Hiring a Bookkeeper with Greg Higdon | FP 110

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A photo of Greg Higdon is captured. Greg Higdon is the Founder of Grow the Books, a bookkeeping company for small businesses. Greg is featured on Faith in Practice, a therapist podcast.

As the business owner, do you run all your own numbers? Are you considering hiring a bookkeeper to handle your financial progress? At what point in your business journey should you hire a bookkeeper?

In this podcast episode, Whitney Owens speaks about Hiring a Bookkeeper with Greg Higdon.

Podcast Sponsor: Brighter Vision

An image of Brighter Vision Web Solutions is featured as the sponsor on The Practice of the Practice Podcast, a therapist podcast. Brighter Vision builds all in one websites for therapists.

It’s Brighter Vision’s biggest sale of the season!

With the holiday season in full swing and the new year right around the corner now is the perfect opportunity to think critically about your future marketing initiatives and consider what improvements can be made to ensure you’re attracting the clients you need to grow your practice.

If you find yourself in need of a professional website that’s properly optimized to rank well in online searches and targeted to speak to your ideal client, Brighter Vision would love to help.

Best of all, as a Faith in Practice listener, you can get your first month completely free.

So, if you’re ready to get started or just want to learn more about how Brighter Vision can help you grow your practice, head on over to brightervision.com/joe

Meet Greg Higdon

A photo of Greg Higdon is captured. Greg Higdon is the Founder of Grow the Books, a bookkeeping company for small businesses. Greg is featured on Faith in Practice, a therapist podcast.

Greg Higdon is the Founder of Grow the Books, a bookkeeping company for small businesses. With over 13 years of experience in education, he teaches his clients so they are empowered and armed with a clearer understanding of what their numbers mean for their business decisions.

When he isn’t balancing books and helping clients you can find him roasting coffee and making wood-fired pizza.

Visit Grow the Books‘ website.

Connect with them on Facebook and Instagram.

In This Podcast

  • What does a bookkeeper do?
  • Why hire a bookkeeper?
  • When should you start bookkeeping?
  • Greg’s advice to Christian counselors

What does a bookkeeper do?

Our business uses QuickBooks online and what that does … is take your business bank account and pool in all the business transactions that you have, all the deposits and expenses … what we do as bookkeepers is we take all of that information and categorize each transaction. (Greg Higdon)

Bookkeepers sort and work through each transaction, organizing all the financial information into QuickBooks so that the business owner receives an easy-to-read profit and loss statement.

This statement clearly shows the influx and outflow of money, outlining the profit and expenses of the business succinctly.

Every month the bookkeepers will send the business owners their company’s profit and loss statements so that they have a firm grasp on their financial status and the progression of the business.

Why hire a bookkeeper?

Some people only tally up their finances at the end of the year, expecting to save money on hiring financial assistants, and try to organize everything on their own.

However, you can lose track of your money throughout the year and end up losing more profits. Some benefits of hiring bookkeepers include:

  • Saving you time, and ultimately money: they perform the financial jobs so that when tax time comes around you do not have to spend 10 to 15 hours organizing your finances.
  • Bookkeepers keep things organized: they will manage the ins and outs of your money and notify you of any changes so that you can focus on the business.

When should you start bookkeeping?

I think it’s really important to make sure that your business is set up correctly and to begin the bookkeeping right from the beginning. (Greg Higdon)

Start tracking your expenses and profits at the beginning of launching your business to save both time and money.

Don’t plug everything into a spreadsheet and have to switch over later on. Invest in software or financial services that can do it well from the beginning for you.

If you only have a little amount of financial bandwidth at the beginning of your business and cannot afford a bookkeeper service, consider getting some training to use a service such as QuickBooks by yourself.

Greg’s advice to Christian counselors

You need to make money in your business. Have good goals to make healthcare affordable, but in order to serve the community, you need to bring in enough profit to keep your business afloat.

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Check out these additional resources:

Meet Whitney Owens

Photo of Christian therapist Whitney Owens. Whitney helps other christian counselors grow faith based private practices!Whitney is a licensed professional counselor and owns a growing group practice in Savannah, Georgia. Along with a wealth of experience managing a practice, she also has an extensive history working in a variety of clinical and religious settings, allowing her to specialize in consulting for faith-based practices and those wanting to connect with religious organizations.

