How to Create More Time for Yourself with Kelly Moreland

Kelly wears a number of different hats. She’s a mom of three little boys, a wife to a husband who travels a lot for business, a landlady and real estate investor, on top of her bookkeeping business.

[3:30] The real estate side of things were happening before the bookkeeping business came into the picture. Kelly and her husband were both working full time and had a couple of rental properties but having kids really changed things. They made some big moves, sold their properties and that was initially how Kelly found bookkeeping as a viable option.

[7:15] Kelly now works from home as a bookkeeper. Her former career was in financial services helping clients invest their money. She enjoyed the numbers aspects of the job and helping people with their money. She stumbled on the idea of bookkeeping after having a chance conversation with her godfather.

[8:40] She started out doing everything wrong (in her words) but she figured it out day by day. Kelly thought that there must be other businesses out there that need bookkeeping services, and that’s when she found Ben’s videos online and joined the course.

[9:40] The best part of the bookkeeping business is the flexibility to make her own schedule. Kelly also enjoys working with people and hearing how they built their business, it also helps that she genuinely enjoys doing their books.

[11:00] There were challenges at every turn but right now Kelly’s biggest challenge is in bringing people into her business and leveraging them to create more time for herself.

[12:10] Always start with the vision of where you want to go. Your vision gives you context to make better decisions. It needs to be specific and well defined in order to be useful.

[13:00] Kelly has a three-year vision where she wants to grow slowly and bring in some contractors to help her. She has a pretty aggressive income goal of quadrupling her current income, and one of her goals is for her bookkeeping business to help fund her real estate activities.

[15:20] One of the things that Kelly always puts off is the manual data entry tasks. This is one task that she be added to Kelly’s not-to-do list right away and is a good candidate for a virtual assistant to take on. Make your to-do list every single day and mark the tasks that you just don’t want to do, those are your first targets for delegation.

[18:15] As you scale your business, the benefit you get is exponential but the downside is also exponential if you don’t get it right at the beginning.

[19:30] Always ask yourself this question, ‘What are my clients paying me for?’ Are they paying you to do manual entries? No, that’s part of what you do to get what they are paying you for but they aren’t paying you for that. They are paying for your smile, for your information, for your reports, and for your interpretation.

[20:10] Only do what you can do. Find someone who can follow instructions, document your task, and then give it to them to take care of.

[21:00] Start with the smallest and least technical tasks and then increase the workload a bit at a time. Starting small keeps the costs down and reduces the learning curve. When someone does make a mistake, make sure you show them what the error was instead of just fixing it yourself.

[24:00] Bookkeeper Elite is a great place to find someone you can add to your team.

[25:45] Temper the expectations at the beginning of the relationship. With VA’s the time commitment is very flexible, unlike a traditional employee.

[27:00] Kelly currently spends around 80 to 100 hours a month working on her business, not counting the random nightly phone calls from clients.

[28:45] Work expands to fill the time allotted. Look at your schedule, chances are you can drop 20% of your time just by giving yourself a cap on the time you allow yourself to spend on it. When you are on you are your off time, be careful about letting your work intrude on your personal life.

[32:40] Once you’ve been more efficient with your time, that will lead you to start thinking about who can help you make your time more useful.

Mentioned in this episode: Precision Bookkeeping