Kristin Ingram is a Small Biz Mama. In this interview, she shares how she’s able to run multiple businesses and enjoy family life. Plus, tips for launching your successful online business!
You can connect with Kristin at smallbizmama.com
If you struggle to tell stories, you’ll struggle to raise funds.
In the Mission Writers course:
Details at MissionWriters.org
Support the Show.
Mission Writers is an online course and group coaching experience where you’ll develop and practice essential storytelling skills to help increase funding for your mission. Get started now, for a year of coaching at over 60% off the regular price.
Kristin Ingram is a Small Biz Mama. In this interview, she shares how she’s able to run multiple businesses and enjoy family life. Plus, tips for launching your successful online business!
You can connect with Kristin at smallbizmama.com
If you struggle to tell stories, you’ll struggle to raise funds.
In the Mission Writers course:
Details at MissionWriters.org
Support the Show.
Mission Writers is an online course and group coaching experience where you’ll develop and practice essential storytelling skills to help increase funding for your mission. Get started now, for a year of coaching at over 60% off the regular price.
Kay: Kristen, you are amazing. I love following what you’re doing on all the socials and, and you know, I just see you popping up here and there with great advice. And then I see, you know, family pictures and I know that work life balance is a big thing. And I know it’s a big thing for a lot of our listeners, can you tell us a little bit of all the things that you’re doing.
Kristin: Okay. So yeah, so I think it’s funny because talking about work life balance, I think when I tell people all the things I do, they’re like, there’s no way that she has balanced. But I’m going to start off by saying, before I tell you all the things that I don’t work more than 25 to 30 hours a week. Okay with all the things.
So here’s what I do. I teach full time at a university. I teach a tax to graduate and undergraduate students. I have a CPA firm where I have clients all over the country. I do tax and consulting work primarily for online businesses.
Kay: Okay.
Kristin: I have a course called bookkeeper training school, which we have almost 250 students in now.
I’m also a mom of a little. He’s two. His name’s Eric. My husband Jeff is with me as well, and we’re both at home, so we kind of trade off on, child raising, which is so cool. It’s so fun that we get to do that together. And, I also have a site called accounting and focus where I provide accounting tutorials for college students who are taking accounting courses. So we do a lot of stuff.
Kay: Yeah, you do. And you know when I think accounting, of course, I’m thinking that’s a lot of concentration and everything has to be exact. And then you’ve got so many things going on, but one of the things you’re doing as well as you’ve got the Small Biz Mama, right? You’ve got your own podcast, which, guys check it out. It’s, I mean, your episodes are like 15 minutes.
Kristin: Yeah. We try to keep them super short. Yeah. Cause they’re mama’s right? And so I want it to be something you can listen to in the shower. You can listen to when you’re doing the dishes, you know?
Kay: And you’ve got this great, kind of like a mantra. It’s like, “We are busy mommas who love our kids and we do any from them. We are the home based business that make this country move.” I mean, it goes on. I love it. So, let’s start with the mom. And grow into kind of how that works with the business, I just know that’s going to be the number one question. So let’s start there
Kristin: Yeah. So I mean, the biggest thing is to be realistic about the time that you have. I think that there are a lot of moms out there that they want to start a business and they get into it and realize that this is a full time job. How am I going to balance that with my kids? And so the reason that I’m able to do as much as I do is because I automate as much as I possibly can.
I delegate a lot. You know, I say no a lot, and I’m really focused on how many hours I have in the day to actually get work done. And right now with my current schedule, I’m at about four and a half hours a day that I’ve got for work. And some of those hours are what I refer to as unfocused hours where you know, my phone is ringing a lot. My email is dinging a lot. Eric is going, “Mama, mama, mama, mama.” So I have to divide my, to do list into my focus time and my unfocused time. If you have kids, you know that there are times where you might be able to respond to some emails while your kids are talking to you in the background. Or maybe you’re cooking dinner and you’re able to read an article that might help you be a better business owner. Those are my unfocused tasks and I keep those separate.
