Hiring employees is not an easy process.
Our return guest, Nancy Gwynne-Vaughan, President of Graham Consulting & Training Inc, encountered problems when she started hiring employees for her bookkeeping business.Three or four years ago, her practice got to a level where it didn't grow any further. She got super busy, her other employees quit the firm and she couldn't get anything done.
That's when she decided to hire a professional bookkeeper.
She started speaking with other bookkeepers, getting their advice, listening to podcasts and followed the Pure Bookkeeping hiring system which helped with her trust issues and the hiring process.
Today, Nancy provides practice management and bookkeeping services to 35 law firms and counting.
During this interview, you'll discover...
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The importance of adopting a positive mindset everyday
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Figuring out your hiring process and what it's going to be
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How allowing yourself the freedom to make all kinds of mistakes will benefit you
For her LinkedIn page, click here.
To check out her previous Successful Bookkeeper podcast episode, listen here.
To get in touch with Nancy, email her at info@bookkeepingforlawyers.ca.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION
Michael Palmer: 01:34 Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a terrific one. We have a return guest on deck. She's a bookkeeper who runs Graham Consulting and Training Inc, which specializes in helping lawyers grow their practices profitably. Nancy Gwynne-Vaughan, welcome back to the podcast.
Nancy Gwynne-Vaughan: 01:57 Thank you very much, Michael. It is a great pleasure to be back.
Mp: 02:01 Yes, and so wonderful to have you and for the listener. We're going to have a link in the show notes where you can go and listen to a previous podcast episode with Nancy, but before we get into any of the details of what you're going through and what you're working on in your business today, Nancy, tell us just a little bit about yourself for our listener.
NWV: 02:24 Yeah, absolutely. So I started my career working as a kid in my dad's law firm doing various and sundry jobs. Um, and then I went to university. I couldn't decide what I wanted to do. I kept changing my major and I thought, well, I'll take a job until I figure out what I really want to do. And I took a job as a legal secretary and I stayed there, oh, about 20 years. Eventually going into the role of bookkeeper when our bookkeeper quit. And, uh, I came to a point where my boss was really slowing down. I knew I needed to do something. I didn't want to go and work in another law firm because I had a lot of flexibility and freedom where I was. And I decided, you know what, I think I'll go into bookkeeping. I did that for a bit, just part time when my kids were little.
NGV: 03:13 And then I joined IPBC and I met some really incredible bookkeepers and I learned about Debbie Roberts and what she had done and I thought, wow, that is incredible. And I would love to do that. Um, and so I became a full time bookkeeper and, uh, I've been working for law firms. That's my area of expertise. I, I tried a few other little things and decided I was gonna stay within the niche of the legal profession. It's something that I'm, um, experienced in and comfortable with and I feel like I can give very good service. And so we're up to Oh, about 35 law firms I think now. And, uh, it's, it's been a great journey.
MP: 04:02 Fantastic. And so, and for our listeners that, um, may or may not know the IPBC, the IPBC is the institute of professional bookkeepers of Canada and, uh, and that's been one of your successful really success Mus is belonging to that association.
NGV: 04:23 Oh, absolutely. That has been life changing for my practice. Um, the, through them I have been introduced to, as I said, just amazing bookkeepers. Um, I've been introduced to all kinds of apps and seminars and conferences and I've attended those and just got so much, so much content from them. It has completely changed the way I do business.
MP: 04:52 Beautiful. Yeah. It's, it speaks to, you know, put it, putting yourself around people that you want to become like, and that can help you be successful and as well providing back the same to the community, a wonderful community that they've created. And for any listener, if you're not a part of a, an association like that, uh, they're not all created equal of course, but, uh, check them out and find one that, that, uh, you can get the same kind of results that Nancy is getting. So is, it's, I see it as being one of the key things for any person in any profession, uh, to really go and find, well, what is the, the, the main body that's advocating for your profession and you got to belong to it.
NGV: 05:35 Oh, absolutely he did. My father says the same thing about when he used to be in his law practice. He would always be off on seminars and, and there's just something about going and meeting other bookkeepers in person. And it's really funny because bookkeeping is, is one of those professions. But keeping an accounting where if you're talking with people who are not within the profession and you start talking shop, their eyes kind of glaze over and it's so much fun to go and talk to bookkeepers who are excited about the same things you're excited about. I can talk workflow, I can talk apps where I struggle, I can find out where they struggle and help them with some of the things that I've learned. It's just an amazing thing to do.
