How I Built a Bookkeeping Business (From Idea to $40k/month Revenue)

How do you start a bookkeeping business with no experience and turn it into $40,000 per month in recurring revenue?

In this video, I break down exactly how I built my bookkeeping business from idea to consistent monthly income. No employees. No office. No inventory. Just a laptop, consistency, and a simple strategy that works.

I started as an Army officer, then worked as a warehouse manager before discovering accounting. Eight weeks into my first accounting class, everything clicked. That moment changed my life and led me to build a profitable bookkeeping business from scratch.

In this video, I walk you through:

• How I got started with less than $1,000
• Why learning the basics of accounting matters
• How I landed my first clients with only 300 Facebook friends
• The exact social media strategy I used to grow
• How I built trust and relationships that turned into paying clients
• How I scaled to $40K/month in recurring revenue

If you're thinking about starting a bookkeeping business, this is the real blueprint. No fluff. No theory. Just what actually worked.

Whether you're a beginner, side hustler, or entrepreneur looking for a scalable service business, bookkeeping is one of the best opportunities right now.

Subscribe for more videos on bookkeeping, business growth, and building real income streams.

*Learn more about my investment fund targeting 8% to 12% fixed returns*
https://www.zipcapitalfund.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

How I build a bookkeeping business from just an idea to actually making recurring revenue. I'm just a regular guy who built a$40,000 per month recurring revenue bookkeeping business, not per year,$40,000 per month. And I'm just a regular guy. And now I make these videos because I just love talking about my bookkeeping business and I really enjoy helping all of you start and grow your own bookkeeping business. So let me give you a little bit of background information on me. If we haven't had the chance to meet yet, my name is Zach Mascarello, and I started out as an army officer, fresh out of college, graduated in 2015, joined the Army, and I was stationed down in Georgia for four years. And I was an army officer. And then we started having kids in my family. And my wife and I decided it was time for us to move back home. So I got out of the army, left Georgia, moved back to Pennsylvania, and then I worked as a warehouse manager for two years. It was a really good job. I built up to making a$100,000 per year salary, which I thought was the pinnacle. I thought that I had reached my goals. I finally made it.$100,000 salary. I was so happy. Warehouse manager, great job, but not a good job for me. I just wasn't really passionate about the work and what I was doing. I always knew that I loved personal finance. I was really good at math in high school and I just loved budgeting my own money. I loved managing my own investments. I loved personal finance. I thought I actually wanted to be a financial advisor. But the more I looked into it, I decided that wasn't really for me. I wanted to start an actual business. And so I was really doing a ton of research on business. And then I learned accounting is the language of business. So I thought that's interesting. If I wanted to start a business, maybe I should learn accounting. So I used my military benefits. I went back to college at Penn State online campus and I took intro to accounting in the fall of 2020. Very first business class, finance class, accounting class. I had a college degree from Lehigh University, but I had never taken a single business class. So I took intro to accounting, fall of 2020. Eight weeks into that course, I fell in love. I loved debits and credits, financial reports, balance sheet, income statement, accounts receivable, reconciliations, intro to accounting. I loved it. Debits and credits, it just clicked in my brain. It just made perfect sense. So at this point, I knew I want to be an accountant. I want to get out of the warehouse. I want to, I want to get out of my management role. And I'll take a pay cut. I just want to be an accountant so bad. But the more I looked into it, I couldn't get a job as a staff accountant because I didn't have an accounting degree. I didn't have a college degree and I didn't have any experience. So the more I looked into it, I learned about bookkeeping. Oh, this is interesting, kind of like accounting, and I don't need any experience. I don't need a college degree. I can just be a bookkeeper. Well, okay, bookkeeper, maybe I can make 20 bucks an hour. At this point, I've got a family. Kind of tough to leave my$100,000 salary and go work as an accounting clerk or account receivable specialist or a bookkeeper for as an employee making 20 bucks an hour. That's a fine job for some people, but it just didn't really fit with where I was professionally and with my family. So then I stumbled across a bookkeeping business. Interestingly, I stumbled across another YouTuber six years ago making bookkeeping business videos, kind of like what I'm doing now. And he was selling a course for$700. The course was outdated. It wasn't great, but it gave me the confidence that I needed to start my bookkeeping business. So I took that course in October of 2020, eight weeks after I started intro to accounting. Most importantly, I fell in love with accounting. I fell in love with intro to accounting, debits and credits. It takes a special kind of person to really love debits and credits. It takes a special kind of nerd like you and me to really fall in love with debits and credits. If you want to start a bookkeeping business, you gotta love bookkeeping. You have to love accounting concepts and bookkeeping fundamentals and debits and credits. If you don't love that stuff, spoiler alert, it's gonna be a really hard business for you to start. So take intro to accounting if you haven't already. That is quite literally what