My really focused time in the morning, I make sure I’m not checking email during that time. I’m not on Facebook during that time. I’m really dialed in to what I need to do during those hours, because there aren’t that many of them.
Kay: So don’t fritter away your time doing those kind of scattered things that you can do when you don’t need to focus, to do those tasks. That’s great. I do a lot of learning with podcasts. Anyway, that’s a great errand-running thing. Or doing other things.
Kristin: Absolutely.
Kay: That’s not just for moms either. It’s for dads, for anybody. I mean, I think a lot of people are dealing with this for the first time now in the middle of this coronavirus stay at home time and people are seeing how hard it is. But also I think there are a lot of people discovering how really wonderful it can be.
Kristin: Absolutely. I think, I mean, we’ve been doing this for a long time. I retired my husband, at the beginning of 2017. So we’re blessed. We’re running about three years that we’ve been doing this together full time.
It was actually funny because we made the decision to bring him home. My husband and I had been together for, at that point we had been together for 16 years. And we didn’t think we could have kids. You know, we just thought as the two of us, we were kind of building this business has like a travel, you know? We’re going to travel and speak. I think I spoke at Launch Out three times in 2016. And he left his job and we think we got pregnant like that week.
Kristin: And so it completely changed our entire plan, right? Because I’m like, well, we’re not gonna be traveling and we have a baby coming. We had to pivot and change the trajectory of our business and where we were going with it, but it’s awesome to be able to go and have lunch with them every day and to be there when my son wakes up from his nap and have breakfast. I talked to all these people that and they’re constantly running.
Kristin: And even now, with the with the pandemic, because they have to get to their desk at a certain time, to start the day. And they’re trying to homeschool and work and, and it’s like we don’t have that rush in our lives. It’s such a wonderful blessing to just be able to be.
Kay: Yes, it, it truly is. I remember, years ago, I had a job interview. And it turned out to be a two and a half hour drive. It shouldn’t have been, but the traffic; and that was typical traffic. There wasn’t anything wrong. It was just that was normal traffic for that distance, for that, that specific place. And by the time I got to the interview, I had decided I didn’t want the job. Practice interview. You know, if this is going to be five hours of my day in commuting. I think about the impact on the family. No, I can’t, I just can’t.
Kristin: Yeah, that’s not doable. And I think a lot of times, we forget when we’re trying to calculate. When I talk to moms and they say, “I’m interested in being a bookkeeper, but you know, I need to make this much money.”
And when I say, “Okay, well how much do you pay for your work clothes? How much do you pay for commuting? How much time do you lose for commuting? How much do you spend on fast food because you’re busy? How much do you spend?” I mean it was funny because one of the things I keep hearing from people is, “I can’t believe how much money I spent eating out,” because they’re not doing it anymore.
But when you add it up, and then daycare. The average family spends $13,000 a year on daycare for one child. One! That’s craziness. So when you start to add it all up, a lot of people are realizing, “I’m not even making any money working, right?” Because it’s still expensive to go out, and then the time lost. So when we start to dig into those numbers with people, they realize that they don’t have to work as much as they thought, if they work really smart. And they cut back on those costs for working.
Kay: And the stress level goes down, which is huge. I have followed you recently as you launched a new thing. And that was your bookkeeper training school. It’s for the moms that you’re talking about right there, right? That are making that switch. And they’re saying, “Okay, I do, I want to, I want to try and figure out a way to stay home. Now what can I do?” So tell me about the bookkeeper training school and how you came to do that.
Kristin: It was actually, about a year ago. I was at my, semi-annual mastermind meeting. So I’m in Julie’s _ mastermind group. It’s called Digital Insiders, and she has business owners from all over the world that descend on Hartford, Connecticut twice a year. I’m the CPA in the group, so everybody’s coming up to me asking me about bookkeepers. And I didn’t have anybody that I trusted enough to refer out to people. Kay: Oh yeah. Kristin: And then we were on our way home, one of the nights of the mastermind. I’m going through my Facebook feed, and there was a woman talking about how she was crying in the parking lot of her son’s daycare because she was dropping him off for the first time at six weeks old. Because she had to go back to work. And it’s like I never had to experience that with my son, because we’ve always been home with him. Both of us have been home with him, and it just kind of clicked.