MP: 06:23 Beautiful. Nancy, your practice has been evolving and as you told a little bit of your story in the beginning of this episode about your journey into business and, and growing and you know, taking the leap, uh, and then how that evolved and, and really recently, you, what's been on your mind and what you've been tacked, tackling and struggling with has been this whole concept of hiring. Tell us a little bit about that journey.
NGV: 06:53 Oh yeah. That has been such a journey. When I first started my bookkeeping practice, I had this idea that bookkeeping would just be the most perfect profession for moms who were home with little kids who were in kindergarten and they just had a half day here or there are students and, and I had this whole idea that I would hire a whole bunch of them and it would be a way that I could give back to, to this group of people that that needed part time work. And I hired some students, I had them doing very simple data entry. Um, but I think I was really unrealistic in that because I got thrown into bookkeeping because our bookkeeper quit. I picked it up really quickly. I had an aptitude for it and I love doing it. I learned to do a lot of the closing stuff. Our accountant used to come into our office every year end to do the closing entries and I would just bug it. Well, what did you do that for? Oh, how did you calculate that to eventually I got to the point where I could do most of the closing entries on my own. And I think because I had picked it up very easily, I had this idea of what bookkeeping is easy, I can just quick, quick, quick teach it to a student or a single mom and uh, yeah, that was just not a good plan.
MP: 08:15 Hm.
NGV: 08:15 I, I, uh, I had some students, I had one student who was very good. She worked for me probably two or three years, but doing very basic data entry. But my practice got to a level where it was just, it couldn't grow any further. I was at capacity and everything depended on me. Um, about three years ago at around this time, tax time, uh, out of desperation because I was just absolutely swamped with work. I called up the lady that I had met, she worked for one of my clients in his office and he became a judge. And so she was looking for a job and I said to her, just, can you come and help me? Just help me catch up. Um, that was three or four years ago. She's still with me. Um, we had a deal. I said, just do what you can.
NGV: 09:11 I'll do the rest. And so that helped. But it also created this giant bottleneck because nothing could get finished without me looking at it and tweaking it. Um, she wasn't a bookkeeper, she was quite upfront about that. She worked in PC law, which is the software in Canada that, uh, quite a lot of the law firms use. So she could do data entry, she could do to the day to day stuff, but the reconciliations or troubleshooting or finishing things off for a year end for an account. She was just not able to do that and, and not frankly interested in doing that. And she was pretty upfront about that. So again, it just created this great big bottle knock where I was super busy and nothing could move forward until I looked at it. And so we continued on like that until, I guess probably spring of last year or I'd just, I'd been talking to bookkeepers and listening to podcasts and, and I just came to, I've read the myth bookkeeper and it just came to the conclusion, okay, this isn't working.
NGV: 10:27 I'm not serving my clients the way I want to. The work is good, but it's not getting done in the time that I would like it to get done. It's not getting to the accountant as early as I'd like to get to the accountant and it's time to just hire a real bookkeeper. And I was terrified because I had never hired a stranger. My business was in my home, so I had students, but I knew them through their parents. I had Ann Marie, but I had known her for years working in the law firm and now I was going to have this stranger. And I thought, you know, I just don't feel comfortable having a stranger come to my home. Um, it had been a challenge having Ann Marie and you know, that was so lovely. She was willing to come to my home one or two days a week and we did that.
NGV: 11:19 But there, there were some close calls. There was one time when my husband forgot she was coming and she missed him in his underwear in the kitchen by about a minute and a half. And, uh, you know, that it was just, it was hard on my family to have somebody there even though they loved her, just, it didn't feel like home when you had employees there. I'm so I, I decided I needed to get commercial office space if I was going to really expand this practice. So I worked away at that and uh, the beginning of this year we got commercial office space, which is awesome, but last year, but this time I decided I was going to hire and I got it. The pure bookkeeping module on hiring. And Debbie talks a lot about being really clear, what's your mission, what's your vision, what are your core values that's really important that you can communicate this to do staff.
