Before quitting your job to be an entrepreneur

When you ask a successful entrepreneur the story of their success, typically somewherin that story they quit their job in order to pursue their business idea. It’s often a part of the story that gets glazed over, but as many aspiring entrepreneur would know it really is a pivotal move. It’s not so easy to quit a job especially if you are dependent on the income from said job. As someone who is more conservative with money (as most accountants are), I would advise on taking some preparation steps before making the jump to be a full-time entrepreneur.

Consider pursuing the business idea as a side gig

Some business ideas can be pursued as a side gig until it grows large enough to pursue full-time. This is a good way to test the waters and see if the business idea is a viable one that can also support you financially. And let’s be honest, some business ideas are just not going to work out so this is a good way to get a little taste of entrepreneurship with less risk. Being a bit of a serial entrepreneur myself, I had several side gigs including selling soaps on Etsy, starting a tutoring business while in University and starting a Shopify store based on the basic drop-shipping model. These were all fun and each experience has shaped me as the entrepreneur that I am today.

Freelancing or contracting while starting a business

Freelancing and contracting offers an excellent way of making some side income while the business is growing. When I first quit my job, I was lucky to be contacted by an agency who wanted to hire me on a short-term basis to contract for a bank. Freelancing nowadays can be entirely done virtually and from home. I used upwork.com and freelancer.com to look for contracts. If you’re lucky, you can even convince your old employer to keep you on an as-needed basis.

Going all-in

As my friend and mentor, Yanky Li from Openhouse.ai believes, a truly good business idea deserves 100% dedication. So if you’ve decided to dedicate yourself to your business idea congratulations, now you need to keep close watch on how long you can survive while making little to no income. And if you cannot survive with little to no income, then I recommend seriously reconsidering this option. Personally, when I started to realize the lifestyle change I had to undergo I had to make some quick and fast decisions. It wasn’t an easy task to go from a senior software consultant salary to no salary. I first considered what was important to me (my business, my family), and cut out some unnecessary costs.
  • I cooked more at home and started going to Chinatown for some really cheap meats and fresh fruits. I can cook dinner for a whole week for under $30. I also froze meals for later consumption. I also cut back significantly on ordering food deliveries.
  • I picked events to go to that offered free food, which saves me from paying for an extra meal. The events doubled as a means to grow my network. With very little exceptions, I declined to go to paid events.
  • I stopped buying clothes and make-up almost entirely, which wasn’t so difficult since I often worked from home. Surprisingly, for the first time in my life, I felt content with my existing wardrobe.
  • Getting coffee and meeting for coffee was purposeful, but I actually stopped going for a routine drink at coffee shops.
  • I wasn’t willing to go to a cheaper hair salon, but instead I grew my hair long and reduced the frequency of needing a haircut. I stopped getting routine procedures like getting my nails and eyelashes done. I learned how to wax at home.
  • I’ve not gone on a vacation since I started my business.

Using Technology To Manage Personal Finances and Save Money (Canadian Edition)

I did a recent poll on our Instagram (@fintcloud) to ask people if they would rather learn more about keeping a paperless office, or how to use tech to save money. The results were almost unanimous, people wanted to learn how to use technology to save money! I tried to do a few tips and tricks on IG stories, but think that a blog post would be a better medium.

Carrot Rewards

The Canadian government is giving away millions of dollars to incentivize Canadians to live a healthier lifestyle. You can earn money / points by taking steps and doing some quizzes. Don’t have a step tracker? Just get Google Fit and connect it to this app. They literally pay you to live your day-to-day life. The goals are personalized based on your activity level. I’ve personally earned the equivalent of $15 in less than a year, doing almost nothing. (You do have to log into the app from time to time). For some extra bonuses, my referral code is: jennyt3667

Drop Reward Points

Carrot Rewards pays out into points, and the point system that I use is the Canadian Drop Rewards. Connect your bank / credit cards, and you can start earning points immediately based on your spend with their partners (which includes Uber, Shopper’s Drug Mart, Sephora, Under Armour, Staples, Adidas and more). Including my $15 from Carrot, I’ve earned roughly $200 in Drop Rewards. It’s not cash, but Amazon.ca gift cards are pretty much as good as cash.

The best thing about Drop Rewards is that I find that you can easily stack this with other deals. Since the spend it tracked on your credit card immediately, you can stack this with other promotional offers (in-store specials, online promo codes).

Ebates

Okay, so enough about points. You want cash? Ebates.ca will give you a cash rebates. So before you go online shopping, check if you are purchasing from an Ebates.ca partner store. If you shop through their link, they get paid a commission, which they share with you once your balance hits more than $5.01. I’m still new to this, but I don’t see why this cannot be stacked with the Drop Rewards. Some major partners include Amazon.ca and Ebates.ca.

