67: Coaching Takeaways: What Kim Has Taught Me

How Coaching Transformed My Business: My JourneyIn this episode, I share how my coach has been instrumental in my business growth and personal development over the past three years. I'll talk about celebrating wins, reframing setbacks, and bringing fun into work, while highlighting the tangible results of my coaching journey.

Key topics:

• The importance of having a dedicated business coach and the benefits I've seen over three years
• Three major lessons I've learned: celebrating achievements, re-framing challenges, and prioritizing fun
• The impact of coaching on my revenue growth, team development, and business scaling
• How I navigated setbacks like losing a major client and making poor hiring decisions with coaching
• Practical ways I'm incorporating fun and human connection into our remote work culture
• The role of outside perspective in pacing my business growth and maintaining company culture
• My upcoming plans, including a firm retreat and continued coaching partnership

Transcript

Welcome And On The Road

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I'm Beth Whitworth, race car driving, quilt making, CPA firm-owning, wife, mom, and boss. I'm here to help you build a business you love by sharing all of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the excellent sides of working in this industry. It's not always easy, but after many years, I can finally say it's worth it. Let me guide you on your journey to accounting with confidence. Hi, and welcome to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. As you can see, I am not in my home office at my nice desk that's cluttered, but I am out in Orlando, Florida, attending Scaly New Heights, but I wanted to jump in and keep rolling with getting episodes out. And so I had just had one planned, didn't get it recorded before I left, so I had a little time this morning and thought I would hop in and let you know what I wanted to talk about

Why I Invest In Coaching

SPEAKER_00 1:05

today. The topic for my podcast today is coaching. So I have been working with a coach for this is my third full year to have a coach that is just working with me for my business. And I have it's through Woodard, and that's who puts on this conference. And so I get to see her in person here. But normally we are meeting every two weeks, and we are working on what's going on in the business. So I wanted to really get in here and talk to you about the three things. Well, there's more than three, but I've limited to three that I wanted to share with you that I have gotten out of my coaching in the last three years. And these things are above and beyond the progress that I have seen in my business, both in you know, monetary metrics, both in just the growth of the firm. These three things are things that I think without uh having a coach that knows me, knows my firm, learns about my people, all of those things, I think if I had not had that, I wouldn't be as far with those, those numbers, the the growth numbers, the team numbers, any of those things, the profit numbers. I wouldn't be there if I she hadn't coached me in certain directions. So the first thing that she is really good at, and I'm actually gonna stop referring to her as she. Her name is Kim. She's been my coach for about three years. Um, it'll be three years this fall. So it was late 2023 when she started being my coach. And she's just that person that I knew when I met her that she was a good fit for me. The coaches with Woodard are great. I had done some group coaching with them, and I knew I was kind of ready for that next step of having that premium level of having just a coach assigned to me. Now, she obviously coaches a lot of firms and she's really good at it. But for me, she brought some things that I could not do myself. I am a sole owner, therefore, I don't have that person that is really helping me to make decisions or, you know, kind of either celebrate with or commiserate with or any of those things. And sometimes it can get very lonely. So while I have a great team, I can't always burden them with those types of things. They're they're there to do the client service, get the work done. You know, they have jobs, they don't need to be my sounding board all the time, and they also don't need to be my coach, I need to be their coach. So, anyway, so back to my three things.

Lesson One Celebrate Everything

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Kim, the first thing she has taught me is to celebrate everything. So she's great. She does the snap snap for celebrating. And I'm one who, when something happens in a way that either I didn't expect or turned out really good, I am always in that glass half-empty type person. So I'm waiting for what's going to happen next to mess this up. And she stops me and says, celebrate this. This was something worth celebrating, whether it was just getting something done that had been on my list for a very long time, doing the hard things, you know, by having difficult conversations or communications with clients or team. She celebrates the personal stuff. She's been through a lot with me. So she really knows kind of what has been going on, not just in my business, but in my life. And when things happen, big or small, celebrate them and take that time to realize you did that. You did that. And I don't do anything, I don't feel like I do anything alone. I've never wanted to be a sole practitioner. I always knew I wanted a team, but I now own the business on my own. And so while I, you know, I have the team, I also have the responsibility and the risk and all those things with being the business owner. And sometimes I definitely, I guess I would say question or did I make the right decision? And so talking with her every two weeks and her knowing what's going on and telling me, hey, stop, celebrate that. You did it, celebrate it, do something. You know, sometimes it's go do something big, sometimes it's take a moment to, you know, just enjoy it. So celebrating is something that I was not doing very well for sure, prior to having a coach.