NGV: 12:18 And I thought, well, you know what? I know in my head what my business is about and what I want it to be, but I didn't really have it down on paper. So I thought, well, I'll just zip that up. Oh my goodness. You can't zip up core values and mission statement and vision statement. It took me probably most of the summer to just get really clear on that. And I looked at at a websites of books, other bookkeepers I had respected, I looked at the information in pure bookkeeping. I looked at companies that I respected, like apple and Ikea, just trying to figure out, okay, how do people do this? So I sat down, I finally finally got that piece up and running. And then in, I guess it was probably November, I put an ad in indeed and I had been to a seminar with IPBC probably the year before and they had this cool little thing in the breakout seminar that I went to where you have the resume answers, go to an email address and then you set up that email address. So it has an auto responder that says thank you very much for your resume and your application. Please answer these six questions. And so basically what I did was I followed the Pure bookkeeping system with that one little twist
NGV: 14:07 and I got probably 50 resumes and out of the 50 resumes that I got, only six of them answered the autoresponder. And the autoresponder had questions like, why do you think you're a fit for this position? What are your salary expectations? I think there was, what was the last book did you read and why did you like it? Just some questions to, to see if to see a little bit more about them. But also the real test was are they detailed oriented and are they willing to follow instructions? And the last question on the autoresponder email was please acknowledge that there will be a skills test. And um, I went through all of the resumes. I called, um, maybe six or seven people who stood out. Some of them it was really easy to discount. Some of them they were accountants, they were only interested in month and work. NGV: 15:12 And I was actually interested in somebody who could do the, the stuff from beginning up to month then. So those were easy to kind of weed out. And then I did telephone interviews and that was really interesting. After that I narrowed it down to two candidates and I had them come in for, in person interviews. And again, I was going through the pure bookkeeping hiring system was with the odd little tweak here and there. Um, and I decided to call them in for interviews first and then do the skills test. I was heading off on vacation, I was moving into my office. There was just all kinds of stuff going on. So I had them in just before I left. And the two candidates, two candidates, they were both excellent. Both experienced, they both had their own business. And by the time I kind of got to that point, I was in a state of absolute terror. I'm thinking, you know, what if I make a mistake and, and what if I hire the wrong person and what if, you know, something happens. And I had worked myself into this state of almost paralysis where I was just afraid to move forward. And I was listening to Sharon Francisco's podcast on the successful bookkeeper. And I remember saying to you, when I, when I first listened to that podcast, Michael, I'm going to listen to that podcast once a week for the rest of my life.
NGV: 16:56 It was just so amazing. And she had this section in there where she was talking about following the pure bookkeeping marketing module and how she was not a bookkeeper and so she was terrified to go out and meet with the accountants and she came to this plan where she decided, okay, the first 20 accountants that I meet with, they don't count. I'm going to completely expect, I'm going to mess that up. And it was, it was awesome. And she talked about, you know how then she approached the whole thing with a completely different mindset and so I decided, okay, you know what, I'm terrified. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm afraid of making a mistake. I'm afraid of doing that's going to not be good for my business, not be good for my clients. And I decided, okay, you know why the first 10 times I go through the hiring process, that doesn't count.
NGV: 18:00 I'm going to expect that I'm going to mess it up, hire the wrong person, has to get rid of them, have to do it all again. And I'm going to allow myself the freedom to make all kinds of mistakes and be okay with that. And when I did that, it was amazing the freedom that I found. And, and so once I sort of adopted that mindset, I was able to just sit down with these candidates to go through the questions. I went through the pure bookkeeping questions. I, I, I tried to do sort of some of my own that or industry specific and I sat down with these two ladies. Um, and then I went on vacation and I come back and I had them do the skills test. Now I did, I did a again, um, I used the pure bookkeeping skills test as a base. But because I work just with the legal profession, there are certain things that I wanted them to be able to do. I wanted them to be able to do time tracking and I wanted them to be able to create a bill from time entries and throw in photocopies and throw in some bills that they had paid through accounts payable. So I, I went through the Pure bookkeeping skills test. And then I just tweaked it for some of the things that I wanted for my own business.
MP: 19:24 Nice.
NGV: 19:25 Yeah, it was, it was, and it was so helpful to, to have that starting point. So I took the skills test. It took me an hour and a half. I had the first lady come in and do the skills test and it took her, I think two and a half hours. And then I had the second lady come in and I was supposed to have my phone installed in my new office and Bell Canada just totally messed it up. They didn't show
NGV: 19:58 what a telephone company messing things up.
