How to GROW a Successful Bookkeeping Business

How do you scale a bookkeeping business after landing your first clients?

In this video, I'll show you how to grow a bookkeeping business without sacrificing quality or working around the clock. We'll discuss the systems, pricing strategies, workflows, and processes that helped me build a bookkeeping business with more than 80 recurring monthly clients.

Scaling a bookkeeping business isn't about taking on as many clients as possible. It's about building repeatable systems, improving efficiency, and creating a business that can continue to grow over time.

In this video you'll learn:

• How to scale a bookkeeping business
• When it's time to raise your bookkeeping prices
• How to create systems and standard operating procedures
• How to manage more bookkeeping clients efficiently
• When to hire your first team member
• How to improve profitability without working more hours
• The biggest mistakes to avoid when growing a bookkeeping business
• How to build a bookkeeping business that lasts

This is the final video in my 10-part series on how to start and grow a bookkeeping business. If you're just discovering this channel, I recommend watching the entire series from the beginning. It covers everything from starting a bookkeeping business and getting your first client to pricing, sales, onboarding, monthly workflows, month-end close, and scaling.

Whether you're starting a bookkeeping business, becoming a virtual bookkeeper, or trying to grow your existing bookkeeping business, I hope this series gives you the confidence and roadmap to build a successful business.

Thank you for following along over the past 10 weeks. I have many more videos planned covering bookkeeping, QuickBooks Online, marketing, pricing, client workflows, financial statements, and everything I've learned while building my bookkeeping business.