Just Butter It

Just Butter It is a Canadian finance app that gives you cashback just for allowing it to keep track of your subscriptions. The cashback seems to be roughly 1% of your eligible subscriptions. The bonus of using this app is that you can also easily keep tabs of what subscriptions you are still on. It allows for you to be more aware of those subscriptions that you should cancel if they are no longer in use;.

Mint by Intuit

Mint not an app that allows you to earn or save money, but it is a fantastic way to keep tabs on your personal finances. Connecting all of your financial accounts will allow it to automatically calculate your net worth *caveat that it is not always accurate, particularly if you own a business. I love how easy it makes to visualize your finances. Bonus that it sends you reminders to pay your credit cards. It automatically sets a budget for you based on your previous spend and sends you reminders if spending trends are off.

I know people out there may be apprehensive about connecting all of their banking information to an app. I can understand that and I also felt this way in the beginning, but I think that it is much more beneficial to keep a close eye on my financials and have a full view of it rather than not. Mint helps me ensure that there isn’t fraud on my accounts, and makes me aware of any additional bank fees or interest charges on my account. It has indirectly saved me a lot of money.

Camel Camel Camel aka Camelx3

Love shopping on Amazon.ca for the convenience? Firstly did you know you can subscribe to recurring subscriptions to basic necessities and save more money if you stack these recurring subscriptions? Well, that’s great, but you also need to make sure that these goods are fairly priced. Here comes in Camelx3, which is a price watch for all items.

At one point, I was obsessed with setting this up. I would search for products that I commonly used (like razor blades), and products that I wanted to buy but only at a good price (like a headphone) and setup a tracking such that Camelx3 would alert me via email once the product’s price went down to the price at which I am willing to buy it at.

Your Start Up and E-Commerce Accountant

Jenny Tran, CPA, CMA

Hiring the wrong people was the biggest and costliest mistake that I made

I’m going to outright say that I made so many mistakes in hiring during my first year of business! I’m going to share all of these mistakes so that others need not follow and can learn through my own mistakes.

Hiring Friends

When I first started the company, I figured that I needed someone to do sales. I decided to hire a friend who is also an accountant to do it, and pay them on a commission basis.

Unfortunately for me, I learned that my friend wasn’t very reliable, nor was he very good at sales. He couldn’t even articulate what the company does in order to make a sale. Turning to friends may seem convenient because they are in your social network, but it’s not always the best especially if you’ve never worked together before on anything real.

Hiring Family

I decided to hire family. I am lucky I got out of this one unscathed. I love my family and I think that is all the more reason to not hire them. Again, for the same reason that hiring friends that you’ve never professionally worked with is a bad idea, hiring family is a bad idea.

Okay, so at this point, I realized that I needed to hire outside of my social circle. I needed to post a job ad out there.

Hiring Freelancers

I can write an entire blog post about hiring from the online freelancing community, but in short, I was able to find a few gems that eventually turned into longer-term team members. I found my right-hand woman this way, and I cannot see myself being where I am today without her!

The secret? Having a filtering process to be able to test candidates for language competency, technical skills, communication skills, customer service skills and the ability to work autonomously.

Hiring Local Employees

At this point, I had a few contractors now and decided that a full-time local employee would be the way to go. I took the same approach as I did online and applied the same tried and true strategy. In short, it didn’t work.

The hiring process does not take into account those that are articulate about their skills but do not have the actual motivation and discipline to own up to the job. I can say for certain that hiring the wrong employees was the biggest and most costliest mistakes as I was starting out in the first year. If I could go back to give myself just one piece of advice, it would be to own up to the mistake and end the relationship sooner.

So what worked?

I went back to focusing on hiring freelancers since that was working fairly well. For those freelancers that were doing well, I gave them a raise and asked them to commit all of their available working hours to my company. I guaranteed them security as best I can. Since they were working well, I asked them to refer their colleagues and this has worked really well.

What was sacrificed?

To the best of my ability, I do not let poor hiring practices impact the work that we do for our clients. What I did sacrifice instead was my mental well-being in having to fill-in for poor hires. I knew that I needed this to work in order for the company to move forward.

Hiring Interns

Stay tuned for an article on how I was able to turn an internship from a burden on resources to a positive experience for both employer and intern.

Your Start Up and E-Commerce Accountant

Jenny Tran, CPA, CMA

5 Lessons that I’ve learned in my first year of starting a cloud accounting firm

It has been several months since I’ve last blogged and I have a good excuse for that. I’ve been busy! Like any entrepreneur trying to make their vision come to fruition, the first year of building a business is just immensely challenging. I’ve been busy learning some really critical lessons in my industry and as a new business owner of a cloud accounting firm.