Lesson Two Reframe What Goes Wrong

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The second thing she has been really good at for me is to help me reframe things that go wrong. So, meaning she comes in and I am like, okay, we we had a terrible tax season. Here's why, you know, here's all here's all my my reasons. And uh she can take things and say, okay, what did you learn from that that you can take away to do better next time? Two years ago, when I was here at this conference, big client sent me an email. I mean, my biggest client, biggest, I would say a big chunk of my revenue, you know, maybe 25% of it. Sent me an email. And I call these Dear John emails because I send them as well, which is they fired me. They fired the firm. You know, it said they were they were going a different direction. And I had been working, the whole team was very invested in this client, and we had been working with them for many years, doing a lot of things. And I was devastated, like freaking out, devastated in the middle of conference. So I got the email while I'm sitting in a breakout session and was like, oh, uh-oh. So I was freaking out. I mean, what do you do? I I am very aware that I have people that rely on me for their livelihood, for income into their households, for benefits, for any of those things. And it just really set me back. So actually, the actual thing I did was leave I left that breakout session and went to find Kim and cried on her shoulder. And but as soon as, you know, I was calmed down enough, it was okay, what do we need to do? What is the most important thing, you know, and what does this free you up for? What, you know, your team is heavily invested in this work. At that point, were we making money on it or not making money on it? We didn't know, but we were really committed to having to help this client. And they've been a client for a very long time. And she was able to help me step back and reframe it. Okay, so let's bring in ideal clients or clients that are the work that you want to do. And what did you learn? It is selling you as a CFO, is that what you want? Is that something that the time it takes to do that? Is that what your passion is? And we worked through all of those things to realize that, yeah, no, I don't want to be the CFO, you know, the outsourced CFO that's sitting on their board with them and helping them make the hard decisions and dealing with the bank and all of those things. It was very stressful for me. I mean, it was definitely stressful for the company and the cash flow issues they were going through, but it was something that was taking me away from being able to grow other parts of my business, to work on speaking, to work on the podcast, to work on any of these things, the my coaching, the things that I really want to do. So she really helped me reframe that. And then just recently this year, we made a hire at the beginning of tap season, thought it was going to be the solution. You know, this is the goal. We wanted to add to our leadership team. And it ended up not being a good hire. And um, it didn't work out. And so she was able to talk to me and say, okay, what did you learn from that? What won't you do when you hire the next time? And it was, it became very apparent that I don't need to beat myself up about making a hire that seemed like it was going to be the perfect fit. And now looking back, I can say, okay, here's the things that made it not a good fit. And here's how I could have spotted it earlier before the hire happened. So actually, she can actually make me say, you know, she can get that out of me. What did you learn and how can you move forward with that information? You know, she's a gather data. This is this is a data point. This is something that you actually can take and use and improve for the next time. And I need someone who can tell me that because when you're in the situation and it's very personal to you, you tend to feel like it's your fault and you messed up. And I I definitely take things and put it in a very, usually a very negative way. And I'm working on that, you know, but it does happen. And to have a coach that helps with that is just amazing. So I would say that. So that's that's the second thing that I've I've learned from her. You know, the first being celebrate things, the second being reframe things, figure out the data that you're getting from the situations that you're in.

