Episode 2 – Our Greatest Assets

Good afternoon, everyone. It's Matt Shiebler your host for the Interactive Entrepreneur sponsored by Interactive Accountants. I am your host Matt Shiebler, where we help you minimize your taxes and measure your success. So this is episode two of the interactive entrepreneur and last week you heard me speaking a little bit about my woes with Google ads, right? So what have I done so far to, you know, to kind of take care of my woes, right? What am I doing today?

Well, in the last week, since we recorded episode one, I've reached out to a couple of other firms that specialize in Google ads also reached out to one of my clients as well, who happens to be what I would call a Google ads specialist, and lo and behold, I think the most information that I got on Google ads was actually from my client and this guy is so kind, so big shout out to Frank Belinda's from ticket fit. He's actually gonna sit there and help me to design some Google ads for my business. So I don't have to spend, you know, a bunch of money hiring a professional, which I've already done in the past and spent lots of money and didn't get anywhere. He's going to help me out. You know, we're gonna create a couple of examples of Google ads, test them out, see how they perform and you know, what I've learned through that whole process is that managing SEO, Google ads, and online marketing has to be considered a part-time job in any entrepreneur's business that wants to advertise online.

So what I'm going to have to do as an entrepreneur and the way I functioned the best is scheduling time every single day, or blocking out a couple of days a week, where all I'm doing is focusing on tweaking my Google ads, reviewing the metrics that I get from the Google dashboard and, you know, tweaking things as I see fit, see if they work, see if they don't and make corrections from there. But the most important thing that I am doing today is I'm getting educated, right?

So that's, what's happening right now with me on the Google ads front and sorry, if last episode seemed like a little bit of a grunt session about that, but you know, we are taking steps and that's what we have to do as entrepreneurs. We, we fail sometimes not all the time, but we fail sometimes. Right? And when we do fail, we can't let it set us back. We have to take sometimes one step back to get two steps forward. Right? And I've failed a lot. You know, I have made a lot of failures, but I've also had some successes.

And as entrepreneurs, it was brought to my attention the other day that we don't necessarily see our successes so clearly as other people outside of us. Right? And I'm going to present an example. So the other day, when was it? Today's Friday the 13th and it's May 2022, just so everybody knows in case you forgot. And the other day I was meeting with a financial advisor that works with a couple of my Amazon DSP clients. And, you know, it was just, you know, we were just kind of sharing a little bit about each other's backgrounds, you know, where we came from, where we are today, you know, and, and learning about each other. It was the first time we met. And, you know, I was just telling her a little bit about my story, where I came from, where we are today. And I don't know, but out of the blue, she just said, wow, you know, that's, that's amazing how far you have come. You know, and as an entrepreneur, I'm just like, well, you know, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking there's so many more places that I want to go. This is nothing. You know what I mean?

I want to get here in the next five years. Right? And I almost forget that I had a lot of success in my past and I don't know, I don't always take, I.. Well, I try not to take the credit for it. Right? We need to stay humble in that respect. But at the same time, you know, a lot of that success is due to the part of an entrepreneur's hard work and energy that they put into their business because the truth of the matter is no employee is going to put in as much effort and, you know, lose sleep like an entrepreneur will, you know, over how their business is functioning, where they want to go. The, you know, the heartaches, the lawsuits, the, the, the successes, you know, those, the entrepreneur, I think feels a lot harder than just, you know, a Monday to Friday nine to five employee, you know, they are there for a paycheck. And I understand that. And you know, my employees at interactive accountants, they are my number one asset. They truly are. And at the same time though, you know, until they really want to become owners, which they have the opportunity to do there, they're not. And they're just, they're going to think a little bit differently than an entrepreneur will until they have that ownership piece. And this is my opinion, you know what I mean? So you have to, in my opinion, again, make that ownership piece available to them, present the roadmap and then, you know, challenge them as well to follow that roadmap. Should it be their course of action. You know, there's always going to be people that, you know, what Matt, or, you know, whoever the owner of the businesses, they're always, they're just going to be that look, I'm truly not interested in being an owner. I am here because I need to earn a living and that's it. And that's cool. You know, I call them worker bees and worker bees are awesome. They get stuff done. They're there when they're there, they're there. When they're not, they're not, then we have, you know, like the entrepreneurial spirit employees. And I have those, I I'm blessed. I have those in my firm. I really do. And you have to nurture these individuals to get them to where you want them to be. You know, because I don't know about you, but I didn't necessarily have the opportunity to be nurtured. Right? It was, I was a sink orswimmer. You know, some of us are different. We've had opportunities to be nurtured either by family members, mentors, or by just, you know, being in the right place at the right time with, with a boss that, that cared and showed you the ropes. You know, I, I didn't necessarily have that opportunity. I was, I was mentored for awhile. I'm not gonna lie. But then, you know, when I found out that mentor's son was going to be taking over the accounting firm and not me well, you know, and then the mentor decides to say, oh, by the way, Matt, my son is going to be, you know, taking over the accounting firm. I, I want you to train him on how to be an accountant. Truth Be told at that point in time, I lost interest.

