Day 4 of the 6 Secrets: Building a Business That Actually Supports Your Life
Jun 19, 2023
Welcome back to the Six Secrets to Starting a Simple, Scalable Bookkeeping Business. Today, instead of showcasing Become A Bookkeeper, we're going to be showcasing Life By The Books.
Life By The Books focuses on building a business that actually supports your life, so we'll be discussing what it means to succeed through your business so that you can support your dream lifestyle.
We'll map out the keys to actually making this dream a reality through your bookkeeping business, and we'll take a look at behind the scenes of LIBBY, how this program differs from Become A Bookkeeper, and how to decide which one will be right for you.
Reminder, this isn't just another online marketing scheme. You have plenty of time to decide, and you have access to lots of resources to help you make your decision. So let’s jump into what you can expect from LIBBY.
Building a Life-Honoring Business
So, what does it mean to succeed through your business?
When we talked about these six secrets on Day One of the event, Secret Three was about having a clear vision. We talked about this quote: “When you build a business in a way that dishonors your life, you build a business that dishonors your life.”
Life By The Books is the program designed to help you build a business around prioritizing your life starting today, instead of hoping to reach elusive success and get your life back…if and when that happens.
This is not about booking out your business to make a buck. It's about having a life supported by your bookkeeping business. Hence the name Life By The Books.
It's relishing instead of hustling. It's inviting ease instead of chasing complexity. It's not just about making money and chasing dollars.
The work will always be there, but having a clear idea of what you want out of life first makes you work smarter.
For me, having a business that actually supports my life means having the space to do the things that matter. When I was first building my business and my little ones were still babies, it meant limiting the hours I worked to minimize time away from my kids.
That way, I could be the one to play with them, take care of them, give them baths, tuck them in at night, and tend to them if they were sick without having to ask permission or check in with anyone first.
These days, it means making breakfast and packing lunches and tying shoes. Back in the day, I would've already been sitting in a cubicle instead of being the one to drop them off each morning and beginning my workday around 11:00 AM, if that. It means time-blocking yoga and Pilates on my calendar and working or taking calls once I'm showered and fed. It means batching my work and still delivering high quality because of my systems and the team I've got in place. And it means shutting the laptop around 3:30 PM to be back in the pickup line, followed by sitting in the grass at soccer or gymnastics when I would otherwise still be stuck in traffic trying to get home.
It also means being the caretaker of my third-born child, who is still home with me three days out of the week, and working when she naps on those days.
It means clearing my summer calendar of marketing efforts and sales calls and focusing only on the work we've already acquired without the need for childcare or camps, because the work can get done around being fully present for the eighteen summers that I'll get with my small kids. It's working from anywhere, taking vacations when I want, packing up the laptop and doing what I need after I tuck them in while hiking in the mountains during the day. It's volunteering, or it's brunch and bookkeeping where I bring my laptop, grab a mimosa, and order lunch at my favorite brunch spots, because why not?
It's knowing that as my kids grow, I'll be there for whatever I want to be there for without caps. It's knowing I want my little ones to stay here where I've raised them, but also knowing if all three move away, I can be a nomadic grandma and always have the ability to travel and see them as much as I want and as much as they'll have me.
That's my vision. What's yours?
I encourage you to get out a sheet of paper and go to that place. Feel free to flow with your desires and remove reality from your thought process. When you get really clear on what this means for you, you can then intentionally build your business for that vision. And the six secrets to starting a simple, scalable bookkeeping business are your pillars—your roadmap—to making this dream a reality.
Recap
Here's a quick recap of the six secrets to become a bookkeeper with a thriving business:
Secret one to become a bookkeeper is having a rock-solid skillset, because the best marketing strategy is being really good at what you do. When you have that confidence, you can show up better to attract, sign, and serve your clients, regardless of your educational background or experience.
(Whether you are an aspiring bookkeeper or a current one, if you lack confidence in your technical skills, then Become A Bookkeeper is your starting point. It’s the foundation of everything else you'll do when growing your bookkeeping business and achieving the freedom that you desire. The rest of these secrets are all aligned with my other program, Life By The Books, or what I affectionately call LIBBY.)
Secret two is having a scalable offer, one that can grow your income without taking a proportionate amount of your time away from the life that you want.
Secret three, which we just talked about, is having a clear vision—not just for your business, but specifically for what you want out of your life so that your business can serve that vision.
Secret four is having a client attraction strategy, which is often much simpler than we make it out to be.
