My Morning Routine That Helped Me Grow My $20k Per Month Bookkeeping Business

How I Built a $20K/Month Bookkeeping Business With My Morning Routine

In this video, I break down the exact morning routine that helped me grow my bookkeeping business to over $20,000 per month while working full time, raising kids, and building my business before and after work.

I’ll walk you through:
• My 5AM entrepreneur routine
• How I used LinkedIn to get bookkeeping clients
• My daily productivity schedule
• Why consistency matters more than motivation
• The sacrifices required to grow a successful business
• How I balanced work, family, fitness, and entrepreneurship
• Why focusing on inputs instead of outputs changed everything

This is not a “get rich quick” strategy. Growing a business takes consistency, hard work, discipline, and focus every single day.

If you want to start a bookkeeping business, grow your accounting firm, get more bookkeeping clients, or improve your productivity as an entrepreneur, this video is for you.


#Bookkeeping #Entrepreneur #SmallBusiness #Productivity #MorningRoutine #BusinessGrowth



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

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

My morning routine that helped me grow my $20,000 per month bookkeeping business. Let's talk about it. If we haven't had the chance to meet yet, my name is Zach Pascarello. I started my bookkeeping business six years ago in 2020, and I grew my business to the point of 80 bookkeeping clients and $40,000 per month in just my bookkeeping business, monthly recurring revenue over four years. So I started in my very first year, I made $55,000. My second year, I made $100,000. Third year, it went up from there. And so let me talk to you about my morning routine very specifically as a bookkeeping business owner. And I had my full-time job for the first six months. So this morning routine works even if you have a full-time job. Okay, let's talk about your morning routine. You gotta hustle, you gotta hustle through the time period that you have your full-time job and you're trying to start and grow your bookkeeping business. You can't talk about a morning routine without first talking about going to bed early. So for me, this is kind of tough because I like to work early in the morning. I'm not a big fan of staying up late, but I guess you could kind of re-reverse engineer this entire morning routine if you just wanted to stay up late and work later in the evening and wake up later. But for me, I'm a morning person. I like to drink my coffee early in the morning and get straight to work. So I go to bed or I try to go to bed at 9 p.m. 9 p.m. Sometimes 9 30, sometimes 9 45. If you're going to bed past 10 p.m., it's really hard to wake up early. So I need seven to eight hours of sleep. If I get fewer than seven hours of sleep, I can sustain that for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but I have found that's not sustainable long term. If I'm getting five or six hours of sleep, after one or two weeks, I'm gonna crash and I'm gonna crash hard. And us as business owners, as bookkeepers, we need to be sharp. We need to be able to think and we need to be able to be creative. And so you need to get sleep. I promise you, you got to get more sleep. Having a lot of sleep is like a superpower, it's like a performance enhancement drug. So if you can get seven to eight hours of sleep or more every night, it's gonna help you so much. Be more alert, think more critically, be more creative. So I'm going to bed. I'm trying to go to bed 9 p.m. every night. Then I wake up at 5 a.m. every single morning. That gets me eight hours of sleep, give or take, roughly. And I have a home office. So as soon as I wake up at 5 a.m., I just go straight to my home office. No nonsense. I don't do anything special. I don't, I don't have any secret strategies. I don't do any grounding or any breath work or any meditation or any red light exposure. I don't do any of that stuff. I'm not saying that stuff is bad, but you don't have to do that stuff. If you want to do that stuff, for sure. Sit in a sauna, do some red light therapy, do some grounding for sure. Do some journaling, get outside, drink your coffee, but you don't have to do that if you don't want to. For me, just the best thing for me to do, I wake up, grab a cup of coffee, and I go straight to my home office. So I wake up around 5 a.m., usually snooze a couple times. I'm not perfect, but I would probably say 520, 5:30, I am no nonsense in my office with my coffee made, ready to work. And so the first thing that I do as soon as I get into my office, I do the same thing every single day. Because this is like, I'm still pretty tired. I'm still drinking my coffee. I'm I'm not at a hundred percent. So I like to have a simple task that I can do. So for me, what I'm doing right now, and this is super practical, you could probably do this exact same thing right now. I go to LinkedIn every single morning, as soon as I wake up. I go to LinkedIn, I see who accepted my connection request from the day before, and I add them to a list on my LinkedIn sales navigator. And then I look back to see who accepted my friend request, my connection request 30 days ago. So for me, right now, today, May 19th. So literally this morning, I woke up, got my coffee at 5 a.m., opened up my computer. The first thing I did, LinkedIn, April 19th. I looked to see who accepted my connection request 30 days ago. On April 19th, what did I do? I sent all of them a message. Hey, my name is Zach Pascarello. I've got this investment fund, Zip Capital. I'm