Documenting the process of becoming the president of a cloud accounting firm was something that I’ve wanted to do, but in this first year this process took precedence to the actual documenting. Moving forward, I will be blogging regularly and sharing my journey through various mediums including this blog. I have also been sharing this journey through social media, Twitter and Instagram @fintcloud .

Here are some critical lessons that I’ve learned in my first year of starting a cloud accounting firm, which I plan to elaborate on in more details in future blog posts.

#5 Partnering with the right people

Networking and meeting new business contacts can be really exciting, but sometimes some skepticism is warranted. I’ve learned that treading carefully is a good idea, and doing some background research on those you partner is worthwhile. It’s kind of like checking out a Yelp review before trying a restaurant.

#4 Managing growth

When I first started the business, I was super gung-ho for new clients and growth. I realized that I really had to pull back on business development in order to for me to first build the operations in a way that was sustainable. It’s a good problem to have.

#3 Having the right software stack

There was a bit of tinkering to figure out the best software stack for my company. Keeping an open mind and staying flexible really helped here. I plan to blog more in future about the cloud applications my company uses on a daily basis.

#2 Taking on the right clients

When I first started the business, I wasn’t choosy about the clients that I took on. As long as they knew how to use e-mail, it was a green light. I really had to take a step back from that to redefine my ideal client. This is still a work in progress, but long story short, we had to let go a few clients who were not a good fit. Letting go the wrong client can have a positive impact on profitability, resource availability and staff morale.

#1 Hiring the right way

When I hired my first employee for Fint, I was very naive in thinking that anyone can learn anything. This isn’t true, and that’s a hard fact. Motivation, drive, ambition, discipline are just a few factors that go into determining whether someone can do the job. When hiring employees, contractors or even interns, it is so important to do this the right way, consciously. Not everyone can do the job. I will most definitely go into more details about my learning on hiring in a future blog post.

Your Start Up and E-Commerce Accountant

Jenny Tran, CPA, CMA

@fintcloud

Preparing for Small Business Growth

Our business is growing and there is just so much to learn along the way.  We want to share some tips and tricks for managing a growing business.  There are three topics that is relevant for every growing small business: staying organized, mental health and appreciating employees.

 

1. Staying Organized

A company with just one owner might be able to get away with mental notes or just a simple notebook, but a growing company needs to be aware of what it means to stay organized at different sizes.

When we were just one, it was just a notebook.  Then we became three, and we started using Trello to manage tasks.  I highly recommend Trello, but we’ve grown out of it and now we started using a more robust tool called Karbon HQ that also allows us to track each other’s e-mail trails.  This journey would look different for different types of small businesses, but the underlying theme of proactively seeking the right tools is one that every growing business needs to consider.

At what point does one need an administrative assistant? This was a big question for me as of late.  We’ve been using Calendly to manage the need of having to coordinate back and forth the question of, “So, when can you meet?”.  It was fantastic, until I realized that it cannot make appointments, or make judgemental decisions on the priority of a meeting over another.  Personally, I made the decision that when my calendar became so full that it became a matter of having to decide which meeting is more important than another.

2. Mental Health

Most entrepreneur would agree with me that staying healthy mentally is something that needs to be proactive.  I don’t think the typical person appreciates how many decisions a business owner needs to make in a day, and how mentally exhausting it can be.

It is our responsibility to take care of ourselves.  My advice is to surround yourself with people who at the very least can sympathize with why you might immediately book a direct flight that costs more to having to check flight prices everyday, or stress out over connecting flights.  Making reasonable choices to avoid unnecessary stress is sometimes more important than saving a few dollars.  Yes, I’m an accountant and I actually said that.

Most recently, I’ve discovered how difficult it is to just look at my phone and not be immediately stressed out over the volume of notifications.  I thought it was normal until my friends started mentioning to me that they get stressed out over my notifications even when I ignore them.  I’ve now manually turned off notifications on almost all apps now.  I’m also trying out a meditation app called Calm.

3. Appreciating Employees

I used to work for big corporations prior to becoming an entrepreneur.  Big corporations are known for having disgruntled employees, and I admit to being a disgruntled employee at one point in my life.  Rather than hold a grudge, I take it upon myself to never forget how being unappreciated made me feel.  As hard as I may be on my employees sometimes, I will always try my best to appreciate them.  Many of my employees are young and new to the working world.  They probably have not seen how an unappreciated team with poor communication can quickly deteriorate.  I realize that having zero disgruntled employees can be difficult as a company grows, but do I take it upon myself to take preventative action.

We encourage open communication channels, welcome informal feedback and most recently we introduced an appreciation program using HeyTaco, a Slack integrated app.  Appreciating employees is something that needs to be ever-evolving and re-assessed from time to time for a growing company.  It should not be just a program that is implemented and forgotten.

 

Your Start Up and E-Commerce Accountant

Jenny Tran, CPA, CMA