Lesson Three Build Fun Into Work

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And the third thing is fun. And I know that seems kind of a strange thing to learn from a coach, but she is a fun person. And we we share book, you know, what we're reading, and we've shared authors, and we're both into, you know, romanticies, or, you know, currently we're reading, uh, I'm reading or listening to the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, which are really entertaining. And so now she's doing that too. And but it's there's just this connection there that um if life isn't fun, and it's not that it's a hundred percent fun all the time, but if you're not having fun, you're not kind of generating the energy that brings good things to your business. You're not taking the time for yourself. So I try to bring fun, and I'm trying to bring more of that into the culture of our company that it's not always business. It's not always deadlines and due dates and all the things. We are actually people. And having fun together is something that is hard to do on a remote team, but I think we can definitely kind of bring that into our culture a little bit more. And we're gonna work on things inside the company to help make that happen. So this year we're gonna do um a firm retreat, bringing people into town for us into St. Louis. So everybody that is on the team is coming in for a day in August to do some training and do some client, a client meet and greet, like a client kind of social event so that they can meet their team members face to face and get that connection. But we're gonna have fun while we're doing it. So we're working in the planning stages for that. But I learned that from Kim. You know, we are not all business when we're on our 45, 50-minute, whatever length coaching call every two weeks. It's not all about what did you do? What did you achieve? What didn't you do? What do you need help with? It's about, hey, what's going on? What's going on in your life? So she knows about my racing, I know about our camping. We know there's just things that we can talk about and recognize that we both have similar outlooks, that we're at a point that we want to be enjoying our life. Life's too short. And she will remind me, go have fun. And definitely, you know, talking about our characters and our books and those types of things is so fun, you know, because we're grown-ups, but it's still fun to discuss some of the highlights of what we're reading. So that is what I wanted to share with you right now, because we've had enough stuff happening lately that I wanted to kind of let you know that I'm not doing this alone. I have a coach and I have a great team, and I have a coach, and this is how I'm getting where I am. And since I have

Results Metrics And Better Pacing

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been with Kim as my coach, I did the math, I went back and looked. Revenues have increased 28% through the end of 25. Cumulative. So we've we've been, I think it was up, you know, when I first started with her, it was up some 7.5%. And that was like I had only started with her very, very short amount of time. Um, and then we had 16% year and a 10%. I mean, it's I was stagnant in revenue growth when I started with Kim, completely stagnant. Now we're gonna track to do revenue growth of probably maybe 20% this year, somewhere between probably 16 and 20. And that's on target for what my goal is for the company. But we're also hit some major targets with firm growth in terms of people and net profit. Things that I was just kind of, I don't have a plan for it when I started. And now, like, this is how much I want to grow by this time. This is how many people I would like to have by this time, this is what kind of net profit I want to have, this is what kind of salaries I want to pay. And so we've just working with her has moved things for forward for me faster. Now, could I have done it by myself? Yes. Would it have been done in the same speed? Maybe. But I think what would have suffered is prioritizing and making sure that the scaling, you know, to the size I want to be wasn't hurting the culture of the company, the client service, the, you know, that's very important to me that we are serving our clients even as we make changes to make the firm better. And I'm afraid if I hadn't had a coach, I would have done one of two things. I would have made decisions that made us grow too fast and not been able to keep up. Or two, I wouldn't have grown fast enough, like have the mental capacity to say, I this is the pace I need to be on, and I would have given up. So she has helped me pace the the numbers, you know, to say, yes, this is realistic. Yes, this is when you need to hire somebody. Yes. And it is just, it's not, she's not making the decision. She is essentially giving me the guidance to say, yeah, I I see good points on this and bad points. Let's talk about it. And we then kind of can shed some light on where I need to focus. So I'm thrilled to work with her. I will continue to be working with her. Um, I think we renew again right now. And so it's it's just been a game changer to have that outside perspective and to be able to take someone like me who tends to get in their own head to be, I tend not to be the most optimistic. I tend to be a warrior. She has really helped with that. So she likes to make sure that I am celebrating, that I am not dwelling on things and actually reframing and learning from them, and make sure that I'm having fun. So that's all I have today. Pretty short episode. Gotta get to the breakfast. Um, and it's way over there. It's a huge conference center here. So I will be coming out with my after scaling episode where I've kind of you know put the days together. And so I'll record, start recording that today because scaling starts today. We've been here since Friday, but we will be actually starting today. So thanks for listening. I will be back with you hopefully very soon.

Closing And How To Text Me

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And please feel free to text me. I love getting fan mail. Someone someone did again last week, and I don't remember her name. And I haven't had time because I've been traveling to, I haven't had time to get back to her. But I'm I love that. I love knowing that I've touched somebody, that something I said resonated, or something made them say, Hey, can you tell me more about this? So, anyway, I love it. So, where it says, send Beth a text, send me a text, it makes me so happy. But anyway, have a great week and I will talk to you again when I get back from scaling. So, all right, everybody, have a great day. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. My hope is that my experiences can help you navigate the realities of owning and operating your business. Please subscribe or follow the podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform so that you never miss an episode. Feel free to leave me a text by using the send us a text message link in the show description and let me know how I'm doing.