So getting back to a little bit of a kind of, sorry, I kind of got off on a little bit of a tangent there, but you know what, let's stay with it. Let's stay with it. We're talking about mentoring staff to become either owners of our company, or at least mentoring them to think like entrepreneurs, right? That's this whole little tangent that I've been going on about here and what am I doing in my practice, right? As an entrepreneur, whether it's an accounting practice, a law practice, you know, health care, you're running an ecommerce business, whatever you're doing, you know, we have the opportunity to mentor certain individuals within our companies that we feel can take it to the next level. You know, so what am I doing?

Number one is education. So at my accounting firm, Interactive Accountants, we sponsor up to 20 hours of continuing education every year for actually every single staff member that wants to do it right now. We have some people on staff that, you know, CPAs and enrolled agents, and they're required to take continuing education every year. So for those people, it's a no brainer. You got to do it, or you lose your license. Right? But for some of our other staff that are, you know, just accounting managers with their accounting degrees or even bookkeepers, that don't even have an accounting degree. Some of them, they just, you know, they learned on the job, what are we doing for them? Again, it's the same process, education we use online webinars. That's our preferred method. And those webinars are, you know, through a subscription at the firm has with an outside company that takes care of that.

Also the one thing that we're doing this year, which is, which is quite special, and I'm really, I'm just blessed to be able to do this. This year is we're actually sponsoring a company retreat where the staff myself, we're going away for four days. So we're going to be headed over to the Dominican Republic and we're going to be having a powwow and believe it or not, this is going to be the first time that I'm actually meeting some of my employees. Hired people over the last couple of years, the last two years. And some of those people have been at our Santiago office and the DR. Some of those people have been at our New Jersey office. And, you know, I just, haven't gotten a chance to meet them in person. We've met through zoom a thousand times, but this is going to be the first time I'm actually seeing them face to face. You know, and, and I am really excited about that. I, and through this retreat, we are going to be spending a good portion of the time that we are together doing training, right? So, and I've challenged some of my staff members to prepare some of the warts of those trainings myself. I am also going to be doing some of the training. I'm going to be heading up customer service as well as also with some of my managers, we're going to be diving into some more tax return training, but some of our, you know, what I'll call senior bookkeepers are going to be working with some of our, I wouldn't say junior bookkeepers, but, you know, just staff bookkeepers and there'll be working on some techniques related to certain clients like, you know, reconciling trust funds for our attorney clients out there that have Viola accounts or trust accounts as they're commonly called.

Additionally, it'll be some time for us to just come together as a team. So if you're an entrepreneur like me and you have people working either remote, or you have offices in different parts of the country or different parts of the world for that matter, coming together once a year and being face-to-face, it was brought to my attention, right? This wasn't an a, this wasn't my original thought. I give this, I give this thought credit to one of my senior staff members here coming together and meeting face to face once a year is really important.It builds comradery.

It gives each other a, just a sense of fellowship. I'll call it. I wouldn't call it friendship because we're not all gonna be friends. Right? But a sense of fellowship where we're kind of all in the same boat and we're all rowing in the same direction, hopefully, and getting together for that meeting once, once a year, at least when you're, you know, like when you're in a situation where you're working with people remotely, I really think is extremely important. And I am looking forward to doing it again and again and again. And, you know, as the Interactive Accountants team hopefully continues to grow, we'll hopefully we'll, you know, we'll have more people and, you know, maybe we'll need a bigger hotel. I'm not sure, but we'll, we'll see what happens in the future with that. So, so we're doing education just to kind of recap, a few of the things that we spoke about so far to help mentor our staff, we're doing team building, right?