Knowing the pains and difficulties surrounding building a private practice, she started this podcast to help clinicians start, grow, and scale a faith-based practice. She has learned how to start and grow a successful practice that adheres to her own faith and values. And as a private practice consultant, she has helped many clinicians do the same.

Visit her website and listen to her podcast here. Connect on Instagram or join the Faith in Practice Facebook group. Email her at [email protected]

Thanks For Listening!

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Faith in Practice is part of the Practice of the Practice Podcast Network, a network of podcasts that are changing the world. To hear other podcasts like Empowered and Unapologetic, Bomb Mom, Imperfect Thriving, Marketing a Practice or Beta Male Revolution, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network.

Podcast Transcription

[WHITNEY OWENS]
Welcome to the Faith in Practice podcast. I’m your host Whitney Owens recording live from Savannah, Georgia. I’m a licensed professional counselor, group practice owner, and private practice consultant. Each week through personal story or amazing interviews, I will help you learn how to start, grow and scale your practice from a faith-based perspective. I will show you how to have an awesome faith-based practice without being cheesy or fake. You too can have a successful practice, make lots of money, and be true to yourself.

Hello and welcome to the Faith in Practice podcast. Hope you’re doing a well today. Thanks so much for taking the time to listen and hang out with me. It means the world to me. If you haven’t already, please take a minute and give me a review on whatever podcast player you are listening to, or shoot me an email. Let me know what you love about the podcast, [email protected]. I love getting feedback from you guys. This is the reason that I do the show, is for you. So if you love an episode or maybe you don’t love an episode so much, or there’s more material you want to hear on the podcast, let me know, because that definitely influences the podcast episodes that I do.

I absolutely love having the opportunity to interview such really amazing people that I meet along the way. I’ve made some really cool connections through the podcast that lead to other things. So when I’m maybe emailing someone or introduced to somebody I’m always thinking, would this person be cool on the podcast? So through my interactions with Practice of the Practice I met Greg Higdon, who is on the show today. He is a bookkeeper. And one of the biggest questions that I get from people is should I hire a bookkeeper? Some of the other things that go along with that are, is it worth the investment and what does a bookkeeper do and what are the things I should consider when hiring a bookkeeper? So I was happy to have him come on the show and he’s going to answer all those questions for you. So if this is something that’s kind of been on your mind? Make sure that you listen. It’s a good short to the point episode that’s going to leave you happy that you listened, because you’re going to learn a lot from it.

I also wanted to talk for a few minutes about a big change that I made in my practice a few years ago that was literally game changer for me. So back in 2018 was when I hired my first clinician onto my practice. So I started my group practice January, 2018. I really didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I did have a consultant that was helping me along the way. So that made a huge difference and I decided to go with the contractor route. And that’s mainly because my consultant did contractors and I hadn’t really known anyone to do anything other than contractors. And it seemed like the easiest least risky thing to do.

So I hired a contractor in January, 2018 and then I hired another on, I believe it was March of 2018. Then when it got to the summer of that year, it was time to hire an assistant. So I was trying to hire a virtual assistant and for various reasons that didn’t work out. Then I was like, okay, well maybe I’ll hire somebody local. Let’s see how that goes. So I ended up hiring a local girl. She’s actually on episode nine, if you want to go back and listen to that, that’s Christina, so shout out to her. So I hired her and my attorney said Whitney, you really need to make her a W2 because you’re telling her exactly what to do for her job. She doesn’t work anywhere else. And then obviously it’s really a gift to some people because when they have a W2, there’s a lot more stability there and makes it easier for them not having to keep up with all those expenses and things.

So when he said, I need to make her a W2, I was just jittery scared. I can’t do this. This sounds like too big girl for me and he said, no, no, no, you can do it. So I met with my accountant and I really wanted to hire her. I went on ahead and did W2 and it worked and it was fine and the world didn’t come crashing down on me. I was like, okay, maybe I can do this W2 thing. And I was in some other groups with other clinicians. I did some masterminds at the time and we got together and we talked about W2 and the benefits and the bad parts and all the stuff in between. I was like, okay, I’m going to make this transition. So it was in November, 2018 that I hired my first W2 clinician and then I offered W2 status for my other clinicians and for various reasons, both of them left. One had gotten another job and the other one wanted to start her own practice.