MP: 20:01 I know, I know.
NGV: 20:02 And anyways, so, so Bell Canada had said they would come in the same day this lady was coming in and I thought, well, you know what, that's probably okay because they always do all those things outside of the office and there's very little involvement in the office. Well, was I ever wrong? This poor woman came in, Bell Canada showed up just afterwards and it was a complete disaster. They were in the office. I had to keep moving her to different offices, to different computers was just, I felt so terrible. It took her four and a half hours to do the test and then I kind of left everything. It was march. Um, I have a whole bunch of reports that are due for the lost society in March. So march is a super busy month for me. And I came to the beginning of April and I finally sat down and I looked at the skills test and I have to tell you it, it was really quite something I had pretty much made up my mind, which of the two candidates I was going to hire, there was one candidate that had actual formal accounting training.
NGV: 21:19 She had run her own bookkeeping practice for a number of years and then had to quit that for some health reasons. She had all kinds of availabilities. She lived just 15 minutes from my office. There were all kinds of things that she really had going for her. And I felt out of the two candidates that she was probably the best one to hire. Um, and you know, it was very close. The other lady was lovely. And then I looked at the skills test and the lady who I thought was so experienced who had sold herself to me as this really great bookkeeper, made some pretty basic errors in, in the skills test. I mean nothing glaring. It wasn't terrible. If I'd hired her it probably would've been fine. But, and when I came back to sort of thinking about her interview, she had said to me the first time she came in that she really figured it was an employees market. And in fact she'd had a couple of handout headhunters call her just that week
NGV: 22:35 and then when she came in a month later and did the skills test when she left, she seemed to be really anxious about when I would be letting her know about which candidate would be hired at it. You know, that all just didn't sit well with me. And I started to think, why does she not have any clients? If she's got headhunters calling her and she's got all this availability, why does she have, why, you know, is she anxious? And it just didn't feel right. And, and having her tell me she could do all these things and then make some basic errors on the skills test at that. Mm. I felt really uneasy about that. And San, I looked at the skills task for the lady who did not have as much experience and she actually caught things on the skills tests that the more experienced bookkeeper had missed.
MP: 23:31 Yeah.
NGV: 23:32 And when I first handed her the skills test, this the, the second candidate who is less experienced, she looked at it and she said, oh, I, you know, you've got a bunch of computerized payroll stuff here. I've never done computerized payroll stuff. I do payroll manually for my clients. That's where my experiences and here this woman who had been bounced around from office to office with Bell Canada coming in and out who had not done computer as payroll, she had managed to figure out on her own a whole bunch of the computerized QuickBooks desktop payroll stuff. There's some stuff she missed, but I was blown away by her skills, tasks.
MP: 24:28 I mean, my head is just filled with thoughts and, and it's so exciting to hear the work that you've been doing and gone through and I've got just, my mind is on fire listening to you because I just, I absolutely love, I love the story. I love the journey. I love that. It's not easy. I love that. Even though it's not easy, you're still, you're working at it, figuring it out and you know you've got, yeah, tons of resources. But even with all of those resources, there's still, there's still unknowns. There's still fears, there's still your own mental stuff that you need to get over and barriers your own fears that you have to get over to do these things. I mean, in the, in life, everything could be laid out and set out in the table, fully set in everything. And yet there's still us as a human being and how we're going to go and navigate that.
MP: 25:19 So I love this story and the thing that rings really, really loudly is something that I learned early and constantly love to share this with other people that are thinking about hiring for their, their business businesses. That there is a golden rule that goes like this. Hire slowly fire fast and you have slow played. You're hiring incredibly such such to the point that people say, Oh, you know, couldn't we do this faster? And I've had people say, well, I just want to get it done. I want to get high people hired. But your slow playing of it has enabled you to really, really, really get clear about why you're doing it, what your business is going to be about, right into finding the right person to hire into your business because you're spending a lot of time preparing, looking at it, analyzing it, a sorting through vetting. All of that is a ton of time, but yet the decision that you're making to hire somebody is such an incredibly important and critical decision. If you make the wrong decision, the costs are 10 x a hundred x, maybe even a thousand x more than the time you would've spent doing the right things to make sure it were to increase the likelihood that you're hiring the right person.