#BookkeepingBusiness #Bookkeeping #QuickBooks


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

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

How to grow a successful bookkeeping company. This has been a 10-week series. This is the final video. This is video number 10. Let's do a recap. Let's talk about all the other videos that we've gone through. If you missed any of them, there should be a playlist on my channel with every video for this 10-week video series. Week number one, should I start? Week number two, can I do it? Those are two very basic questions that we talked about in the very first two videos of this series. Number week number three, how to get your first client. Week number four, how to set up your business. Week number five, how to price your services, how to quote bookkeeping services. Week number six, how to sell your services. Week number seven, once you actually get a client, how do you onboard your client? Week number eight, how to do a complete monthly workflow. Week number nine, how to reconcile accounts and close out your books month and close. So weeks one through nine pretty much taught you everything you need to know. I'm not selling a course. I just gave you for free everything you need to know to start your bookkeeping business week one through nine. Now, week 10, the final video how to grow a successful bookkeeping company. Not start, how to grow, how to scale your business. Let's jump right into it. Topic number one, when you're ready to grow. When are you ready to grow? Most people think that scaling immediately means hiring. It doesn't, at least not right away. So there's a couple things you need to keep in mind. Here are some signs that you've outgrown your current systems. Most obvious probably, you're saying no. If you're turning down clients, it's probably because you're out of time, or maybe you're overwhelmed, or maybe you're stressed out, or maybe you just can't even think straight because you've got 60 clients, and the idea of taking on one more client is going to give you a panic attack. If that is happening to you right now, congratulations. You grew your bookkeeping business, but this is a sign that you have outgrown your current system. Whatever you've been doing to get from zero to 60, you've outgrown. Or maybe you're just barely holding on. Maybe you're just barely surviving. Maybe you're working late into the evening. You're staying up late. Maybe you're missing out on family time. Maybe you're missing out on gym time or friend time. Or maybe you're working seven days a week. Maybe you're working on Saturday. Maybe you're working on Sunday. Maybe you can't watch football on Sunday, or you can't go to the pool on Saturday, or you can't even take a vacation. Maybe you can't even take a weekend because you're so stressed out, because you have so many clients and your systems are broken. Whatever was working from zero to 60 is no longer working. Your systems are breaking. Now, let me just let me just warn you, let me give you some advice. Don't hire someone just because you're busy. Hire somebody because your systems are working. Right now, if you're at that point that I just described where you're overwhelmed, you're stressed out, you can't think straight, you're working long nights, you're working on the weekends. If you hire somebody now, it's probably not gonna help. If anything, honestly, probably just gonna add to the chaos. It's just going to make you more stressed out because now you have to train somebody. Now you have to manage somebody. Don't just hire somebody because you're busy. First, you gotta build a system. You gotta build a system before you build a team. So you gotta document every process. You have to create a checklist for everything you do. Right now, all of your clients, you know how to do the bookkeeping because you've been with them since day one. It's easy for you, it makes sense. You know exactly what to do, you know all the little details, all the little nuances. If you know what I mean. All the, you know, maybe this client wants a statement of cash flows. Maybe this client wants a transaction report. Maybe this client, you got to log into this obscure credit card website and download the banks, download the credit card statements, or download the transactions into an Excel file. Or maybe this particular client wants their transactions classed to this particular list of classes or do project tracking this way or log into this app or that software or that website. You got to document all of those processes. You have to create a checklist for every client. SOP, standard operating procedure. If you've ever been in the military or worked at a warehouse or in manufacturing or probably most other jobs, most other legitimate big companies have an SOP, standard operating procedure, checklist, processes, systems, and it all starts with documenting. And if you're brand new, start today. Start now. Document everything, create a Google Drive, create a Google Doc, create a Word document, create an Excel spreadsheet, create a folder on your desktop, whatever that looks like, a Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, whatever that looks like, create documents, create a process, create a checklist, create an SOP, create a system. Make every client follow your process. If you want to hire somebody, if you want to grow your business, you need a process, and then you need your clients to follow that process. This is that point in your business where you decide what, where, when, how. You have to decide how your clients operate. You have to decide what information your clients send you, and what information you send them, and when you do it, and where you do it, and what website, and what cloud, and what drive, and what Dropbox. You have to decide those those systems and those processes. If you let your clients tell you how to do everything, then you're going to have 60 different systems, 60 different processes that might have worked in the first year when you only had five clients. Not a big deal. Five different clients. I'm just going to do whatever they want me to do. Who cares? But as you grow, now that you've got 40, 60, 80 clients, you can't operate like that anymore. You need to develop a system before you hire somebody, and you need to tell your clients what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, where it's going to happen, how it's going to happen. This is so important. It's difficult because you have to have difficult conversations. And it's it's extra difficult if you don't do it from the beginning. So learn from my mistakes. Let me help you, let me teach you. Start early. Tell your clients how you operate, how you're going to do their bookkeeping, document the process, create a checklist, create a system, and make every client follow your process. Once you have that in place, once you have a good system, a good SOP, then maybe it's time to hire somebody. But before you go add in more clients or adding new clients, let's explore some alternative ways to increase revenue before adding clients. This is something very few bookkeepers are talking about and very few book bookkeepers are doing. Raise prices. Number one, raise prices. It's an easy way to increase revenue by 10%. And if if you're making $40,000 a month, $100,000 a month, and you increase your revenue by 10%, you just got a $4,000 raise. You just got a $10,000 raise. And if you're doing a good job, clients will not leave you as often as you think. If you're doing a good job, clients will not leave you