I also think she wasn’t too keen on the W2 idea because when we have contractors, they have their own LLCs, their own businesses. They really, in essence, do their own practice under your umbrella of your practice name. Then with W2 S they work for you. They don’t have their own business. I felt like changing to W2s allowed me to do the things that wanted to do in my business that I really couldn’t do with contractors. There’s a lot to this, but I’m going to give you a couple of the bullet points real quick. I wanted to have a closer community, not where we were all doing our own business book, that we were all working towards the same goal. I wanted to provide a space where therapists could really do the work that they love without all the administrative headache. And even contractors they still have to keep up with their expenses, they have to do their own taxes. With employees, W2s I can do all that for them. I can provide all the administrative support I can do all the marketing.

I also loved the idea of creating a space for benefits, for PTO, for retirement. These are things that as a private practice solo person, I worried about like, how am I ever going to have money for retirement? I’m sure some of you listening feel the same way. So this way I was able to have practice where people could get everything that they need at their job, and also just enjoy the clients to get to work with. So those are some of the reasons that’s switch the W2 model and I cannot tell you enough how happy I am. There’s greater profit in the business, more comradery among the employees. They love the opportunity that they get to have benefits to really see the types of clients they want to see and the turnover has decreased as well. So it has been a good decision all around.

Alison Pidgeon who’s one of the other consultants at Practice of the Practice, when she made the transition to a W2, one of the reasons she transitioned was because of the turnover. She had contractors. She always sat at about 12 people and just every time someone would leave, she’d hire and she really couldn’t get past 12 clinicians. Once she made the transition to the W2 model now she consistently has over 20 clinicians. I feel like she’s probably more at like 24 or 25 right now. So it’s made a huge difference in her practice. So Alison and I get lots of questions about making that transition and why it’s beneficial.

So we came together and created a course, and this course will walk you through the process of transitioning from 1099 to W2. I really want to encourage you, don’t try to do it without some kind of guidance from us or from somewhere else. Do your research because there is a lot that goes into it. You’ve got to follow up with your local attorneys and your local accountant to know what the laws are in your state. But in this course, we’re going to walk you through, it’s a three-hour course and we walk you all the way through the process. So from the very beginning of why it’s beneficial, what are the difference is, here is paperwork that you need to take to your attorney and get it altered for your area.

We walk you through pay scales because one of the other biggest flaws that we see is people pay their clinicians too much and then they get on the other side of being a practice owner and they say, oh well, I’m sweating out more than I did as a solo practice owner. And I’m making less. So we don’t want you to do that. So we help you know, hey, how do you have to make this change in your pay structure so that it can help you as you bring on the extra expenses of liability insurance and taxes and those kind of things.

A lot of people say to me, how can you possibly make more money? You can. It’s a numbers game and it really is not only more money for you, but it really just seems to be more money overall, even for your clinicians. So we help you through that process of why you’re making more money and how to present this to your staff so that your 1099s understand the tree transition and they buy into it. And then we have lots of other paperwork like offer letters and job descriptions and handbooks and policy and procedure manuals and other things you need to consider.

So Alison and I have done this course a couple of times live, we ended up doing a recording and editing it so that it could be for you to purchase so that way you don’t depend on us to do it live time. It’s just available all the time. So we have a link to that in the show notes, or you go to the Practice of the Practice website and access that course. That course is $397 and it’s three hours to help you with that transition with all the paperwork that you can have access to, take to your attorney and reuse. And then if you get to the end of that course, and you want to follow up with me, maybe you have follow up questions about it, or you want me to specifically look at your pay scales, things like that, you can just shoot me an email, happy to do that for you. So if you’re thinking about making that transition, check out the course, let me know what you think.

