EP193: Femke Hogema – How To Become A High-Priced Advisor

Michael Palmer: It's a huge step for bookkeepers to embrace the idea that asking the right question is more valuable than giving the right answer. Of course, sometime in your relationship you're expected to give answers. I mean, you should. But if you give answers too quickly, you're just solving the obvious, the short-term problems. And once you train yourself to I sometimes ask questions for 30 minutes before I even imagine going into an answer. And if you train yourself to do that, you go so much deeper into the problem, and the trust that you build with your client goes sky high. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a great one. Our guest is all the way from the Netherlands, and she is the author of the number one bestselling book on Amazon, The Profit Advisor: The New Role of Accountants and Bookkeepers. Femke Hoekma, welcome to the show. Thank you, Michael. It's great to be here. It's great to have you, and always remarkable how small our world is, having you do the work that you're doing over in the Netherlands, but you have a lot of connections and you work with, and I was introduced to you by people here in North America. So such a small community in this big world. Definitely, definitely. Yeah. Yes. Well, tell us a little bit about your career journey leading up to this point.

Femke Hogema: Yeah, it started kind of interesting because I grew up in a family that had nothing with finance or entrepreneurship or even money. And I was supposed to go into more a social direction myself. My mother was a teacher, my father was a director of a children's home. So I was to follow them in their footsteps and I ended up going to a financial college and being a financial controller. So I took a complete detour, but my roots in more the social, well, life are so visible in everything I do because I always say I connect people with money, I connect people with finance, and that's how I started my career. I mean, I completely feel that Finance is so, so vital for all entrepreneurs. I believe that entrepreneurs have great