targeting 8 to 12% fixed returns to accredited investors. If you want to learn more, would love to chat. Super simple. I'm messaging five to 10 LinkedIn connections every single day, trying to grow my investment fund. Now, for you, what that looks like, for me, what that looked like six years ago. Hey, my name is Zach. I'm a bookkeeper. Let me know if you ever need help with your QuickBooks. Sending LinkedIn messages, Facebook messages every single day, every single morning. So that's a very simple task, mindless, takes about 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes, knock it out first thing in the morning. That way I don't forget, but it also kind of helps kickstart my morning. It kind of helps me get in the flow of working. So pick a simple, mindless, important task that you can do every single morning to get started. And then once I'm done with that, straight to emails. So I'm looking through my emails, I'm deleting everything that's irrelevant, that's spam or junk or just not important. And then I'm responding to priority emails, responding to important stuff, like stuff that's time sensitive, things that need to be responded right away. And then if it's not super important, maybe I'll wait for later in the morning to take care of it. Or who knows? If it's a simple task, maybe I'll just take care of it right away. Like super simple, just take care of it right away. That way I like to stack wins early. I like to get things done early. That way I start to feel like I'm actually getting things done. I'm getting ahead, I'm accomplishing things. So check emails, respond to important stuff. And then at this point, it's probably 6 a.m., maybe 5 45 if I got an early start. So at this point, now from 6 to 7:30, I'm doing bookkeeping. I'm actually still doing bookkeeping. I have 55 bookkeeping clients, which means I have about 11 clients who I service every day. So this morning, I have my Tuesday clients. Today's Tuesday. Tomorrow, I'll do my Wednesday clients. Yesterday, I did my Monday clients. I've got about 10 to 12 bookkeeping clients who I still service every single day. And it takes me about an hour and a half. Maybe if I truly focus and don't get distracted with emails or social media or anything else, if I truly focus, I can probably get all 10 to 12 bookkeeping clients done in about an hour and a half, maybe two hours. So from 6 to 7:30, hardcore, focused, coffee flowing, caffeine, feeling good, bookkeeping. And at this point, 7:30, I've already done two hours of work. What an amazing head start to your day. Instead of spending time with a rigid morning routine that need that I need to get started working at 7:30, in my opinion, it's just great to actually just start working two hours earlier and get that much more work done. That's my personal preference. I know there are some people out there who encourage a morning routine, just not really my style. I'm more of a no-nonsense, get straight to work, grab a cup of coffee, home office, super convenient. So I don't spend any time commuting or I don't spend any time like getting dressed or like getting my work clothes on or taking a shower or packing my lunch. I am just no nonsense, straight to work, straight to business, right into my home office, ready to go. At this point, 7:30, the kids are probably awake. So now 7:30, the last thing that I do is I post on social media every single morning. I want to get this done because if I don't do it now, it's not gonna get done. I'm gonna keep pushing it off. So if you want, you could schedule your social media post the day before. But if you don't do that, that's fine too. So every morning at around 7:30, right before I go eat breakfast, I make sure I can't go eat breakfast until my social media post is done. So 7:30, I start working on it, start thinking about what I want to post, type something up real quick, find a relevant picture, and then I post my social media post every morning at 8 a.m. It's usually kind of like a two to three paragraph story with a picture associated with it. And I post that to Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. I post the exact same post across all four channels. And the post is always generally geared toward what I'm working on in the moment. If I'm trying to raise money in Zip Capital, that's what I'm gonna post about. If I'm trying to find more real estate investors to lend to, that's what I'm gonna post about. If I'm struggling with a personal issue, maybe there's some family stuff, some kids stuff going on, maybe something in the gym, or maybe something with any other personal issues, or maybe I just had a really great Sunday at church and I want to talk about my Sunday at church on Monday morning, that's fine too. I try to mix it up. I try to mix it up what I post. Sometimes it's personal, sometimes it's business, sometimes it's zip capital, sometimes it's social media related. But I'm always posting every morning at 8 a.m. a story with a picture every single morning without fail, Monday through Friday at around 8 a.m. So once that's done, now you got three hours of work done, and it's you're gonna go eat breakfast. So what a great way to kickstart my day, get a ton done first thing in the morning, very few distractions, very high energy because I just woke up, just had my coffee, so I'm ready to work. So eat breakfast and I hang out with the kids from 8 a.m. to about 9 a.m. I take my son to the bus stop, eat breakfast. I've got five kids, so crazy morning, busy morning, and then more work. So once I take my son to the bus stop, straight back to my home office. More work