over a five or ten percent annual increase. Some will, but not every client is going to leave. I promise you, and I'm I'm basing that off of my experience. Not every client is going to fire you just because you increase their prices per year five to ten percent. Raise prices and do it early. Do it often. Do it in the beginning every year. Don't miss a year because that's that's compounding. If you increase somebody's price by 5% every year, in five years, you will have increased their price by 5% every year. So don't miss out on it. Come up with a system to keep track of when you onboard a client and when you last increased their price. Maybe there's really probably two ways to do it. You can do it at the same time every year for everybody. So maybe, maybe every quarter you just increase everybody's prices that you haven't already. That's that's one way to do it. Everybody at the same time. Or you could do everybody at a different time, but at the same amount of time that has elapsed since you onboarded them. So maybe you on you increase everybody's price on January 1st. Easy to remember, easy to do. But what about that client who you just onboarded in July? Now you're increasing their price only five months after you onboarded them. So you could increase everybody's price on the first day of the month, or the first day of the year, or any other day of the year, just everybody, same time. Or you could increase everybody's price exactly 12 months after they onboarded. A little bit more tracking, a little bit more keeping track of records and onboarding dates, but I think that might be a better system for your clients. They might understand more. Okay, that makes sense. I started working with you July 1st, 2026. Now it's July 1st, 2027. That just logically makes sense. 12 months later, you increase my price, but you gotta do it. Raise prices. Don't be afraid. Raise prices, raise prices. Super important. Eliminate difficult clients. This is tough. You worked so hard to get 40 clients. You worked so hard to get 80 clients, and now you're telling me to fire them if they're difficult. If if you get stressed out just thinking about them, yes, it might be time to eliminate difficult clients. I have never regretted firing a difficult client. Think about that for a second. I have fired dozens of clients. I never regret firing a difficult client because what does that do? That frees you up to go after good clients, get rid of bad clients, spend more time marketing and selling to good clients. There are really good clients out there who deserve your high-quality bookkeeping, and you deserve really good clients. Finally, improve your efficiency. Think about this. If it takes you two hours to work for a client who's paying you $400 per month, you're making $200 per hour. But what if you could do the same work in half the time? Now you can do a $400 per month client in one hour. Now all of a sudden, you're right, you're making $400 an hour. You just doubled your pay by improving your efficiency. This is a really important way that I was able to grow. I went from 10 clients my first year, 20 clients my second year, 40 clients my third year, 80 clients my fourth year. At the end of 2024, I had 80 bookkeeping clients. And I was working so much more efficiently. So I was able to handle more work, make more money in less time, improve your efficiency. It's a great way to increase your revenue before adding clients. Increase your quote unquote hourly pay. Even though we don't charge hourly, you can still figure out how much money you make per hour based on a fixed rate and figuring out how much time per month it takes you to service that client. So growing doesn't always mean adding more clients. Okay, so let's recap. Topic number one: when are you ready to grow? It's not necessarily what you think, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're stressed out and you can't handle the work. That's that's not the point when you're ready to hire somebody. The point that you're ready to hire somebody is when you have good systems in place. Build systems before you build a team. And then we just talked about increasing revenue before adding clients. Now, let's talk about it. Your first hire. What would I delegate first if I was hiring somebody? I would look at a couple things. First, what do you struggle with? Realistically, seriously, what are you struggling with right now? What's your bottleneck? What don't you like doing? For a lot of people, that's appointment setting or managing their email or managing their calendar or doing their bookkeeping or creating social media marketing content. Simple things like that. What are you struggling with? Legitimately, realistically, you right now you're overworked, you're stressed out, you're overwhelmed, you have too much work going on. You need to identify specifically what work is your bottleneck. Figure that out first before you hire somebody. You can't just hire a bookkeeper, bring them on, and now all of a sudden you think that your life is going to get easier. You need to know very specifically what are you struggling with. And it might start with you doing like a time block test. Maybe for a whole week, you look at the calendar, you look at the clock, and every 30 minutes, write down what you're doing for those 30 minutes every day. So eight hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, for 15 to 30 minute blocks. Every time you start a new task, write down the time, write what you're doing. And then you can look back on your week and you can say, Oh wow, I spent a lot of time creating social media marketing content. I spent a lot of time following up with my clients asking for documents. I spent a lot of time recording transactions. It's gonna look different for everybody. Start with something simple. Whenever you do decide to hire somebody, whenever you do figure out what your bottleneck is, I would start with something simple. I don't want to hire, I don't want my first hire to be a CFO. I don't want my first hire to be a chief operating officer. I want my first hire to be like an executive assistant or an administrative assistant or an office manager, something like that. Something simple, something repeatable, teachable, and scalable. I want to hire somebody who I can teach what to do every day, repeatable. Maybe a couple really good examples for us bookkeepers, document collection. Maybe you've got 80 clients and you spend a ton of time organizing bank statements and credit card statements and loan documents. How nice would it be if you have somebody on your team who just collects all the relevant documents that you need for month end close and then puts them in a nice, neat, digitally organized folder on your computer. That way, instead of going to your email and logging into 10 different websites, instead, you can just go to one folder on your computer for that client for that month and pull up all the relevant documents. That would make month end close so much easier. And it's really simple. You don't actually need to teach somebody how to do month-end reconciliation. You just have to teach somebody how to collect documents and where to put them. But also, that's such a great stepping stone. That's such a great first step. Because if you teach somebody how to do that, then it's pretty simple to teach somebody how to reconcile accounts. You could easily start somebody off with helping you with document collection, and then after a couple months, maybe after six months, they do a good job. Then you could teach them how to