How To Start Your Own Bookkeeping Business – Recast Episode: This episode originally aired on July 14, 2016, but it’s a favorite among our Growing Your Company podcast community, so we’re bringing it back. Comment below to tell us if you’ve listened to the podcast since the original airing of this episode.
Meryl is a chartered accountant who worked in business accounting roles and as an auditor and lecturer before a friend and fellow entrepreneur playfully challenged her to redefine the future of bookkeeping. Seven days and a thousand dollars later, Bean Ninjas was born and has since gone from strength to strength. Along with Bean Ninjas, Meryl also runs her own consulting business, MCJ Consulting, where she helps implement cloud accounting in businesses that need to make the transition.
How To Start Your Own Bookkeeping Business
Meryl has worked in business accounting roles and as an auditor and lecturer. She was tired of working late nights and weekends really no matter what she did. So, she started MCJ Consulting to help meet her lifestyle needs. “The first year after starting MCJ was great,” Meryl said. “A lot of surfing and fun projects, but then I wanted to expand MCJ.”
Start Your Own Bookkeeping Business
In her line of work, she has a lot of project management type projects. For example, she would work with a company that had acquired a new payroll software and Meryl would help ensure it integrated with the rest of the financial systems and then train the rest of the staff to use it properly. So, it was difficult to find the right staff due to the varied nature of the projects she had. Meryl visits India to see if she can outsource some of the back office work. She built a small team of dedicated professionals there in India and started with a recurring revenue/subscription-based business.
She would take clients one at a time, and the onboarding consultation process could take time to get clients switched to the cloud-based tools, Xero, and other add-ons she was using. Then, she would have her back office team do the monthly reporting. But it would take several months to get clients from the onboarding stage to the point where the team processes their reports.
Meryl says that before switching to a recurring revenue approach, “Cashflow is unpredictable. It was difficult to manage the sales pipeline – finish one project and already have another one lined up and ready to go. So, from a cash flow Perspective, recurring revenue services are more predictable, and this also means more consistent work for our staff.
While MCJ is a consulting agency, Bean Ninjas is a bookkeeping business. Meryl and Ben met in an online mastermind group, not even dedicated to accountants specifically. Both of them followed the “7-day startup” movement of Dan Norris, who proposed that you can start and launch your own business in just 7 days and be successful. This attracted Meryl and Ben.
Bookkeeping Tips Archives
When Meryl started MCJ, she didn’t have a business partner and really didn’t expect to have one. Meryl’s parents ran an engineering business and one of the first business tips her father gave her was to never have a business partner. However, she was very happy to have Ben as a co-founder. They have similar dreams, skills and visions, and are far-better together.
“Ben and I had only met face-to-face once, but we had been working together for months before.”
They shared several clients and worked together on some of their projects, so they knew how well they worked together. They also took the time to have the difficult and detailed conversations ahead and signed a co-founder agreement.
Bean Ninjas launched in 2015. Although Meryl and her business partner, Ben McAdam, are accountants, they decided that bookkeeping was a repeatable process that they could train their people to do.
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In their first six months, Bean Ninjas had 15 clients, but in the next four months, they gained nearly 40 clients. In the first 10 months of operation, they gained more than one client per week. What happened in the last four months that helped their client base grow so much?
A large part of their work came through word of mouth referrals. It takes a while to build the kind of trust needed to earn recommendations like this. Most of their client work comes from online communities, which is their target market. Meryl spends quite a bit of time trying to add value to the communities. The best thing you can do when trying to build your client base is to think about how you can add value to your community.
For example, Meryl would see people in her online community asking for feedback on the new website they were building. She would visit their website, take a good look at it and give them feedback on what worked and what needed improvement from her perspective. Similarly, if someone posted their new book online and asked for reviews, she would read it and then tell them both what she loved about it and the things that could be improved.
Where does Meryl find the most valuable, vibrant communities? She says she is part of several paid communities. One is a Facebook group – Dan Norris’ 7-day startup program, and another is called the Dynamite Circle – where she met Ben. She is also a part of several Facebook pages for bookkeepers and accountants. She is not an idle participant either. She is extremely active, dedicating an hour a day just to correspond with the groups. She also started her own group focused on bringing together accountants and bookkeeping professionals.
Virtual Bookkeeper’s Academy
What’s important about these groups is that she doesn’t just join and immediately start talking about her product. She joined and took the time to build relationships. Building client bases takes time, because you have to build individual relationships first. Cold call? Door to door knocking? Cold emails? Those just didn’t work for Meryl. She just focused on building relationships, one conversation at a time.
One of the ways you can add value to your community is by providing desirable content. Meryl does this by writing articles/blog posts. Her typical process involves brainstorming and using Trello to keep a log of her blog ideas. If you are interested in content marketing, the first thing to do is to create a content strategy for what you are going to write. For Meryl, her strategy/focus is either educating others about accounting and bookkeeping or general business growth.
One of Meryl’s most successful pieces of content is the Bean Ninjas Business Report, in which they report on how well the business is performing. The report details their recurring revenue, churn rate, customer satisfaction rating, etc. The report is an honest and transparent assessment of what went well and what didn’t.
We covered a lot of great information in the podcast. If you want to dive even deeper, be sure to check out the full episode! If you want to learn more about Meryl, her company, and the 7-Day Startup, you can connect with her on LinkedIn!
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Although it will take a lot of effort when starting a bookkeeping business, once you are established, there are many benefits:
Make sure you have these seven character traits. Know your big why. Then, find a hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves bookkeeping course. One that rocks and shows you how to be a great accountant in a “paint by numbers” format.
However, there are some questions that should be swirling around your head. And you need to know the answers before you dive into the bookkeeping business pool.
What Is Bookkeeping? Definition, Types, And Best Practices
Our comprehensive bookkeeping business course, Bookkeeper Lunch, is designed to be completed in ten (10) weeks. Some students even land their first client while still on the course! I know, crazy.
While we plan Bookkeeper Launch for you to start a bookkeeping business in 10 weeks, it’s really up to you. If you can focus full time on starting your bookkeeping business, it will take much less time to launch.
Look, bookkeeping is a simple business. However, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Nothing in life that has lasting value is easy. Again, it’s a short-term sacrifice for a lifetime of benefit.
Bottom line: You can be up and running in as little as ten weeks. It’s all up to you my amigo! You control your own destiny.
Easy Steps To Start A Bookkeeping Business
And remember bookkeeping is the #1 most profitable business. This is a virtual bookkeeping business, so you will definitely need:
Beyond these three key items, here are the other startup costs you can expect when starting a bookkeeping business:
BTW… When you setup a business entity, there are several flavors. To understand what might work for you, check out this helpful post on Best Business Structure from
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