Like, what if? I’ve been teaching small business owners how to do bookkeeping for almost 20 years. And it’s your average person. A lot of times I’m teaching the wife. Right? So somebody has a landscaping business or an electrical business, and their wives are doing the bookkeeping at night. So I’ve been doing this for 20 years. And I thought to myself, “What if I can teach these moms how to be bookkeepers?” You know, because I’ve even taught Jeff how to do this for our business. He does a lot of our bookkeeping during tax season, for my clients. What if we teach them the system that we put together, which is highly automated, very quick, and really, really profitable? You know, you could make a full time income while your kids are napping.
And that’s how Bookkeeper Training School was born. That’s really, that’s our tagline. We help moms create a full time income while their kids are napping. Now I have former college students of mine in the group. We have dads in the group. We have retirees in the group, because of the message of creating a full time income, you know, everybody knows the kids don’t nap very long. You know, what? Maybe two hours a day.
Kristin: So if I hadn’t created an income in two hours a day, like everybody kind of understands what that means. That’s where Bookkeeper Training School, kind of where we got the idea. It’s funny, because I’ve been in Julie’s mastermind for, it had been two years at that point. Every six months I’d come in and be like, “Look, I came up with this idea!” And she’s like, “Nope, that’s not it.” And I’d be like, “Okay, what about this?” And she’s like, “No, that’s not it.” And so we came back the next day and it was actually my turn to go. And I said, “Okay, I’ve come up with this thing called Bookkeeper Training School, and I’m going to teach moms how to create a full time income while their kids are napping.” And she went, “That! Go make that! Go do that! Like, right now, go, go do that!”
You may also like: The Power of Lament
So we launched it in July. I just kind of posted it on my wall and said, “Hey, I’m going to build this course. Do you want to come with me?” We had 40 people sign up. Kay: Oh, that’s great. Kristin: Yeah. We built the course. We launched it again in January, and we had over 175 people join.
Kay: Boom. Oh, that’s awesome.
Kristin: So, it was a great launch. We have a great group of folks in the group. Like I said, I’ve got young moms, I’ve got older moms, I have people who are fur moms. I’ve got dads, I’ve got retirees, I’ve got college students. So I really target moms, but then we brought a really diverse group of people into the group. And it’s just, it’s, it’s a blast. I do a live call with them every week and answer all their questions and it’s like the highlight of my week to do that with them.
Kay: Oh, that’s wonderful. And then now when somebody asks you who you’re going to refer, you’ve got over 200 people now that you can refer them out to. That is huge.
Kristin: Yeah. And if, if anyone in your audience needs a bookkeeper, they can go to small biz mama.com and they can hire a bookkeeper right from there.
Kay: All right. Did y’all hear that? You need a bookkeeper? Now? You know where to go.
Kristin: Yep. Smallbizmama.com.
Kay: Smallbizmama.com and I’ll also have that link in the show notes. Another our listeners are also saying, I want to create a course. And you had a launch and you got 40 people. I talked to somebody the other day, you know, in a Facebook conversation, and they were saying, “I only had two people sign up.” And the person leading the conversation said, “Great, teach those two people, everything you know, and then launch it again!”
But starting with 40, that’s why I said, “wow, that’s awesome.” That actually is a really good launch. And then you multiply it of course, and as you keep going. I think that fear of what if I launch something and nobody shows up? That’s a huge fear among, I think, every online entrepreneur, especially people stepping into this space for the first time. What do you do? I’m not talking tactics, but in general, how do you prepare people to say yes. Once you have found that thing, or maybe it’s finding the thing is the key. But if you could speak to that.