kickstarted my bookkeeping business. I fell in love with debits and credits. I took intro to accounting. I continued taking classes at Penn State online. I ended up taking 10 undergraduate and graduate level classes at Penn State. So I basically almost took enough credits to get a full bachelor's degree in just accounting. So I took the bookkeeping course in October of 2020. And then I basically at that point decided to start my bookkeeping business. So I registered my LLC, I got a website, I got a LinkedIn profile, I got a Facebook account, and I just started talking about it. It's so super simple. I literally just started talking about this idea of accounting and bookkeeping for small business owners. I didn't even really know what that meant. I learned about QuickBooks, I became a QuickBooks Online certified pro advisor, and I knew that business owners needed a profit and loss so that they could file their taxes. That's pretty much all that I knew. I knew that I had to record transactions, categorize them, put them into buckets, put them into chart of accounts. I had to categorize people's transactions, I had to reconcile accounts, and then that would enable me to create this profit and loss. Or as I learned in my accounting class, it was actually called an income statement. Income statement, profit and loss, same thing. Income at the top, expenses down below, net income, that's what they're gonna end up paying taxes on. So I knew kind of fundamentally like what a bookkeeper did, but I had no experience. I never did it for somebody. I didn't know how to do it. So I really just went to social media and I was like, hey, I gotta tell people about this. I got to get my name out there, I gotta tell people about bookkeeping and accounting and financial reports and profit and loss and how they need this to file their taxes. I thought maybe if I told people about this idea of needing a bookkeeper, that maybe I could end up getting a client. So this to me was just a brilliant idea. I only needed$1,000 to get started because I spent$700 on the course,$300 on a laptop, and that was it. I kept my current job. That's huge. I kept my current job because I could work remotely from anywhere. I could create marketing content on my phone, I could use my laptop to log into QuickBooks and do bookkeeping. I was able to keep my current job, very little money up front to get started. If you don't buy a course, you can get started with 300 bucks. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection. You don't need inventory, you don't need employees, you don't need equipment, you don't need a building, you don't need all of this stuff that other businesses require. If you want to start selling widgets as an e-commerce business, you got to front a lot of money potentially for inventory. I started a trucking company a few years ago. I had to buy a truck. If you want to flip houses, you got to buy a house. If you want to start other companies, you might need employees, but with a bookkeeping business, you don't need any of that. That's why I love bookkeeping. I love bookkeeping as a business because it's a necessary service. People need bookkeepers to file their taxes because they need financial reports. And so that's what us as bookkeepers do. Okay, that's pretty much it. So at this point, I had 300 friends on my Facebook profile six years ago. Fall of 2020, I had 300, I had 300 friends, and they were all just regular people. They were not potential clients, they were not business owners, they were not prospective clients, they were just friends from high school, buddies from the army, and people in my community. And then I had a LinkedIn profile, but this was all also just warehouse employees, like people from my professional career previously. So I just started creating content on social media. It was, I didn't really have a blueprint, didn't really have a plan. I just knew that I had to spread awareness. That was really that was my social media marketing plan. Like I gotta tell people about this so that more people find out, so that more people are likely to hire me. Because right now, nobody knows that I'm a bookkeeper. And right now, if you're watching this, probably nobody knows that you're a bookkeeper. So my social media marketing strategy was so super simple. I literally just created content every day. And my main focus was two things establishing myself as a bookkeeping expert. You got to do that. People need to think, okay, Zach Pascarello, who is this guy? Never heard of him before. He seems like a bookkeeper because he's always talking about QuickBooks and bookkeeping and taxes and finances and accounting. So he must be a bookkeeper. You got to talk about bookkeeping. But then also you got to build trust and relationships with total strangers on the internet. I know it sounds crazy, but I've got good news for you. It's absolutely possible. And you do it just naturally over time. There's no magic secret, there's no shortcut, there's no secret formula. You literally just show up every day, be consistent, be a good person, be polite, positive, and professional. And you just naturally build trust and you naturally build relationships by creating content, putting yourself out there, and showing up every single day. So that's what I did on social media, primarily just Facebook and LinkedIn. I didn't even have an Instagram when I started my bookkeeping business. I didn't have a YouTube channel, literally just Facebook and LinkedIn. And I just created a post every single day. It wasn't great, it wasn't even good. It was honestly all of my content was horrible whenever I was just getting started because I didn't know any better. But you just keep don't you just keep going, you don't give up. So you just got to create content every single day, and then you just got to find prospective clients. Where do business owners hang out on social media? LinkedIn makes it super simple to find people because the search features are very helpful. Facebook, a