I read this review description for a business, and it has stuck with me. It wasn’t for a bakery. Or a restaurant. It was for a women’s clothing store. It made me want to find the store just to see what was so great about the customer experience that it could draw a review so sweet and delicious.

I am big on change; I am always iterating on my business models, app stack, systems and processes - so, of course, that means there are trials along the way.

But as I love to say (so much so that I have trademarked it) “Change is hard. Not changing will be harder.”

I am in the messy middle of a change, of a few changes, actually. I decided to hit myself up with honing my niche and all the required process updates, along with rationalizing two of my workhorse techs. I wanted to start 2024 off fresh, but I may have been a little ambitious.

The way we market our services is often “water bottling”. We have lulled ourselves into services that every bookkeeping and accounting firm provides. 

But what if you engage in some navel-gazing of yourself and your firm and figure out your unique qualities?

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I have blogged for more than a few years but what is fairly new to me, is my email campaigns. I didn’t think the effort-to-outcome ratio would make it worthwhile. I didn’t have a clear enough outcome of why I would send out emails. I wasn’t sure how to bring value to subscribers. And I was worried about being intrusive to people’s inboxes. Sound like you?

Running a successful business means email communication runs rampant. But what if there was another way? A way to run your business so that it doesn’t require your inbox to overflow with to-dos constantly? Would you do it? I would hope so!

My friend ChatGPT listed a few other reasons why we don’t delegate. These aren’t my reasons, but for those of you who are like me and aren’t delegating some of the silly things we should, they may resonate.

• Lack of trust

• Perfectionism

• Lack of delegation skills

• Fear of Repercussions

• Lack of Awareness

• Insecurity

• Perceived Costs

Community is not a place; it's a feeling.

- Unknown

I am lucky to be a part of many communities, personally and professionally. All of them add richness and depth to my life. They make me feel part of worlds larger than me, give me deep meaning to my business and life and add immeasurable joy to my day!

I have been hitting the road pretty hard these last five weeks.

And when I haven’t been away (and the week leading up to August 28th), I’ve been crafting my content for eight - count ‘em, eight - live and virtual sessions that I hosted/am hosting between the end of August and tomorrow. That’s a ton of content, and I still need to manage my wee bookkeeping firm, work with my app partners and keep my templates fresh.

I have written previously that my husband, Jeff, has a few organizational quirks, such as not embracing naming conventions, but he excels at setting expectations and enforcing boundaries.

He has a fly fishing guiding company, Calmwaters Fly Fishing, which is committed to the preservation of fish for generations to come, so they are a catch-and-release guiding company and use barbless hooks on their flies. He gets many inquiries from anglers who would like to keep their fish, and he always says no to these requests. Always…

Oh, dear!

It may not look like it, but our golf-cart-child-wagon combo is heckishly convenient and fun for small jobs - and for my doggos - they love a golf cart ride. Heck, who doesn’t love a golf cart ride⁉️

But it’s not the most efficient setup for actual yard work. It is simple for small one-off jobs like taking away downed twigs and garden debris. Quick, no fuss, toss a bag of plant material in the back and off we go simple.

If you have read my musings in the past, you will know that my husband and I have two Australian Shepards. I have written that the one on the left, Sharkie, is a gentle beauty, and the one on the right, Tippet, is…well.. enthusiastic.

And anxious.

And unruly.

And doesn’t listen.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again “Letting go of clients is hard”. Really, really hard. I am never going to minimize the hand-wringing of churning out clients. But you should start to identify which clients are Tippet clients.

A cool reverse advertising campaign run by The Cossette Group for The Canadian Dairy Farmers more than 17 years ago, has stuck with me. The tagline was “Stop Cooking With Cheese”, and I use the saying often.

It was based on the premise that parents wanted to get their twenty-something-year-olds out of the house, but they were taking too good of care of them - they were not motivating them to leave. Cooking with cheese is obviously amazing (if you don’t like cheese, you are probably an alien…), so why would anyone leave a house that cooks with it?

I made a playlist for hiking; it has music from Peanuts, The Cranberries, and Eminem.

I call it my Trail Mix.

My husband, Jeff Parks, crafts the most awesome playlists. We have a fun little cabin filled with family, friends, and music. Lots of music. Our 1,200 sqft home has 17 connected Sonos devices, and almost always, one of Jeff’s playlists is running. People love his playlists and are constantly asking him to share them, which is easy to do from one Spotify account to another.

Unless you don’t have a consistent naming pattern - naming convention - for your lists.

According to the fortune-cookie logic most people live by, the best things in life are free. That's crap. I have a gold-plated robot that scratches the exact part of my back where my hands can't reach, and it certainly wasn't free.

- Josh Lieb

Silicone Valley Bank took us on a bender!

By this time last week, a chat group I am in was ablaze with the SVB implosion.

The SVB Advils were barely kicking in when GPT threw a party.

It went from 3 percent alcohol to 4. Seemingly overnight.

The what if-s, the I’m not sure-s, the we’ve always done it this way and it’s worked out fine-s - they are the attitudes that make it hard to implement change.

Change though - if just taking a different look at the benefits in the near future not the comfort of the time honoured past - would improve the client outcomes immensely.

Eeeek!

Tomorrow some of us are heading to #QBConnect and I am so looking forward to seeing old friends there, and meeting some of you IRL for the first time.

I will be overwhelmed, though - in a great way - as will many of you.

It’s how far you go, not how fast.

― T. Rafael Cimino (ish… same concept, slightly different words)

I am a short, flat-footed klutz - I liken myself to a penguin - but that’s okay by me. I’m out there consistently - day by day, year by year. The rhythm of my feet, the time out from the world, the changing face of the seasons - it’s all so soothing.