Kristin: Yeah. So I think what happens a lot of times, and this happened with us, is that you come up with an idea and you’d say, okay, this is the thing, and then you create it. And you launch it to the world. Then if only two people buy, or one person buys, and I had this happen before. We tried to launch a tax course a couple of years ago for small business owners. I had one person buy. I said, okay, this is not the thing. Right. This is not the thing.
So I think the biggest thing is not to get too attached to your idea. Okay. And don’t build it. If you’re going to launch a course, that’s anything more than like two or $300, don’t build it first. Sell it first. The first time, you sell it. We did this with Bookkeeper Training School. The first time we sold that, we told people, “Here’s the schedule. This is how we’re going to release the content, but I haven’t built it yet.” So we were completely up front with people, and we sold it for a significant discount because we were building the course. They took it, and we sold it. I talked about it for a week, and we did the whole open cart. We did a sales page, but we treated it like it was a launch.
And I think what happens a lot of times with people who are building courses, or selling any sort of any sort of product for the first time. I see this with authors all the time. “I wrote a book, look! Buy my book!” And you never hear from them again. “I don’t understand why nobody bought my book or bought my course or bought my thing.” You have to talk about it all the time. All the time. I am so tired. I had this conversation with somebody, about a week ago. They were selling an online service. And they’re like, “Well, I don’t know how to get people to sign up.” I’m like, “Do you talk about it all the time?” All the time. I go live every single day on my Facebook page. I chit chat with my followers and I mention Bookkeeper Training School, or I talk about a book or talk about something that we’re doing. Every single day. We email multiple times a week. We post multiple times a day.
And you know what one of my mentors told me is, if they’re not sick of your face, you’re not live enough. You’re not out there. If you’re not getting unsubscribes from your list, you’re not emailing enough.
Kay: Ooh, yeah,
Kristin: Okay. The goal is not to keep everybody on the list. The goal is to get the non-buyers off the list.
Kay: Yes.
Kristin: Right? So when I got that, when I really started to think about it that way. You don’t want people that are in a little about you to follow you. You want raving fans to follow you. Right? So if you think about like, think about like your favorite celebrity or your favorite preacher or your favorite person to listen to. There is not enough content that that person could put out to make you happy, right? I’m like that with Brendon Burchard, there is not enough content that that man can put out to make me happy. That’s who you want to be for your followers. You want to be that person. They’re like, Oh my God, she’s live. Oh my God, he’s live. I got to go watch it.
Kay: yeah. They’re going to turn on the notifications.
Kristin: Let me go get it.
Kay: Yeah.
Kristin: You want to be that person for people. You don’t want to be the, well, I’m going to put stuff out every once in a while and then I got to apologize because I have had emails for three months. You don’t want to be that person. You want to have the raving fans and that’s how you do it. You have to be out there. Those are people who make money. Sell it.
Kay: Yes, of course. You know, the next question is, okay, if I’ve got to post every day now that’s the pressure again, right? But what do I say? What do I do, to create all of this content? I think that also is the next terrifying wave that washes over an online entrepreneur.
Kristin: So we use Slack in our business, but you could do it in a notebook or I have this big, mixed media notebook on my desk. I have a planner that I carry around with me. I’ve got Evernote on my phone. Anytime I have an idea for something, I write it down because I think during the day we have lots and lots of ideas, but then the moment we want to post, or the moment we want an email or whatever it is, we can’t remember what to say.
Kay: Yep.
Kristin: Right? So if I keep a running list of what I want to talk about, and it could be, I think sometimes we think that we have to talk about our topic all the time. And people want to do business with people they like and trust. They cannot learn to trust you if you don’t let them behind the scenes a little bit. So, you know, a lot of what I’m posting on Instagram is pictures of my son and pictures of my family. And Hey, I went out for a walk and I’ll look, it’s cloudy, but I’m still out here, you know, Hey, look, I’m doing an interview with today. Huh? You know, it’s, I think we overthink it a lot. Right? And I think that it’s, it’s really important to understand that you’re not doing this content for you. You’re doing it for for your followers. I think especially men have this issue that they’re like, well, I wouldn’t look at that. I wouldn’t want to watch that. But you have lots of people who do.