And then also we're doing what I'll call mentorship meetings, I guess is the right word for it. Right? So once a month, I meet with my senior team members. Okay. And all of my senior team members are actually on my websites. Their faces are there, right. It's called the leadership team. And once a month, we meet with the leadership team and we hash out, what's working for them. And you know, where they're having some as my good friend, Mario calls it turbulence, and Mario defines turbulence, as you know, when, like, think about when you're on the airplane. Right? And it gets a little bumpy. And I don't know about you, but I hate that. I like a smooth flight. Some people love the turbulence. It's like, Ooh, you know, but not me. So I like a smooth flight. And I like the smooth flight also in my company. I don't like turbulence, but it's going to happen no matter what. So turbulence in my business is, you know, a client's not happy or an employee isn't performing up to standard, or, you know, there's a issue going on with a client that had nothing to do with us. But, you know, we're, we're still involved in the matter somehow some way. Right?

And it's affecting our operations. Operations are not running smoothly. We have turbulence today and that's okay. Turbulence is going to happen. But it's how we, how we really deal with that turbulence. And you know, the one thing that I do in my firm is we meet again once a month with the leadership team. And we talk about what's happening with our clients, where do we have turbulence? What's working correctly and what's not.

So those are three things that I do as an entrepreneur to foster what we'll call a leadership team, you know, mentorship, whatever you want to call it. I really don't care. You know what I mean? For me, it's just making sure that I'm putting my greatest asset to work. And, you know, I'm polishing that asset, right? Sorry. A brief pause there for a sip of water. The, the asset, if we think about it, like, you know, some people love classic cars, right? And a lot of these classic cars, they go up in value their assets. And if we don't take care of our assets, they will rust. They will wither and they will lose value.

So whether you're in a service-based industry or you're a, in a, you know, like a manufacturer or a product that you deliver, there are certain assets you have in your business that just have to function all the time. You know, when they're broke down or when they're sick or when, you know, they're, they're not there for lack of a better word, they're on vacation somewhere. Some way your business is, well, I'm just going to say it somewhere, somewhere your business's hurting. If I have an employee on vacation, chances are, clients are not getting served the way they are when that employee is in the office. If I am a manufacturer and a piece of equipment on my manufacturing line is down, then I'm suffering my assets. So we have to maintain our assets. I mean, let's face it. People get sick, things break. It is what it is, but maintaining those assets, whether it's a person, whether it's a piece of equipment is well, should be right. It's not for some people it's not, but it should be for you as an interactive entrepreneur and asset that you want to take care of. You know, if you're a type of person that religiously you get your oil changed on your car, because you know, it's going to maintain the health of your car, then think about your employees like that. You know, if you're not, you know, maintaining your employees by training them, mentoring them, or at least, you know, patting them on the back once in a while, then near going to lose that asset or that asset isn't going to perform as well as it possibly could.

So wrapping things up today, I think we've, I've gone off a little bit longer than I did last week. Last week was the inaugural episode. So we are going to be getting into some more interesting topics on future episodes. And we will be having some guests. I was actually going to have Frank on the show today, but the gentleman that I spoke to you about earlier, that has helped me out with my Google ads, but unfortunately his mom got COVID. He's got to take care of mom. So we'll have Frank on a, on another episode, maybe after we've played around with those Google ads for a little bit, and I'll share with all of you what's happening with that. But in the meantime, take care of those assets entrepreneurs. They will hopefully lead you to the promised land.

This is Matt, Sheibler your Interactive Entrepreneur. And once again, Interactive Accountants is the sponsor for the Interactive Entrepreneur Podcast. So if you are interested in learning about accounting or if you are an existing entrepreneur, and maybe you're just not happy with your current accountant, check us out at interactiveaccountants.com, happy to schedule a consultation. And we appreciate everyone listening. Have a great day, take care.