NGV: 26:48 Oh absolutely. Absolutely. And that just the process of having them in to the office twice. So I spoke to them on the phone, then had them in for an interview, then had them in for skills tests over a period of several weeks. It gave me such insight and, and I was terrified. Terrified to ask somebody to take a skills test.
MP: 27:12 Yeah. What were some of the responses? Did you have any responses about what people said like you, you were terrified about it. Did, did people push back?
NGV: 27:21 Nope. Not One person now. Now most of them did not specifically respond to that little thing in the autoresponder that said there would be a skills test, but of the ones who did, yep. They all acknowledged that would be fine. And the ones who came in were very happy to take the skills test and that's skills test. That piece was the deciding factor because people can come in and they can tell you they can do things and they can tell you that they have all this experience, but when you actually get them to sit down and say, okay, show me that just reveals so much.
MP: 28:05 It really is powerful. I mean to think of, you know, people often talk about, oh well have people do a, you know, we want to hire for character, right? So do a character assessment, do a personality assessment and there's no better indicator of a person's character and personality than watching them when they don't know they're being watched. And often when people are put into this situation, it's exactly what's going on. As you get to be a fly on the wall and watch them, how do they react to things? What are the questions in your, you're taking data, you're making notes, you're giving yourself all of this information to sit back and go, what do the facts say? What does what? It's almost a science based approach to actually hiring somebody in your business, which going to increase the efficacy. What you're doing right? You're more likely to get the right solution, right, the right situation for your business based on what's really happened versus a hypothetical stuff.
NGV: 29:06 Oh yeah. And you know, you sit and you agonize about what interview questions to ask and you ask them and you're trying to get information. But in an, and I used to interview and I used to hire when I, when I managed the law firm, but actually having people come in and do a test revealed far more than any of the interview questions and, and made the decision much more easy for me. And so then I was able to say, okay, well who do I want to come into work with every day? And I thought, I want to come in to work with somebody who's honest and says, I've never done that before. I don't know how to do that. And then, then we've got a good starting point. Okay, well I can teach you, that's no problem. Rather than someone who says, Oh yeah, I've got all the experience in the world, but then they actually can't do it when it comes right down to it.
NGV: 30:03 So that was just really, really instructive for me. And also to see how this lady operated under pressure and pressure, which I didn't intend to put the poor woman under. Um, but she just responded with such grace and you know, the next day she sent me an email. Thank you very much for the opportunity to do it. And I'm, you know, really excited about the possibility of working with your firm. And I'm really interested in learning PC law and I'll do that on my own time and just what an attitude. Just amazing. Any, and so she's the one I did hire and she has been with me now since, uh, probably I guess it's been almost a month and she doesn't have a whole lot of availability. So I had to think about, okay, what's the best use I can can put her too. And so we're working away on that. But Oh, she's lovely. Just absolutely reliable. She's here at nine on the dot. And I tell her about apps that I'm going to be showing her. She goes home and she researches them online on her own times. So enthusiastic and dedicated. And, and a pleasure to work with health.
MP: 31:23 Mm. So great. You did the work, you getting the results. Um, and that's, and that's, and that's it. And whilst it's early days, you know, you're already, you're seeing signs of a really great addition to the team and you know, often people forget that. What, what having other people, so this is conversation of automation, right? Well what is automation? Automation is having somebody else do it other than you. And that can either be an a machine like an app. Uh, and there's lots of that happening all the time and we're always looking to, you know, how can we add, how can we have a machine do something that we're doing where we can have it done by the machine. Automation though is also having staff, staff is automation because you are no longer having to do it. The key though is that you have to make sure with people, you have to make sure you have the right person in place to do it. Otherwise the promise falls down because automation, the promise of our automated automation can never get there unless you have somebody that you hand something to them and that, that there's a predictable outcome that will come of you doing it. And so you've done the work to find somebody who's going to actually deliver on that promise, is that you've now automated part of your business where you were having to scramble and do that work even a month ago. You now have somebody that's trusted, reliable, that can do the work for you.
NGV: 32:48 Yes. And I'm very excited about that and excited about having somebody who's a full fledged bookkeeper who can just take things off my plate completely and, and get rid of that bottleneck that I created for myself by hiring people who were not really experienced
MP: 33:14 So what is the onboarding of this, uh, of this new new person then like into your business?