Kay: Yeah.
Kristin: So it’s not about what you like, it’s about what your audience likes.
Kay: Yes. Yes. That’s a that was a really hard one for me, and I’m still learning that one. You know. Part of it is I just do the things I like, but I also need to do the things that, especially what do my audience likes. But guys tell me, what do you love? Give us more of , fill in the blank for me and you’ll get it.
Kristin: You know? And it’s really funny because I think so for, if you are going to launch a course. Okay, are you’re going to launch anything? The best thing that you can do? And I got so much response to this when I sent it out. You send out a very short email, right? And this is kind of the beginning of like, Ooh, what’s she doing?
You know, what’s he doing? Very short email. Hi, I’m working on a course about blank. If I had to put one thing in that course for you, what would it be? And they will tell you. I had so many people who wrote back to me on that, and that really helped us figure out what needed to be in Bookkeeper Training School.
It was interesting because a lot of the answers had nothing to do with bookkeeping. Like, I don’t know how to run a business. I don’t know how to market. I don’t know how to manage my time. I don’t know how to manage my money. So we built all of these bonuses around Bookkeeper Training School to deal with all of those things. So ask. Ask what they want.
Kay: Yeah. And you have to have that whole package. And that’s one reason I wanted to have you on. I mean, I know you’re a CPA and, and like, I could ask you a lot of accounting questions and I could ask you a lot of bookkeeping questions. But you launched a course based on the thing that you know backwards and forwards.
The things that are obvious, I think Brian Dixon, he’s going to be my guest in a couple of weeks. He always says, “The thing that’s obvious to you is like miracle to somebody else,” you know? And so we, we as creators, we have the curse of knowledge, right? We know everything. So we don’t think there’s a lot that we can talk about. So all of those things around the things that people really have the questions about, they don’t know to ask for the things that we’re thinking about teaching.
Kristin: Right.
Kay: Expert kind of things. You know, they expect all that to come. They expect to run into things that they don’t know about, but then the other stuff is the really scary stuff that keeps them from doing it.
I talked to so many writers that want to get the word out about their book, but they have no idea how to do it. And they get stuck on “I don’t know how to build a website.”
Kristin: Right
Kay: Or “I don’t know how to schedule my posts.” Well, okay. You can learn that. So, that’s one reason I wanted you to come in and talk actually about creating a course. Because you know what? So, so think about it. If you’re listening, think about you. Just what is it that you know, that people ask you about?
Kristin: Right. And it’s funny because when I teach my undergraduate tax course at the university, the last class, because my students all know that I do all this online stuff and I make money online, and they really want to know how to do this. So the last night of class, I say, okay. You know, if you’re not interested in this, you can leave.
But everybody who wants to stay, and I teach them the pillars of online business. And that’s what I tell them. There is something that you know how to do, that enough of the population does not know how to do, that they would pay you for it.
You may also like: VANESSA CHASE LOCKSHIN – THE STORYTELLING NON-PROFIT
Kay: Yeah.
Kristin: So find out what is that thing, you know? And go out and do that.
Kay: Yeah, and I think the other thing that gets in our way is, we think we have to have a thousand people taking our course for it to help us make a living, or for it to be successful. I’m making air quotes. But you really only need what you need. I mean, you figure out what, what do you need to charge for it? What’s the value of what you’re teaching?
Kristin: Great.
Kay: And how many people do you need to sign up? And I think that that number is a lot smaller than a lot of us think it is.
Kristin: I mean, just run the numbers. If my course is this much, how much will I make if I have 100 people or 200 people? Right? Or 500 people?
And I think that the biggest mistake that I made, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs make this. Go do something. I don’t care what it is. Go, go drive for Uber. I don’t care. Go do something and save up some money and run ads.