Secret five is a feel-good sales process, which is largely about detaching from the outcome, taking your ego out of the process, and simply having conversations that honor both you and the potential client backed by intentional, streamlined systems that save you and your client both time.
Secret six is a solid support system. This may include a team, but it's more than that. This can also mean community, mentors, and more. A true support system lifts you up, shares ideas, celebrates, encourages, validates, gives grace, and more.
What LIBBY Has to Offer
If you can’t become a bookkeeper yet because you need to solidify a rock-solid skillset, then Become A Bookkeeper is the program to help you with that. But if you need to focus on any of the other secrets, here’s how LIBBY can help.
Where Become A Bookkeeper gives you the technical skills and foundation you need to actually become a bookkeeper that is confident and capable, LIBBY will help you take those skills and use them to become a bookkeeper with a business that serves your life.
This program, which is a month-to-month coaching membership with a course component, will decondition the high-achieving employee in you and reprogram you to become a bookkeeper who is highly compensated for work you are truly passionate about while experiencing a life you love.
I asked LIBBY students if they were able to achieve their learning objectives after taking the program. They had the option to respond either “Yes I Did”, “Not yet, but I feel equipped to do this later”, and “I still don't know how to do this.”
When asked if they were able to design their ideal life in business, 50% said that they’d already done it, and 50% said “Not yet, but I feel equipped.”
When asked if they were able to establish the legal and operational foundations for their business, 88% said that they were, and 13% said “Not yet, but I feel equipped.” (Apparently it rounds a little weird…or maybe my students are just overachievers and want to give 101%)
When asked if they were marketing their skills and expertise within their community, 81% said they were, and 19% said “Not yet, but I feel equipped.”
When asked if they were able to sell more confidently and start booking ideal clients, 63% said they were, and 38% said “Not yet, but I feel equipped.”
When asked if they were able to optimize and personalize the way that they work for quality and efficiency, 69% said that they were, and 31% said “Not yet, but I feel equipped.”
And lastly, when asked if they were able to clarify what they were looking for in a potential team and begin the hiring process, 38% said that they were, and 63% said “Not yet, but I feel equipped.”
What I want to highlight here is that to date, nobody responded that they still didn't feel equipped to become a bookkeeper and complete their learning objectives after taking this course. And even when they say not yet, but they feel equipped, it’s just after they complete the course component. So it’s about “Did you do it, or do you feel ready to?”
So even those who haven’t done it yet are ready to do it—they just haven’t for whatever reason. It’s only a matter of time.
The Components of LIBBY
Now I’m going to walk you through the components of LIBBY, which were intentionally designed to help you implement what you've learned in Become a Bookkeeper and grow your business well.
Since the program is created for busy people to maximize their efforts, I make sure everything is as accessible and self-paced as possible while still giving you time to connect both with me and others.
There's a well-designed course component that walks you through the “Six S” framework that LIBBY is built upon.
I call that portion the course portion, and it contains the strategies and systems that will help you grow. It’s 24 hours of audio content, so it allows you to quickly get up to speed on what we've set out to do here so that we're all on the same page.
Then we come into the portion where we actually support you through the implementation, where you’re adapting and continuing to grow the components that are included in this membership so that you not only know what to do, but you're guided through how to do it in a way that works for the blend of who you are as a person, what your goals are, and the resources currently available to you, which could be time, money, or connections.
So you have the course, and the course resources that you get immediately are resources you maintain for life. They never expire or cut off your access. You not only get the course piece of Life By The Books, which by itself is worth more than your first payment many times over, but you also get guides, checklists, prompts, and systems to implement the Six S approach in Life By The Books.
You’ll also get a companion digital workbook that's clickable and functions much like a companion guide for this Six Secrets event, only it's much more robust and will help you implement what you learn inside of the course. A print copy is not included, but you can still purchase a double-sided color copy that's spiral-bound from my Etsy shop for a fraction of the price that it would be to print at FedEx.
These are the components that you keep for the lifetime of the program, whether you continue to stay active in the membership or not.
Everything I talk about from here on out is what you get with your monthly membership, so upon cancellation of your membership, these are the things that you would lose access to.
The first components are community and access. We have a Circle community for seeing other members and their bios and seeing where everyone is in the world and what they focus on. We stay organized with threads that we want to be able to search and refer back to, because we have plenty of very good conversations we want to have access to.
It also helps us organize our events, so you always know what's coming up next.
Besides Circle, we also have Voxer channels. We have an active group channel for more conversational matters and hype. It’s optional, because it’s more community-based and conversational, but a lot of people love it.