from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., catching up on more emails, more bookkeeping, more loan processing. I'm still growing zip capital. I've got almost 60 loans deployed right now, and I've got seven and a half million dollars outfunded in Pennsylvania real estate. So doing more zip capital stuff, more Harrisburg bookkeeping stuff, just whatever comes up. If I didn't get my daily, weekly bookkeeping clients done before breakfast, I'll catch up on that. Emails, meetings, phone calls, just whatever you need to do, 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. And then I always try to do a short video at around 10 a.m. So today, right now, perfect example. It's literally 10 a.m. right now, and I'm making this video. So like it's right in line with my actual schedule. Every morning at around 10 a.m., I make a video. Usually just a short video, once a week, I'll make a long video for YouTube, and then more work from 10:30 to 12. Just more work, more work. If you have bookkeeping clients, great. Service your current clients. That's the most important thing. If you don't have bookkeeping clients, if you're all done with your bookkeeping work for the day and it's 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and you're like, okay, I already made a post, I just recorded a short video, I sent out my messages to my Facebook friends and my LinkedIn connections. Now you just got to get creative. Just sit in front of your computer. I know this sounds weird, but you got to work for eight hours a day, at least. You got if you want to try to grow this thing, you got to work at least eight hours a day. And so if you've already quit your full-time job and it's 10 a.m. and you don't know what to do, just think, what can I do right now that will help get me more bookkeeping clients, right? Because that's probably your one and only goal right now. You're not you're probably not struggling to keep up with the bookkeeping. Right now, you're probably your one and only goal, how can I get more bookkeeping clients? And so it doesn't matter what you do, it just matters that you do something. That's the most important part. So whether it's filming a commercial, designing a billboard, publishing a newspaper article, or optimizing your website for SEO, or updating your Google My Business profile, or engaging with your Facebook friends on social media to spread awareness and to build relationships, or cold calling people, or designing flyers to send out in the mail, or tweaking your PPC ads, or your Google ads, or your Facebook ads. Doesn't matter what you do, it just matters that you do something. So 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., continue to work. That's what I do. And then at 12 p.m. every day, I go to the gym. So I know some people like to work out early in the morning, some people might do it in the evenings after work. Me personally, I love working out at 12 p.m. every day. I've got kids. I've got, like I said, I got five kids. We are busy every single day after school for sports, so I can't realistically go to the gym at 6 p.m. That would be insane with my schedule. And I don't like working out early in the morning. You don't have to. As an entrepreneur, you have the freedom and flexibility to go to the gym whenever you want. So instead of working out at 5 a.m., I do computer work at 5 a.m., get ahead, and then I go to the gym at 12 p.m. And then eat lunch at around 1, 1:30, and then it's just back in my office from 2 to 5. Nothing crazy, nothing special, more work from 2 to 5. So realistically, I work, let's call it from 5:30 to 7:30, that's two hours. And then I work from 9 to 12, that's three hours, and then I work from two to five, that's three hours. So all in eight to nine hours, realistically, on average, let's call it nine hours per day. I'm not working 16-hour days, nothing crazy. And I I did this exact same schedule when I was making $20,000 per month in my bookkeeping business, and while I was growing it to $30,000, $40,000 per month in my bookkeeping business. So really, it's it's it's not crazy. It's just nine hours of very concentrated, very focused work. Gradually, I get less and less productive through the day. So knowing that about me, I try to do the most important stuff first. Things that need to get done every single day without fail. I try to do those things first. And I can only focus for about two hours. Anything after that, my productivity drops significantly. So as you can notice, I kind of tailored my schedule to fit that two to three hour work period. Two hours in the morning, breakfast, three hours in the morning, gym, lunch, three hours in the evening. And then if you are super busy, if you are behind on your work, maybe maybe you stay up maybe from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. instead of watching Netflix, instead of watching the football game, maybe from 8 to 9 p.m. you you catch up on more emails, or you try to create your social media content for tomorrow. Doesn't matter, doesn't matter what you do, doesn't matter when you do it, it just matters that you do it consistently every day and come up with a routine or a schedule that works for you. Now, I have to I have to say, you've heard me talk about my morning routine, you've heard me talk about my gym schedule, you've heard me talk about having five kids. I can't say any of this without acknowledging the fact that my wife does stay home with the kids. And so she is the primary caretaker for our kids. Two of them are in school, and one of them is in preschool, but then two of them are too young to be in