We will go ahead and jump into the episode today. So this is Greg Higdon. I want to just read his bio here so you can get a little bit more information about him. He is the founder of Grow the Books, which is a bookkeeping company for small businesses. With over 13 years experience in education, he teaches his clients so that they can be empowered and armed with the clear understanding of what their numbers mean to their business decisions and helping clients. You can find him roasting coffee and making Woodfire pizza. I need to go to his house. Sounds like Woodfire pizza sounds really yummy. Anyway we are going to get into the episode with Greg. He does a great job. He will answer all your questions about bookkeeping. So this is episode one 10, should I hire a bookkeeper with Greg Higdon.

Today on the Faith in Practice podcast, I have a Greg Higdon. How are you doing today, Greg?
[GREG HIGDON]
Great. I’m doing very well. Thank you for having me here.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, well I appreciate you taking the time to come on and whenever I am emailing or meeting people in different places, I’m always thinking, would this be a good podcast guest? So when I knew that you were a bookkeeper, I get lots of questions about bookkeeping, so definitely wanted to have you on the show.
[GREG]
Yes, definitely.
[WHITNEY]
Well, why don’t you just start out telling the audience a little bit about yourself, where you’re from and kind of how you got into you lot of work.
[GREG]
Yes, so I’m originally from Texas, but now I live in San Diego county. SO I think throughout my life, I kind of look back and I’ve had quite a few businesses in my lifetime so far. While I was wasn’t having running my own business, I also was a teacher for 13 years at a school here in California and after 13 years I was laid off from my position. Then I looked back on all the different businesses I owned and I realized that the one thing that I really enjoyed about all the business is doing the books, the bookkeeping, the numbers. That’s the one thing I enjoy more so than trying to sell product or trying or anything else other than doing the books. So that’s what got me interested in starting a bookkeeping business.
[WHITNEY]
Great. And how long have you been doing keeping?
[GREG]
I’ve been doing bookkeeping about, I guess three years now.
[WHITNEY]
And do you have like a type of business you like to work with or do you work with all different types of businesses?
[GREG]
Yes, I would say that 80% of clients that Grow the Books are mental health practitioners and about 15% or e-commerce type businesses and 5% are kind of just other things that come along a lot of times, like spouses of mental health owner, practice owners and things like that. They have businesses and so they come along and, but mostly mental health practices is really our niche.
[WHITNEY]
I love hearing you talk about how you love numbers and I agree. I’ve always loved numbers since I was a little kid and I actually did my own books for quite some time. I’m embarrassed to tell you that I actually did a checkbook like the ledger for my first two years of private practice and then did my own taxes on TurboTax. It was terrible. I don’t know what I was thinking but, yes, QuickBooks was like the best thing that ever happened to me.
[GREG]
I totally understand that. I used to do my own taxes as well in my twenties. Back then I used to do my own taxes and a lot of that was on paper. I didn’t have QuickBooks or TurboTax. I just did it all by hand. And in some ways I don’t know why I enjoyed it, but I did. I know people probably think I’m crazy for taking that, but I do enjoy the numbers a lot.
[WHITNEY]
It’s a challenge, right? It’s like, and filling out the forms, it’s like filling in the little boxes and checking the things. There’s kind of some satisfaction that comes with that.
[GREG]
That’s exactly what I was going to say. There’s some satisfaction about just checking things off and filling things out and then double check, even double checking my own work. I’m just happy to do that.
[WHITNEY]
So with Grow the Books, is it a solo business? Do you have other people that work with you? How does that work?
[GREG]
Yes. So I currently have three employees. They’re all part-time and they mostly work in QuickBooks and on the books. Then the other part of our business that many of our clients really like are the check-in meetings. I do meet with clients usually about four times a year. We meet to go over the numbers and to make sure our clients know what they’re looking at, because I think that’s one of the biggest thing and that’s one of the things I, you know I was in education for 13 years. So part of my passion too is teaching. So I mean helping clinicians or just business owners go over the numbers, the profit and loss sheet, balance sheet, I think is very important for them to understand that. Because I don’t know how many times I’ve sent out a profit and lost statement to one of our clients and then they email me back, “I don’t know what I’m looking at, what should I be looking at here?” It’s like, “Ok, let’s go through this?”
[WHITNEY]
Most definitely. So before we got on air I was telling Greg that this is a really common question I get in consulting, what does a bookkeeper do? Should I hire one? What’s the ROI for this? So let’s run through a few of those questions. So first of all, if somebody’s listening and they’re not really sure what a bookkeeper does, could you explain what you would do for someone’s business?
[GREG]
Yes, so basically, I mean you already mentioned this earlier, but QuickBooks is online. So basically our business uses QuickBooks online and what that does is it, basically QuickBooks online takes your business bank accounts and pulls in all the business transactions that you have, all the deposits that go into your check account, all the expenses that go out of your checking account or credit card accounts for your business. Then what we do is bookkeepers we take that information and we categorize each one of those transactions. So we work our way through each transaction, categorize it, and by categorizing all these transactions, then that kind of is, QuickBooks, what it’s doing is it’s producing this profit loss statement so that you can see exactly like how much money are you making this month? Where did you spend your money this month, and things like that.