Once you know that you have a course that people want, right? So you use, use your small audience, build your course off their feedback, and then once you have that, run ads on Facebook. Because we could not have done as well as we did without running an ad campaign.
We got the initial 40 in July, just off my own thing. And we’ve got some other people who bought, over the six months until the year ended. Then we sunk some money into ads. We got 6,500 people on our email list running ads. We got 3,500 people in a Facebook group running ads. And we got 175 people to sign up for our course.
Kay: That’s awesome.
Kristin: And it can take forever to organically build an audience.
Kay: Yes.
Kristin: At some point, if you want to reach new people and really, really scale, you have to run ads. You have to.
Kay: My dad used to always tell the story of a CEO riding with a young up and coming executive. They were in a train, and the young guy really wanted to make an impression on the CEO. So he said, “I’ve got this idea. We can, we can boost profits if we cut costs,” and he wanted to cut the marketing. And, the CEO, you know, sees, yeah. The guy is young, he doesn’t know. So he’s going to teach him, and he says, “All right. Do you think you think this train is going fast enough?” “Yeah. Yeah. It’s going, it’s a good speed.” You know? It’s like, “Are we going in the right direction, and at a good pace?”
“Yeah.” “That’s great. Okay, well let’s toss the engine. Let’s, we don’t need the engine anymore.” Right? “No, we need the engine!” But it’s the same thing. That was my great marketing lesson, I think as a teenager, that I got from my dad, and it’s still. That’s the one I go back to. You have to have marketing, I don’t care what you do. You absolutely have to have marketing and you’re so right about that.
Kristin: You absolutely have to have marketing and you’re so right about that. And have realistic expectations. Do some research on what realistic conversion rates look like. Because This is really down and dirty, but for us to acquire a new buyer for bookkeeper training school, it costs us about $50.
So if you think that you’re going to spend $20 in ads on Facebook and get 80 people to buy your thing, that’s not going to happen. That was one thing that was really eyeopening for me, cause I, I’ve been doing this online thing for like 12 years.So to figure out, you know, what are realistic numbers for people opting in for people, watching and buying. And it’s really important. You can do research and there are people that talk about this online that are going to give you that information, but really understand what’s realistic before you throw in the towel because the numbers are a lot lower than you think they are. You know, I think most people think like, okay, if I put up an opt in, and I put up a free thing, 90% of people that land on the page are going to sign up for, no, no.
If you’re getting 50% you’re doing really, really well,
Kay: that is good. Yep.
Kristin: So you have to be realistic about how many people you have to get into the, you know, the top of your sales process to get the number of sales that you want.
Kay: Right.
Kristin: Really, really important.
Kay: Yeah. And that’s it. Just the realities of, of business. I mean, that’s whether you’re in a walk-in store, you know, a physical place or, or online, not everybody’s going to buy everything. Not everybody’s going to follow the process like you want them to. And if you can get an idea of what those numbers are, it’ll lower your stress level and really inform your actions, and you can take the smart actions.
Kristin: Yeah. Well, I’ve been saying that to my business. My, my bookkeepers too, like, you know, you know, I, I didn’t get any new clients this week. I’m like, well, how many business owners did you talk to? Like two. Okay. We need to do more than two. Right. You know, I mean, you’re gonna, you’re always gonna have people who say no, and so the thing I pushed my bookkeepers to do is to get an answer.
Yes is best. No is awesome. No answer is not good.
Kay: Right.
Kristin: So we just want to have a definitive answer. Are you going to hire me or not? Yes or no, and, and keep moving forward. In any sort of sales process, you need to talk to way more people than you think you’re going to need to.
Kay: And keep showing up. You know, we talked earlier about all the content, creating all the content and being there until you think everybody’s sick of you. But, that was a big part of even you getting that first 40 in your course and building that whole thing. That was part of the success was you are showing up. Long before you ever had the ideas, so don’t wait for the idea. Just show up with what you’ve got because you, you’ve built, you have authority. Like if somebody has an accounting question, I’m going to send them to you. So, you’re actually, this is great go-to resource you’ve become the authority. How do you become the person that people send people to you?
