to do it all at once. You just have to have a plan and stick with it. Key is execution of the plan.

I was also very transparent with my clients in what I was doing. There were many that got it together and started sending their information monthly and timely. They went to monthly engagements and their fees increased with no hesitation. You have to set up the boundaries. Doing this has increased team morale because the team is not having to scramble to figure out a year’s worth of work. I also now do a better job of vetting them before I even work with them. I now have a minimum to even work with us.

It is hard to fire a client. I have even had them send me sad pictures. But at the end of the day I have to remember my WHY. They all have sad stories, don’t have money, and we feel sorry for them, but you will be like that too if you do not do something with your own business. My why has led me to work on my business and completely change it. What is your WHY?