So it’s important to have a bookkeeper or at least if you’re doing your own books, that’s great and if you understand it to keep everything up to date. So we go through the books every month and we send our clients profit and loss statements and balance sheets every month. That way they’re all up to date. They can see how they did in their business the previous month. And the kind of, usually I’m asked that same question a lot of times is, why should I have a bookkeeper? Why do I need to keep up to date with my books? Why can’t I just wait till the end of the year? It’s been 15 hours doing my own books. And there’s several answers to that question. I think one of the main ones that that kind of connect sometimes with our clients is that when tax time comes around, you don’t need to spend that 10 or 15 hours doing your own books. It’s already completed for you. So you just hand over your profit and loss statement and your balance sheet to your accountant, and they’re able to file your tax returns for you.
[WHITNEY]
I’m just sitting here thinking about, I can like see myself sitting with all my receipts in front of me and how terrible it was. So I’m just like laughing, thinking about it and now I don’t have to do any of that. Okay so another question I get a lot is people that are solo owners, or maybe they just started a group practice, so how do they know if they should invest in bookkeeping? Is there like a time when you start your practice where, “Hey, when you hit amount of money or this phase, this is when you should hire a bookkeeper. What do you recommend for that?”
[GREG]
That question is a really good question there, because what happens is one, I think it’s really important to make sure your business is set up correctly and to begin the bookkeeping right in the beginning. And I think a lot times for business owners, and it’s not just mental health practices, but pretty much most business owners, I think they don’t really know what to do with the numbers. They have a certain skillset that they’re using, but it’s not numbers a lot of times. So I think it’s, so it’s very important to start in the very beginning to kind of start tracking all your expenses. And I know sometimes clinicians use a spreadsheet, start tracking all their expenses on a spreadsheet, but to be totally honest with you, I mean, it’s a lot easier to have bookkeeping software.

I know QuickBooks right now cost about $25 a month but I think it’s really worth it to have, if you think about how much time you’re spending kind of writing down, putting all your expenses into spreadsheet and creating the spreadsheet for your business. So should you hire a bookkeeper? I think a lot of times our clients, the consults I do a lot of times, I think a lot of the solo practices, they usually wait a little longer to hire a bookkeeper. I would say if you want a number, amount, I would say a lot of times it might be like around seven to 8,000 in revenue per month coming in.