little bit harder. Facebook groups are a great place to find people. So you can go to local Facebook groups. I always recommend start local, start with your local geographical region, and then you can just find business owners in these Facebook groups, find real estate investor groups, find support groups for local business owners on Facebook, and then you can sort through the members in those groups. And so now you know here are people who are probably close to me geographically because we're both in the same city. We're both in this Facebook group that's relevant to our city or our state. And then they're probably business owners because they're in these business-related Facebook groups. So just connect with them, connect with them, send people connection requests. These are total strangers and it's okay. These are total strangers, it's okay. You're growing a business, you're not trying to make friends, you're trying to find potential clients. So send connection requests on LinkedIn, send Facebook requests on Facebook. Fun fact this is interesting. I was having some problems sending Facebook requests, friend requests on Facebook, because Facebook was not allowing me to do it. It was saying, like, sorry, you can't use this feature right now. And I was like, what's going on? Why is this happening? And I realized it was happening because I was not accepting any friend requests. So there was a massive imbalance of my ratios of sent friend requests and accepted friend requests. So I did an experiment on my own account. I just simply started accepting every friend request that I received. And all of a sudden, what I noticed is Facebook allowed me to send a lot more friend requests. So what I recommend you doing, if you're just getting started, send one or two friend requests today. Tomorrow, try doing three or four. The next day, maybe do two in the morning, two at lunch, and two right before bed. The next day, maybe you try five to ten and just accept a bunch of friend requests, accept every request you can, send as many as you can, spread them out, be patient, start very small, and slowly build up. And then as you're getting these new friends, now it's time to engage with them. So this all goes back to building trust and relationships. So you're sending friend requests on Facebook, you're sending connection requests on LinkedIn, and now you just simply comment on their posts. Or if they comment on your stuff, reply to their comments and just engage with them. You're literally just hanging out and talking with total strangers on the internet with the sole purpose of building relationships and trust, establishing yourself as a bookkeeping expert so that hopefully in the future they hire you as a bookkeeper. That is the whole point. And the cool thing is, social media is like a real community. These people, myself included, you probably also spend so much time on social media. And so you can use it to your advantage. We're not doom scrolling, we're not creating mindless content about kittens and sports. We're strategically creating content to build trust and relationships and establish ourselves as a bookkeeping expert. And we're also strategically connecting with business owners, local business owners. And then finally, we are systematically engaging with these people. So engage as much as you possibly can. There's no limit to how many posts you can comment on per day. At least there's no limit within reason, of course. Be reasonable, but engage as much as you possibly can. Make it a goal. Every morning, I'm gonna comment on 10 of my friends' posts, and then every afternoon, five more. Every evening before bed, I'm gonna do 10 comments just to get your name out there. Because if you if you comment on somebody's post, what are they likely to do? See your name, click on your profile, and look at your stuff. And if you do that enough, if you're polite and positive and professional enough with your comments, it'll just naturally build relationships with these new friends. Because these remember, these are strangers on the internet who don't know you, you don't know them. The best thing you can do, the only thing you should be doing is being polite, positive, and professional. There is there's absolutely no reason for you to be negative, rude, and nasty on social media. Don't do it, don't ever do it. Just be polite, positive, and professional. Engage with your new Facebook friends, your new LinkedIn connections, and then finally, 30 days after you've been friends with them, send them a message. Be like, hey John, notice that you're a business owner. I'm a bookkeeper. If you ever need help with your QuickBooks, I'd love to help. Send me a message. Here's my website, here's my phone number. Let's hop on a call. I would love to see if I could help you with your bookkeeping and QuickBooks. That's it. That's literally all that I did. It's not complicated. It's incredibly simple, but it's not easy. So there's a big difference between simple and easy. Things can be very simple, but also incredibly hard. The reason it's hard is because it's boring, it's monotonous, and it's every day. You have to do the same thing every day for six months. And that's incredibly challenging. But if you can do it, I'm just a regular guy. If you can do it, if you can stick with it, if you can get better every day and create better content, send better messages, have better conversations, then you can grow your bookkeeping business. I did it and I think you can do it too. I grew my bookkeeping business to$40,000 per month. So that's it for the video. I hope this was helpful. Check out my podcast. I have a podcast on Apple and Spotify. And then if you're listening to the podcast, check out my YouTube channel, bookkeeping expert Zach Pascarello. I try to make these videos every single week for the sole purpose of just trying to help you start and grow your own bookkeeping business. So thank you all so much. God bless you, and I'll see you all next time.