Why a Bookkeeping Business is the BEST Opportunity for Stay-at-Home Moms

What Bookkeeping Has to Offer Stay-At-Home Moms

While bookkeeping is, in my opinion, one of the greatest businesses for anyone, it’s especially great for stay-at-home moms.

Here are the ten things bookkeeping can offer you as a stay-at-home mom:

1.     Flexible schedule
2.     Predictable recurring income
3.     No need to always chase new clients
4.     Location independence
5.     Low startup costs
6.     High demand
7.     Scalability
8.     True work-life balance
9.     No glass ceiling
10.   Complete autonomy

When you're a stay-at-home mom looking for something that can produce recurring revenue that you don't have to worry about too much, bookkeeping is the perfect choice. You're not always chasing sales, and that allows you to really live your life, which is so important as a stay-at-home mom.

Of course, there is also an element of allowing ourselves to be present and making sure that we build our business in a way that actually honors the life that we've set out to protect, but bookkeeping is the kind of business that lends itself very well to that pursuit.

Let’s expand on the reasons bookkeeping is the best business for stay-at-home moms to start.

Top 10 Reasons Bookkeeping is PERFECT For Stay-At-Home Moms

Flexible Schedule

As a stay-at-home mom with a bookkeeping business, I have always been able to adjust my schedule according to when I needed to or when I wanted to work. I'm in a season now where I can do a little bit more of “This is when I want to work” instead of “This is when I need to work,” but it wasn’t always that way.

In the early seasons of my business, you could often find me working between the hours of nine in the evening and midnight. That was when I had little babies; I would put them down by nine, and I could get some work done until midnight.

I was chronically exhausted, yes. But I really did not mind working at those hours. I had this desire to check off a to-do list before I went to bed. I've never been one of those stay-at-home moms that can wake up at five in the morning and get stuff done before the kids wake up. I prefer to go to bed with a clean slate in my mind and every item of the to-do list checked off.

Nowadays, you can find me working around my kids’ school schedule, which means that it looks different during the school year than it does during the summer. And I really enjoy being in the position to change that schedule.

Predictable Income

The next thing bookkeeping gives stay-at-home moms is predictable, recurring income. Nothing else has this in the way that bookkeeping does.

It's been a while since I've used my Ferris wheel analogy, but it’s a good one: when clients come in to my world, they do shed off, but it's very rare, especially in comparison to how many long-term clients I have.

I really grew my bookkeeping business in 2019, and I still have a solid base of those clients from 2019. I've also signed new ones since here and there, and I’ve retained them as well.

I picture this as a Ferris wheel in my head.

Let’s say you have twenty cars on your Ferris wheel, and the wheel is spinning. A client gets on, and for a bit, they’re the only one on the ride; it goes around a couple of times until you work out your systems and your sales and how all of that works. Then another client boards, and you have two cars full. It keeps going, and now they're coming in at a steadier pace, and before long, you're up to twenty cars full. And after that, it’s just about keeping the ride going.

As a stay-at-home mom, it is incredibly helpful that you can have a full rotation of clients where you're not on any sales calls, where you're not onboarding anybody, and you're just maintaining what you have put in place. And you know that month to month, you will receive your fixed fee from each of those clients. You will be doing the same basic tasks for each one. It becomes a very predictable process, including the money coming into the business.

No Need for Constant Client Pursuit

The number three reason why this is such an amazing business for stay-at-home moms is that you don't always need to chase new clients. Instead, you can go into what I call bursts of client acquisition mode.

For me, when I was pregnant with my third child, I finally realized that bookkeeping can be scalable and passive, and it doesn't always mean that each dollar I bring in is a dollar of my time, because I can hire a team and I can structure that any way I want. And you can definitely scale while still having that repeatable base of income and clients, without having to be in sales mode at all.

When I went into that burst and I was purposefully trying to get clients—client acquisition mode, I call it—I signed thirteen clients in a few months.  And after that, my goal was just to maintain what I had. I have not gone into an actual client acquisition mode since.

I have tons of ideas on how you could market, but I have not needed to, because I've maintained my base and grown my base just from the clients that I'm serving, their CPAs, people that know that this is what I do, family and friends, all word of mouth.

You don't need viral reels. You don't need to be on TikTok. If you want to be, I’m sure it won't hurt, but it's not required.

Location Independence

This one is huge for stay-at-home moms: location independence.

There’s not much to explain here, but it’s crucial to being able to live your life as flexibly as you need.

I have fully realized that my business has no location dependence. I could literally go anywhere. I could work in another country with little to no disruption in my business as long as I can access the internet, and I’m so grateful that that's my reality. And it can be your reality too, thanks to bookkeeping.

Low Startup Costs

For stay-at-home moms, low startup costs are a must. Most people wanting to start a business are looking for things without a lot of initial expense, and bookkeeping is perfect for that.

People who are looking for ways to do it better, faster, and to learn from others might have a bit more upfront cost; for instance, if you sign up for my programs, you may put up as much as five grand before you’re making income. But if you compare that to other businesses, that's very low.