They decide, “Okay, I can actually afford to pay for a bookkeeper.” But the one thing, like in the beginning of your practice, if you don’t have enough revenue coming in to kind of justify an expense like that I would say that at least get some training on QuickBooks or something like that, because we do offer training packages as well. So at least you get training and kind of get a QuickBooks account kind of set up. That way you kind of know what to do. Then we also have check in meetings throughout the year to where you can come back and then we can categorize transactions for you and kind of caught up for you. That way you’re not spending this monthly fee on a bookkeeper, when you really don’t have enough transactions to really support that.
[WHITNEY]
That’s really nice. So you kind have that middle ground where they kind of do it themselves, but then you’re able to help them a little bit. So when people ask me this question, I’m going to tell you what I say, and you can tell me what you think about it. Because I get this from group practice owners a lot. I find that group practice owners at the very beginning when they’re hiring their first people, it’s like, they feel like they’ve got to hire out for a hundred different things. I’m like, no, no, no. You haven’t brought in the money yet. Wait until these people start bringing in money and then you can delegate out more. So I say to them that if you’ve got the money and you don’t like numbers and it’s taking a lot of your time and you can see a client totally get somebody to do your bookkeeping. But if you love numbers or you really just don’t have extra money don’t spend it on a bookkeeper and not be able to pay yourself what you need to pay yourself. That’s not good either. I actually did my own books for years. I had the QuickBooks and started a group practice and I loved it because I just love looking at the numbers and now I have someone doing it, but still, just sometimes I miss it.
[GREG]
Yes. You’re totally right there. I agree with your advice there. especially for like group practices. A lot of times, what I see a lot of times is someone is, you know you’re solo practice and then you decide to start moving at that group practice. And once you hire a first employee or contractor or something like that, then you decide to hire a bookkeeper because you feel like, oh no, there’s a lot resting on my shoulders because I have this employee or contractor I need to pay now. So I see that quite often for someone to hire a bookkeeper once they move into a group practice. But yes, if your numbers justify you to hire someone and you’re still paying yourself and you’re making a profit, then I would say definitely contract out some like bookkeeping, especially if you don’t like doing it.
[BRIGHTER VISION]
It’s Brighter Vision’s biggest sale of the season. With the holiday season in full swing and the new year right around the corner, now’s the perfect opportunity to think critically about your future marketing initiatives and to consider what improvements can be made to ensure you’re attracting the clients you need to grow your practice. If you find yourself in need of a professional website, that’s properly optimized to rank well in online searches and targeted to speak to your ideal client, Brighter Vision would love to help. Best of all, as a Faith in Practice listener, you will get your first month completely free. So if you’re ready to get started or just want to learn more about how Brighter Vision can help you grow your practice, head on over to brightervision.com/joe. That’s brightervision.com/joe.
[WHITNEY]
I would love to hear kind of what return on investment you see for people when they do choose to hire a bookkeeper. Are you able to kind of help them see some pitfalls with their finances, save them money in certain ways, or do you find that people just feel so much relief and now they have more time? What are some of the benefits that make it worth the investment that we’re making?
[GREG]
I think some of those you listed. Yes, definitely. they feel a little bit relief that someone else has taken care of this. And I think, especially for like last year when there were like PPP loans and things like that a lot of our clients were thankful that their books were in order. They didn’t need to do anything to get everything organized, to get a PPP grant or something like that. But you’re right about the numbers as well. If you hand that over to someone else you’re not really looking at the numbers as much and you’re not sure like, okay, what’s happening in my business. That a lot of times that, I mean, that is why our check-in meetings are very beneficial for our clients.

We go over for all the numbers. Especially last year a lot of our clients cut back on expenses. We were able to work through different expenses that our clients no longer needed and started cutting back on the books. And a lot of our clients are very lean right now when it comes to their books because we started cutting back. I think the other benefit of hiring a bookkeeper that’ll sit down and meet with you, is to, the biggest thing I see with group practices is like how much they pay their contractors and employees. If you don’t have your books in order, then you really do not know how much you should be paying an employee or contractor.
[WHITNEY]
I’m glad you said that. And when Alison and I help people start group practices, that is the number one issue that we see, is that they pay too much and then they can’t pay themselves or I’m sweating as much as I did solo and I’m making less money and that’s so important. Are there any other big mistakes that you see across the board for practice owners that they’re making with their finances?
[GREG]
Yes, I think other than, usually the top one Is definitely like paying your employees or contractors. That’s usually the main one that we do see. The other thing is, I think the other big one, I think for therapists is paying too much for professional development and education and training. we have some clients that are on all these coaching programs paying like $3000 a month on coaching when they only have like 7,000 a month revenue coming in. So most or all of their income pretty much is going to these coaching programs. And while I do support coaches heavily and I think it’s important for you to have a business coach, I mean, I had one when I started my business to make sure I set everything up correctly, but it is possible to pay too many coaches and a lot of times some of those coaching programs are overlapping.