preschool. So she is the primary caretaker, and also my mom lives 10 minutes away, and she also helps out a lot with the kids. So I I get it, I understand. You and me, you watching this video of me, our life situations might be different. Maybe you are a recent college graduate with no kids. If that's the case, you've got congratulations. You you hit the time jackpot and you have all the time in the world. Or maybe you are 35 years old and you have three kids and you are the primary caretaker, and maybe your spouse goes to work for 10 hours a day, and you're like, I only have two hours a day. I could never work nine hours and I could never work from five to seven because I'm getting the kids ready for school. So I get it. I understand everybody has different situations. I'm not necessarily telling you that you have to do exactly what I'm doing. I'm just sharing what has worked really well for me. So hopefully you can either copy my exact schedule and do exactly what I did, or if you have a different schedule, if you have a different life situation, hopefully you can at least take a few things from my routine and maybe implement them into your routine. So maybe, for example, maybe you are the primary caretaker and maybe your only free time is 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. while your young kids are at preschool. Maybe you maybe they do a half day preschool and you've got 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. That's great. Though those are your two hours. So in those two hours, implement my 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. routine. So do a non-negotiable at 9 a.m. Send out some messages on LinkedIn, get started, check your emails at 9:30, do your bookkeeping from 10 to 10:30, and then create your social media post at 11 a.m. And then you can go pick up your kids from preschool at 11:30. So I don't know what your schedule looks like, but hopefully some of this can be implemented into your routine. Weekends. If you have kids, I try to work on the weekends as well. So I'm working nine hours a day, Monday through Friday. And then also on the weekends, especially during month end close, especially during tax season, March, April, September, October, things do get busier. So on the weekends, if you have kids, maybe you sacrifice and maybe you go to bed early Friday night. I know nobody wants to, but maybe during this hustling, grinding phase while you still have your full-time job and you're still trying to grow your bookkeeping business, maybe you have to wake up early. Maybe you set your alarm for 6 a.m. on Saturday, sleep in an extra hour instead of waking up at five, wake up at six, and then get two hours of work done, 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. while the kids are still sleeping, or maybe the kids watch Saturday morning cartoons, get a couple hours of work done on the weekends. It doesn't sound like much, but I promise you, if you could work for an extra one or two hours on Saturday and Sunday, you can accomplish so much. You can get so far because that way, instead, instead of constantly catching up Monday morning, you're catching up on emails from the weekend. Monday morning, you're catching up on work that needs to be done for your daily bookkeeping clients. If you can catch up on work emails over the weekend, catch up on business administrative tasks over the weekend, or even catch up on your weekly bookkeeping clients on Sunday, you can get ahead on Monday morning. And then something magical happens in your brain. When you get ahead, all of a sudden you can start thinking so much more clearly. All of a sudden, you're no longer in survival mode. You're no longer thinking, oh my goodness, I'm so stressed out. I'm barely keeping up. I don't know how I can continue doing this. Instead of thinking like that and not able to think creatively or critically, or not able to think about the future, you're just so focused on trying to survive today. Instead of being like that, instead, you could work for a couple hours on Saturday, work for 90 minutes on Sunday, catch up on some work, get ahead, and all of a sudden your entire Monday through Friday changes drastically just because you spent three or four hours on the weekend working. Doesn't sound like much, but it really makes a huge impact. So if you're struggling, consider making a sacrifice on the weekend and working a little bit. I'm not saying you go to the office for 10 hours and totally abandon your family on Saturday. I'm not saying you skip church on Sunday. I'm just saying one, maybe two hours. Try to find some time, sneak away, open up the laptop, catch up on emails. So this is not going to be easy. Hopefully, I made it seem like hopefully I didn't make it seem like this was going to be easy. If this was easy, guess what? Everybody would be doing it. Nobody would be watching my videos because you would all already have 40 bookkeeping clients and you would already be making $20,000 a month. If you could just spend a few thousand dollars and all of a sudden get clients, everybody would be doing it. If you could spend $5,000 on marketing and make $10,000 in monthly bookkeeping revenue, everybody would be doing it. I don't think it's that easy. I don't think it's as simple as let me hire a coach, let me hire a social media manager, let me pay for ads, and then all of a sudden I'll just start getting clients. It could work, but it's going to require a lot of hard work by you. There's no substitute for hard work, research, trial and error, making mistakes, being consistent, making sacrifices, waking up early, staying