Kristin: So I think for me it was, I mean, like I said, I’ve been doing the online thing for like 12 years. Right? And so one of my online pet peeves, okay. And, and I tell my bookkeepers this, if people ask a question online and you can give a short answer, do it. Because one thing that drives me crazy is when you have people that say, PM me or I’ll PM you. Because typically, when those posts are in a big group of people, and you PM, there’s all these other accounts that go, oh PM me, oh I’ll help you.
And I just put in the answer, Oh, this is what you should do. Or this is what my clients do. Or, you know, this is what I generally recommend. Remember, that might not be the answer for everybody. Right, and you kind of put that little disclaimer in there. What I find is that people, there are other people will read that post and reach out to you, right?
Because they’re like, Oh wow. She gave the answer know she’s really helpful. And so you become like the defacto authority in that area. And so I found like sometimes I’ll respond to a post like that and I’ll have seven or eight people, not the original poster, contact me for a consult.
Kay: Yeah.
Kristin: So you may get, if you do the Oh PM me thing, or I’ll PM you, you might get one person to react.
But if you’re genuine with your attitude, you freely help people. You’re going to, it’s going to come back to tenfold. And so that, that’s always been my advice on that. And I’ve been doing that for 10 years, one of the things I did is, when the, when all of the SBA loans started and IDL and PPP and all the acronyms, I was out there all the time, Hey, this is what’s going on with the loans. This is how you apply, this is how you do this. and I’ve. I’ve had other people reach out to me to talk to their groups. And so, like we’re, we’re kind of estimating that I’ve probably reached about 5,000 businesses just through organic reach online.
Kay: Yeah.
Kristin: And so that’s really, really cool, you know, to do that.
Kay: And when you, when you keep spreading it out there, you just, you just keep showing up. That’s what we keep saying. Keep showing up and build that thing is it’s that know, like, and trust. So the other people that are, that are saying PM me, they’re trying to jump straight to a sale and they haven’t built the know, like, and trust. They haven’t let people get to know them. They haven’t given them a reason to like them.
Kristin: And they haven’t shown their value yet.
Kay: Exactly. And so it’s kind of like the whole dating thing, you know? It’s like, no, you do not jump ahead. So yeah, that’s huge. That’s huge. What, you know, because we’re coming to the end and I just, I always want to give people, if you’re listening and you’re saying, Oh my gosh. This is great. I’ve got some ideas rolling around right now, but I don’t know how to get started. What’s, what’s the first thing people need to do to get started? If they think, think, Oh, I have, I have something I can start to do online.
Kristin: So I think the first thing is to start talking about the topic online and see what kind of traction you get. And when you do that. So let’s say that you start a Facebook page and you start talking about your thing. Share it out on your personal profile, right. Share it out in other places, because I think sometimes we put things out there and we’re like, Oh, it was crickets. I’m done. I’m done. You have to do a great show up on a regular basis. Talk about your topic and see if you can see if you can generate some traction, but give it, give it two months. Going out on a regular basis, you know, pretty much daily talking about your thing and introducing yourself to people and getting out there and see what happens.
Kay: Yeah.
Kristin: But it is, Rome was not built in a day, and this won’t be either. Be patient.
Kay: Yes. And like you said earlier, you kept coming back to your mastermind group. Is this it? Is this it? I’ve got a great idea. Keep doing that because your, your people will tell you if it’s it or not. And you’ll know. So Kristen, thank you so, so much. I think you’ve helped a lot of people today as you, that’s, I mean, that’s what I know you for doing.
As as we close, just tell us again how people can get a hold of you because if they need accounting, they need to go to you and if they need bookkeeping school, they need to go to you and then we’ll have some other resources as well.
Kristin: So smallbizmama.com is the best place to reach us. You can find our podcast there. You can hire a bookkeeper, you can become a bookkeeper. You can connect to all of my social channels. Smallbizmama.com is the best place to go.