There are a lot of softwares and tools that I would recommend as well, but most are very low-dollar, and some even have free versions. I just think it's worth it to pay for the things that bring you in more revenue than you're spending or buy you back more hours than you could bill, if that makes sense.

As long as you're profitable on that investment, then that investment makes sense. Especially because when you compare it to most other industries, the startup costs are very low, even if you factor in the costs of the programs.

High Demand

The next thing stay-at-home moms need from a business is a business that is in high demand.

There are people that feel like there isn't high demand for bookkeeping. And while it can feel that way in the beginning, it’s not really true; it’s just that you’re not established yet.

Maybe you have a lack of confidence that’s stopping you from seeking out or signing clients; maybe you haven’t quite figured out your process yet. But there is a high demand for accounting; as many businesses as there are, they all need an accountant. And even if only 25 percent of them have one, do you think that one-fifth of people are accountants? There's more people that need bookkeepers than there are bookkeepers!

That’s why when you get established and you build a reputation, you will have a steady stream of leads coming in.

Scalability

Next, while this one can be intimidating to stay-at-home moms, you want a business that has scalability.

Scalability is the ability to take on more income while not dishing out much more of your time or your resources to continuously profit and continuously expand, and that is possible with bookkeeping.

Even though it's a service, it's a service you can hire people out for—and yes, hiring is a skill and an art (one I can teach you in my Life by the Books program!)—but it is doable!

The scalability was really the thing that put the nail in the coffin for me when it came to going all in on my bookkeeping business, because I was chasing passive income, and I could do that with my bookkeeping business.

Work-Life Balance

The eighth reason bookkeeping is perfect for stay-at-home moms is true work-life balance. And I say that because you really can flex your schedule around your season of life as much as you want to—as much as you'll allow yourself to—especially with creative thinking or mentorship to talk through some of the challenges that you're experiencing and how you can structure it differently.

True work-life balance means you can take a vacation when you want—I have done tons of that this year without worrying about the bookkeeping schedule. It is not a concern. I'll take trips in the beginning of the month or the end of the month—I'll just flex my schedule accordingly or call on the team or communicate with my clients.

You can change in your seasons. You can be there for birthday parties. You can move your schedule around and be at anything that your kids need you to be at. You can drop anything and take care of them if they're sick; likewise, you can drop everything and take care of yourself if you're sick. Bookkeeping gives you that freedom as a stay-at-home mom, which is what we all desperately need.

No Glass Ceiling

Next, there is no glass ceiling to contend with in bookkeeping.

If you’re a stay-at-home mom in need of work, you might start considering going back to corporate life. But when you compare corporate and what those annual merit increases would be to what inflation has been in the last three years, then every year that you worked at a company, you would be losing money. Every year, your personal profit would go down. You would be spending more personally than you would be earning, and that divide would continue to grow.

That is not the goal. We want to be able to keep up in this economy, and we want to be able to be the ones who decide what our income is going to do.

We don't need to chase metrics, either. We can be happy with what is good or good enough or better than expected. It doesn't always have to be the absolute most amount that we can ever do, but I can assure you that if you do the math or if you go through my Six Secrets exercise and get my 10K-a-month calculator and start plugging in projections, you can get beyond 10K of profit in your own business just by structuring it differently.

There's so much choice. And so you are the one that decides where your ceiling is or if it exists. And that’s something that I don't take lightly, especially for women, especially for stay-at-home moms of young children.

Complete Autonomy

Last but not least, bookkeeping provides stay-at-home moms with complete autonomy.

Autonomy means that you're calling the shots; you're the one in charge. It takes some getting used to if you're coming out of a corporate environment—the bigger the corporate environment, the harder the adjustment is. But you are the one that chooses what work you take on, what clients you work with, what services you offer, when you respond, where you work, when you work, what you charge, what you do, how you structure it, how you communicate, and all of the other things that come with a business.

That’s a responsibility that you have, but it’s also a choice that you have. And there are so many scenarios where that's not the case.

How to Get Started

For all of those reasons, I find bookkeeping to be an amazing business for stay-at-home moms…and pretty much all people in general.

If you have questions on how to start or grow your bookkeeping business, the best place to go is to my free on-demand event, The Six Secrets to a Simple, Scalable Bookkeeping Business.

This event shows you the behind-the-scenes of my programs. It shares the six secrets of how I built my business with you. It gets you thinking in a way that actually achieves the goal of that simple, scalable business that supports your life, not the other way around.

And for the stay-at-home mom reading this and thinking you can’t make this work…I promise you that you can. I did it with three babies at home, and I can teach you how to do it, too.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Want a peek behind the curtain into LIBBY, my program all about what it really takes to have a simple and scalable (and successful) bookkeeping business? Get access to my free, on-demand four-part series, 6 Secrets to a Simple, Scalable Bookkeeping Business: 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).  

Need to boost your bookkeeping basics? Join BABs now: https://www.katieferro.com/become 

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