up late, going to bed early, whatever that looks like. It's not going to be easy. It's going to be incredibly hard. But that's good. That's good news. You know why? Because our competition, other people out there who we're competing with, they're not willing to work as hard as you. They're not willing to make the sacrifices on Saturday morning. So that is your competitive advantage while you're just getting started. You're going to beat other bookkeepers because they are not willing to skip Monday night football so they can go so they can wake up early on Tuesday. They're not willing to skip trivia night on Thursday night so that they can go to a networking event or so that they can work on their bookkeeping website on Thursday evening. So that is your competitive advantage. Be willing to work hard, be willing to make sacrifices, and be consistent. Like I said before, doesn't matter what you do, it only matters that you do something. Doesn't matter when you do it, it only matters that you do something consistently. It could be like me, I go to the gym every day at 12 p.m. It doesn't matter when I go to the gym. I could go to the gym at 5 a.m., 12 p.m. 6 p.m. Doesn't matter. But I go to the gym every day. Same thing for you. It doesn't matter when you get your work done. If you're a night owl, if you want to work from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m., do it. That's amazing. If you're a morning person, you want to work from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m., do it. Doesn't matter when you do it, it just matters that you do something consistently. You got to make sacrifices, you got to work hard, and you're going to make mistakes. You're going to fail. And that's okay. Making mistakes is the greatest teacher. I'll leave you with this. And maybe I'll talk about this more in my next video. There's inputs and there's outputs. So when we look at outputs, we look at results, things that happen, like onboarding new clients, or getting social media engagement, like getting comments, getting a viral video, or booking sales consultations, or people responding to our cold calls or our DMs. Those are outputs. Guess what? We don't have control over our outputs. I can't control if a video goes viral. I can't control if somebody responds to my message. I can't control if I get a new zip capital investor. Side note, by the way, if you do want to invest in zip capital, I'm targeting 8 to 12% fixed returns to accredited investors. And there's a link down below where you can sign up and learn more about Zip Capital, my investment fund. But I can't control who signs up for Zip Capital. I can't control getting a new bookkeeping client. Those are outputs. If you focus on those, you're going to fail. You're going to think you're failing every day. Every day I don't get a new zip capital investor. I'm a failure if I'm judging my performance based on getting a new zip capital investor. Don't judge yourself on the outputs. Instead, judge yourself, evaluate your performance on the inputs. Focus on the inputs. That's what you can control. I can't control if somebody responds to my message. I can control if I send out 10 messages every day. That's the input. I'm going to create social media marketing content every day. I'm going to record one of these long videos every single week and post it on my YouTube channel, and I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to stop. I don't care if it goes viral. Of course, I want people to watch these videos. I want you to subscribe to my channel. I want you to like the video and comment down below, but I can't control if you do that. The only thing I can control are the inputs. The only thing I can control is creating these videos every week. Sending out 30 LinkedIn connections every morning at 5 a.m. Sending out LinkedIn messages to everybody who accepted my connection request 30 days ago. That's all I can do. I can't control if somebody responds to my message, but I can control if I send the message consistently for a long period of time, every single day. Now, with that, with that, what is insanity? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So we're not insane, right? So we have to make things better. So it's not enough to just be consistent. That's the that's the first goal. First, I want you to try to be consistent, try to show up every day and do something. 30, 60, 90 days, just be consistent. But then there becomes a point where you got to make it better. So I can't control if people respond to my message, but I can control if I try to make my message better. If I try to like my DM that I send on LinkedIn, if nobody's responding and I'm sending it every day, okay, I gotta make it better. Clearly, the message is not working. Clearly, I'm sending it to the wrong people. It's not working. There's there's something that's not good about the message, there's something that's not good about the strategy, I gotta make it better. Same thing with social media marketing. Okay, nobody's commenting on my post, nobody's engaging with my my posts. Clearly, something's not good. So establish the habit and the routine and the consistency first. 60, 30, 60, 90 days. That's your goal. Just don't even worry about making it better. Just worry about making it for the first 90 days. And then after that, go back and look. Go back and see which posts did really well, which videos got the most views, which messages got the most replies, and then make it better. But focus on the inputs, don't focus on the outputs. I hope that was helpful. I'll see you all next week. Thank you all so much.