Some of the clients, some of my own clients that I’ve talked to about this tell me partly it comes down to kind of a lack of confidence, especially when it comes to business. Because you are really trained in being a therapist or a counselor, and then you’re not really trained in how to run a business. So you pay all these other people to give you advice on how to run a business, when sometimes you just need to take the advice that was already given and then go with it.
[WHITNEY]
500% agree with you on that even though I obviously believe in coaches too. Yes, of course then I do see some people who need to hire a coach and they could have saved the ton of money that they had. So it goes both ways. But yes, I totally agree with you. I also feel like a lot of people spend money on continuing education. Like, I’ll see therapists that want to get trained in this modality and that’s fantastic, but if you can’t get clients in the door, like you can’t do your marketing and all this other stuff, don’t waste your money on all this stuff that you’re not going to be able to make it back. So it’s kind of like that fine line there.
[GREG]
Yes, definitely. And it all comes back to really kind of knowing your numbers and having everything kind of up to date and looking at your numbers in your accounting software or if you’re using a spreadsheet to kind, because it’s really important to kind of look at your revenue that comes in every month and decide, okay, what percent of this, or how much of this can actually spend toward coaching or professional development or continuing education? And many of our clients when they first come to us, they’re not able to do that because nothing’s up to date. But once everything’s up to date and that’s really helpful to kind of just meet with us and sit down and kind of look over the numbers and say, ok, can you cut back anywhere? What about this coaching program or this education expense that you’re paying for? Do you really need this? Is it really going to help you in your practice?
[WHITNEY]
Yes, that’s so good . All right. So let’s say somebody is listening to the podcast today and they don’t have a bookkeeper and they’re thinking, “Hey, I like this guy, Greg. How can I work with him?” Can you tell people how to get in touch with you and a little bit about like the onboarding process?
[GREG]
Yes, definitely. So if you go to our website w www.growthebooks.com, there is a link there to book a free consult. So you will meet with me, I’ll sit down with you and we’ll go over kind of what’s happening in your business, kind of looking at a number of transactions going in and out of your accounts and talk about what you’re currently doing for your bookkeeping right now, and then we’ll come up with a plan from there. Then the onboarding process, our onboarding process is, I mean, it’s quite good. I hired a coach at the beginning of my business to help me with all the onboarding.

So every, everything runs pretty smoothly for that. Yes, with a bookkeeper, the few things that we’ll definitely need, is one of them is, we only work with QuickBooks online. So if you’re not on bookkeeping software, we do help you set that up. We also offer a small discount on some of the QuickBooks product as well. But if you have your own bookkeeping software, but your business is, your books are not up to date, we can also help with that in cleaning that up. So there’s just kind of different options there that we have.
[WHITNEY]
Well, you make it sound easy. I feel like, if people are listening and they’ve ever thought about hiring a bookkeeper now is a really good a time to do it and see how much it helps. And I definitely think that, even when I think about my experiences, it definitely helps me save money in the long run and just my sanity and confidence too. Well, Greg, I forgot to actually warn you about my last question that I ask on this show. So you can take a moment to consider but I ask everyone that comes on the show what do you believe every Christian counselor needs to know?
[GREG]
I think the one thing that I see, I have quite a few, quite a few clients that are Christian counselors and have large group practices. I think the one, and I’ve done quite a few consults as well. but I think the one thing that I would say is that you need to make money in your business. So sometimes I see Christian counselors that see their kind of practice as a mission, and they want to deliver affordable mental health to their community, which is wonderful. I think that’s great. However, if you are losing money every month or profiting very little, then it’s not sustainable. And you want to make sure that if you are helping the community and serving the community then that you are around for a long time.
[WHITNEY]
You said that so well. I’m so glad you said that. I totally agree again with what you just shared. Well, thank you Greg so much for coming on the show. All of the contact information will be in the show notes so that you can get in touch with grow with the books.
[GREG]
Thank you. And thank you for having me on your program today.
[WHITNEY]
Thank you again to Brighter Vision for sponsoring this podcast episode. If you want to get that special deal on your website, head on over to brightervision.com/joe.

Thank you for listening to the Faith in Practice podcast. If you love this podcast, please rate and review on iTunes or your favorite podcast player. If you liked this episode and want to know more, check out the Practice of the Practice website. Also there, you can learn more about me, options for working together, such as individual and in group consulting, or just shoot me an email, [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.