actually start reconciling accounts. It would be a very easy transition, a very easy promotion, a very easy step up, a very easy additional task. They already have all the documents, they already know how to do that. Now you just gotta get the information and reconcile the accounts and QuickBooks. And then, of course, recording transactions. That's obvious. Most bookkeepers, that's what we do. We record transactions. So it would probably make sense to hire somebody to help you with recording transactions. But you have to have a process, you gotta have a system, you gotta have an SOP for each client before you hire somebody, before you try to teach them how to record transactions. Now, and how do you teach somebody? How do you train somebody? These are all rhetorical questions that you have to answer for your business. In person, are you gonna have an office where people come in person, or is it gonna be all virtual? Training people, managing people virtually comes with its own challenges. But might be easier to get started, less money, you don't have to buy an office, you don't have to pay rent, you don't have to have somebody in person. But pros and cons to each. Maybe shadowing, maybe if you are in person, maybe hey, just just sit here, sit next to me for the next two days, just watch what I do, just watch what I do, see what I do, see how I operate, and then we can go from there. Slowly introduce clients. If you do have if you do hire somebody, you don't necessarily need to hire somebody full time. Maybe you just hire somebody part-time, maybe five, ten hours per week, and just give them a couple clients, give them a few clients, let them learn, give them, give them your easy clients, let them learn how to do the bookkeeping on easy clients, and then slowly add more clients. How do you pay somebody? I don't even have this in my notes, but just thinking about slowly adding more clients, I guess there's two different ways to pay somebody. You can pay somebody hourly, which is probably the easiest way, but might not necessarily be the best compensation for them. You can also pay somebody per client. Maybe it's I don't know, 30% of revenue, 40%, 50% of revenue. That would be really simple. And then it's like, hey, you want to make more money? Take on more clients. Pretty simple way to h pretty simple way to pay somebody. I don't know, I guess that's up to you. Pay somebody hourly, pay somebody salary, or pay somebody kind of commission based. Probably a mix of both. Maybe I'm gonna give you a base salary for the first 12 months, and then we're slowly going to transition you from salary to commission based on how many clients you take on. That way you reward people. Some people just trying to chill. I just want to make a couple thousand bucks a month being a bookkeeper, working for a bookkeeper. So I don't need 30 clients. But maybe somebody else trying to trying to hustle, trying to make some extra money, maybe they do want 30 or 40 clients and they would love to get that commission, that incentive to take on more work. Doesn't matter who you hire, doesn't matter what they do, you gotta think about quality control. You gotta manage them, you have to check their work. This is a whole different, a whole different situation, a whole different set of skills. You are going from just the bookkeeper to now the manager. You've got to manage your people and you've got to check their work. Quality control. Very important. Very, very important. Okay, let's wrap it up. I think that's pretty much it for this 10-week video series. Last topic. Think bigger than just bookkeeping. Think about all of the opportunities that bookkeeping creates. Think about why you started this bookkeeping business in the first place. Flexible schedule. You are no longer confined to a 40-hour work week, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. You're no longer forced to work overtime or weekends or on holidays. Flexible schedule. Being an entrepreneur, business owner, you can work as little or as much as you want. Location, working from home, working remotely. Huge blessing. You can go all over the world and you can continue to service your bookkeeping clients. You can continue managing your virtual team working from anywhere on the beach, at the lake house, working from home, working at your friend's house, traveling anywhere. Financial freedom. I firmly believe that the earning potential for entrepreneurs is generally higher than employees. I think, this is my opinion, I think it's easier to make a hundred thousand dollars per year as an employee. But I think it's easier to make a million dollars a year as an entrepreneur. And if you grow your bookkeeping business correctly, you can absolutely potentially make a million dollars per year. Very hard to make a million dollars per year as an employee, maybe a surgeon or a partner at a law firm. Very hard to make a million dollars as an employee. Also, very hard to make it as an entrepreneur, but I don't think I could have made a million dollars as an employee. I just don't have the specific skill set to be an employee making a million dollars. But absolutely can make a million dollars as an entrepreneur, growing your bookkeeping business and potentially doing some other things. Learning valuable skills. You just started a bookkeeping business. You just started a business, you just learned sales, marketing, how to set up a website, how to maybe run paid ads, how to do sales consultations, how to sell people, how to deliver customer service. You just learned so many valuable skills. That's kind of what happened to me. I I started doing bookkeeping for real estate investors, and then I learned about private money lending, and then I learned about investment funds, and then I learned how to underwrite private money loans and real estate acquisitions. And that's kind of how I transitioned, graduated to managing zip capital. So if you don't really know my story, I started with bookkeeping, 10 clients, 20 clients, 40 clients, 80 clients from 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024. And then 2025, I launched my investment fund, Zip Capital. And now I'm totally focused on zip capital. I still have 40 bookkeeping clients. I'm slowly getting rid of several clients every month to eventually I'm gonna have zero bookkeeping clients, hopefully in six to 12 months. And now I'm just 100% focused on growing zip capital. But I never could have started zip capital, my investment fund, real estate, hard money lending. I never could have started that had I not started a bookkeeping business. I learned about it by accident, just by running my bookkeeping business, working with real estate investors. But the the key point is you are not just getting a new job. You are not just starting a business. You are learning incredibly valuable skills that could transition and evolve onto the next thing. So keep that in mind. Everything you learn starting your bookkeeping business could potentially lead to your next big idea. But remember, watching videos won't build your business. I'm happy that you joined me on this 10-week video series. If you haven't already, subscribe to my YouTube channel, comment down below. You know the drill. But watching these videos won't build your business. Taking action will start before you feel ready. Learn as you go, make mistakes, learn from your mistakes. Don't make the same mistake twice. Stay consistent, never give up. One day you're going to look back and you're going to realize that first bookkeeping client changed your life.