"Absolutely Worth The Investment"
Teresa Slack shares how Pure Bookkeeping, its systems and HR content helped her business achieve incredible results.
63%
Increase in Business
100%
Confidence In Hiring Staff
100%
Increase In Happiness
Background
Teresa is a co-founder of Financly with her sister, Connie Smith and a few years after starting their business they nearly quit.
"We did not have any of our policies and procedures written down. We didn't have systems and policies in place. Things actually got fairly bad for us."
Journey
Financly grew quickly. Teresa and Connie went to networking events. They partnered with Intuit, Canada to put on some seminars for female entrepreneurs about financial literacy and the business started to roll in and they grew from 5 to 10 to 20 to 30 bookkeeping clients. They had over a hundred tax clients and about 30 or 40 consulting and training clients. At that point, they thought they needed to hire because they couldn't manage all of the work.
So they hired three part-time staff and they thought they were set up for success and continued growth. But, what they learned really quickly was that they made a lot of mistakes. They hired the wrong people. At that point, they didn't even have any policies, procedures and processes written down.
Both Teresa and Connie had over 30 years of experience, but to try and get that information out of their heads and into a format where their team could learn it and understand what needed to be done and how to take excellent care of their clients and how to really perform high quality bookkeeping work, that was hard.
Teresa and Connie were struggling. Their clients were getting upset. They were losing clients. The team was really having a hard time and it came to the point where they were not getting paid. There was no income left for us because they also didn't really understand the value of the work they provided and they didn't have the skills to communicate the value of their work.
So on 2 fronts, they were having a lot of problems. Their pricing was wrong, so they weren't making enough revenue. They had hired the wrong people. They were paying them the wrong way and it got bad. It came to the point where Teresa and Connie asked themselves, "Do we just shut this down? Go get jobs?"
Solution
Teresa and Connie decided to give it one more try.
There were two really important things they did to turn their business around.
One was the Pure Bookkeeping System and the other was they hired a coach to help them understand their value and how to price their services better.
Those two things set them on the path to where they are today.
In regards to Pure Bookkeeping, they attended a session. It was called the 7 Secrets of Growing Your Bookkeeping Business and Michael Palmer presented the PBS. And to Teresa, she thought, "I don't know the birds were singing because it had everything we needed."
According to Teresa, the PBS had all the procedures, policies, the step-by-step, how-tos and both she and Connie thought, "Wow. We don't have to take all the time that it's going to take us to try and create our own procedures. As entrepreneurs, we can do it all. We can write our own procedures. We can come up with all of our own policies.
Absolutely. We can. But there's only eight hours in a day, and there's only so much time available in between taking care of our clients and trying to teach and train our staff and trying to continue to build and grow a business." They were struggling and Pure Bookkeeping had the answer because it came with all of those high quality bookkeeping processes that ensured that their team was providing their clients with the best quality work. They were able to use the Pure Bookkeeping System that included checklists, how to literally step-by-step file a Canadian sales tax return, how to manage AR, how to manage AP, how to properly set up and organize your business systems and policies.
Teresa mentioned, "It has a module on sales and marketing to help you build and grow your business and has a full HR module. Which really, really helped us. So when we were at that breaking point, when we made those two choices, what we did do is we let our staff go. We recognized that they were not the right team for us. And we took a step back. We rebuild our relationships with our clients. We then started to move forward again. But this time, we did it with the Pure Bookkeeping System. Now we're a team of 12 and growing even more all the time. All of our team is working virtually, but because of the Pure Bookkeeping System, all of our staff have the checklist step-by-step, how to do the work in the way that we want it done so that we know that every one of our clients is getting top quality bookkeeping that they can trust and that they can count on and that they can believe in. "You know, our clients will reach out to us and say, 'I can't tell you how much better I feel I'm sleeping better at night.'"
Teresa adds, "Here we are. Three years later, and our business has dramatically changed. We work with different clients. We work with better paying clients. Um, we have an incredible team of highly. Skilled professional bookkeepers that provide our clients with top quality. Our revenue has quadrupled in those three years. The growth has been amazing. And I honestly have to say, I don't know that we could have done it without the PBS and the support and the guidance that we get from being a licensee of the Pure Bookkeeping System. So, if you ask me if Pure Bookkeeping is worth the investment. I will say absolutely it is worth the investment. It will pay back a hundred fold in your business if you take the time to implement it and use the systems."
Processes & Systems Implemented
Our growth has been amazing. And I honestly have to say, I don't know that we could have done it without the Pure Bookkeeping System and the support and the guidance that we get from being a licensee of the Pure Bookkeeping System. So, if you ask me if Pure Bookkeeping is worth the investment. I will say absolutely it is worth the investment.
Teresa Slack & Connie Smith, Co-Founders, Financly
Results
Since becoming PB licensees in May 2018
Sales growth
May 2018-May 2019 - 45% increase in sales and 192% increase in Net Profit
( we made significant changes to how we ran our business over the previous year)
May 2019 - May 2020 - 42% increase in sales and 32% decrease in Net profit
( we started to significantly grow our team and invested in our business processes)
May 2020 - May 2021 - 84% Increase in sales and 10% increase in Net Profit
( Covid was actually good for our business due to e-commerce specialty)
Staffing:
May 2018 - 3 staff members before starting with Pure Bookkeeping...all the wrong fit!
May 2019 - we have revamped our business, fired the staff, and started to rebuild our relationships and systems with our clients - No staff other than Connie and I.
May 2020 - we had 6 team members all part-time contractors
May 2021 - We have 5 full-time team members and 5 part-time contractors
The team we have now was all hired using the PB Hiring System and that has allowed us to find the right team members with the right skills who are committed to being a part of Financly. I am 100% more confident in my new hires using the PB Hiring System
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