This group is active. If you're into that, you'll be very happy. If you're not into that, it's okay, because you can opt out of this portion of it. It's just something people wanted, and we're having a lot of fun with it at the moment.
There’s also a broadcast channel that allows me to directly share tips with you or announcements to the whole group without it getting buried in the active chat, and then you also have direct access to me for private matters.
The next two components serve to offer deeper coaching, so beyond what we could do while popping in at different times in Voxer, we have a once a month live coaching call to help you get inspired and align your action to what you know you need to do, but for some reason are either still stalling on or you're stressing on, or you feel like it's not working.
Calls happen live once a month on Zoom with the whole group, and they last 90 to 120 minutes, depending on when we feel complete. And if you miss the live call, you will be able to listen to the replay.
The last component is the technical support. You are expected to have solid technical skills before joining this program (join Become A Bookkeeper if you aren’t confident with this piece!), but that doesn't mean that things won't pop up where you need help. In fact, they're absolutely going to. So each month, we have a 90-minute call focused on your specific technical issues. I call these Tech Talks.
When we hold these sessions, not only can you come live, but we're also building out a Tech Talk vault as we go so that you can find answers to technical questions that were already asked on demand by topic, meaning you can refer back to the issue that you are having and be guided through it rather than waiting for the next call, because it was already answered.
Again, these calls contain some of the biggest value by themselves, and they were added on at no extra cost to LIBBY members. You can also add just the Tech Talks as a supplement to Become A Bookkeeper, if you like.
LIBBY FAQ
Is LIBBY for aspiring bookkeepers, or would LIBBY be for me if I’ve already become a bookkeeper and built a business?
The answer is both. If you’ve already become a bookkeeper and you already have clients, you'll learn how to make the most of what you've got, navigate client relations, grow a team, attract more of the clients that you love, increase your prices, and more.
If you don't have any clients yet, but you feel that you have the skills ready to start taking them on, then this course will be your guide to help you find and convert your first clients in an aligned way that feels good and matches your vision for your life.
How long does it take to get through the program?
Like I said, the course component is 24 hours of audio, but everyone goes at their own pace. This is a month-to-month coaching and community opportunity. Inside LIBBY, time is not the focus, which is why the offer is perpetual and also non-committal.
The first month is not optional, but you can cancel the monthly membership at any time starting as soon as your first month. You're also welcome to rejoin at any time, and upon rejoining, you will not have to purchase the whole program again. You'll just be joining at the monthly rate.
However, the membership cost is subject to increase, and when you rejoin, it will be at that current pricing. If you stay active, whatever your price is, will be your price as long as you continue to stay active, even as prices increase.
What if I need Become A Bookkeeper now, but I still want to join LIBBY later?
LIBBY is always enrolling and ready when you are. If you know that you want both Become A Bookkeeper and LIBBY, I recommend getting Become A Bookkeeper today, focusing on completing it, and then joining us inside of LIBBY.
I'm not a CPA. Will this prevent me from succeeding?
I get this question a lot. The answer is no. You can make your clientele and your services fit your skillset.
Your confidence speaks louder than your credentials, and you'll be guided to embracing your value in this program. It’ll be even easier if you go through Become a Bookkeeper first!
I'm not located in the US. Can this program work for me?
While the majority of the members are in the US and the program is US-centric, meaning if we're talking about tax, we're talking about US tax, every other portion of this program is translatable to any other country, especially if you're talking about designing your life, how to find clients, how to sign clients, how to serve clients, how to grow a team, etc.
I'm currently working a nine-to-five. Can I juggle both?
The answer, again, is yes! This program will help you to be strategic and supported on your journey so that you actually succeed rather than burn out or stay stuck in overwhelm. At least half of the students who have gone through this program have done so while working corporate, and many have used their success in the program as their ticket out.
Join Become a Bookkeeper or LIBBY now!
This concludes the Six Secrets Series. Whether Become A Bookkeeper or LIBBY is the place for you, you can join RIGHT NOW without worrying about waiting on enrollment to open! The links will be waiting for you below. I can’t wait to see you there.
EPISODE RESOURCES:
If you're looking for more tips for bookkeeping, insight on how to become a bookkeeper, and how to say hello to a more confident business model, enroll in Become A Bookkeeper (BABs).
To learn about the programs and get a peek behind the curtain, head to www.katieferro.com/6-secrets.
Learn how to take your bookkeeping skills and turn them into a business that allows you to replace (or surpass) your corporate salary, be present for your life, and profoundly impact your clients without selling your life in the process by joining Life by the Books (LIBBY).
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Website: https://www.katieferro.com/