NGV: 33:22 Oh, it's been awesome. Just, just awesome. So again, I, you know, I went back to the pure bookkeeping system as my starting point, which has been so very helpful. And we sat down, the first thing we did was we sat down for morning and we went over, okay, what's the vision? What's the mission, what's the core values? Who are we as a company? What kind of services are we going to provide for our clients? And what's that gonna look like? What's our culture going to be? How do we want to serve the clients? How do we want our business to be presented to the clients? And we talked quite a lot about that. And then I've just sat down over the period of a few weeks and just thought about what tasks do I want to give to somebody else. And one of the, one of the big things that I'm trying to accomplish at the moment is historically our work has gone in peaks and valleys.
NGV: 34:24 So at year end there's just this enormous peak where we are catching up on anything that was done. We are getting everything ready to give to the accountants. And then there's other periods. HST quarter end is the peak period march when we're doing the reports to the law societies, the peak period and their peaks. Not because it's difficult to do, for example, in HST return and HST return is not difficult at all. It takes five minutes, which takes the time in doing the HST return is you have to have all the data entered, you have to have everything reconciled and if you're at all behind in that are there because you haven't got to it or your client hasn't given you the information. That's what creates the peak because you've got to get all of that done before you can do an accurate HST return. And so what I'm working with with her is to try to get that work done. We're, we're aiming for weekly to have her follow up with the clients, hey, we don't have your payroll information this week. Can you send it to us? Rather than that happening with me the next month going, oh, I gotta give you your source and you haven't told me what your payroll was for last month. So that's where we're going.
MP: 35:42 That speaks to the client's satisfaction, right? Know you were doing, you were doing the job that you were doing. You had a level of quality, which you know, with the clients you have, and I know very well your clients love you and, and you do great work even though you're tough on yourself around, around it at times, but you've now you're doing a lift, so you're investing in your business. Your customers are going to get better satisfaction. That's going to lead to increased referrals, that's gonna increase your ability to actually deliver on and capture new client revenue. So lovely, lovely, lovely. You're building a foundation that you're going to scale this business that's going to enable you to have the freedom and lifestyle that you want to have.
NGV: 36:26 Yup. Absolutely. That's the plan.
MP: 36:28 Well, Nancy, if you're, you know, a lot of listeners right now that may have hired people and, and really, you know, messed it up and believe me, it's your, you're not alone. If you've messed it up, everyone that's been in business has probably messed up, uh, hiring if they've ever attempted it. It's not easy as we've heard from your story. Uh, and then we have some people that have never tackled this and going through the same fears as you. What's your recommendation to them?
NGV: 36:56 I think my first recommendation is just get rid of the fear. Just say to yourself, I may mess this up and that's okay and if I mess it up, I'm going to fix it and not make the state and the same mistakes next time I make different mistakes maybe, but to give yourself that, that freedom and, and then figure out what your hiring, hiring process is going to be. For me, the pure bookkeeping was just huge. It gave me a starting point and then I was able to just tweak it for what I needed and then document what you do as you go along and document, Gee, I wish I'd done this better. I wish I'd done this differently because when you come to do your next hiring, you'll have forgotten all of that and it it, I find it very, very helpful and so I documented all of the questions that I asked. I've documented the skills test, I've documented what works, what doesn't work and and just go for it. Do the best you can. Read books, uh, listen to podcasts, get ideas from people and then just go for it.
MP: 38:08 Tearful. And we, I will add as a resource, we have a really cool guide. It's a hiring checklist which goes through a lot of the steps that Nancy has shared with all of you today. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes as well, where you can download that checklist and start to think about what, what hiring somebody in your business can look like if it's the first time you're doing it or the, or you've done it a bunch of times and you want to improve and amp it up. You know, Nancy, this has been absolutely fantastic. I just love having you on to share where you're at with your business and what you're doing. You, you're the type of person that really just goes in and does research and is so positive about the people you work with and the people that you meet along the way. And so thank you so much for your generosity of bringing that back to us and sharing all the hard work and learning and blood, sweat and tears that you've had to go through to be able to even share this with our listener.
NGV: 39:09 Thank you very much, Michael is a great pleasure to be back and, and to share a, anything I can with the, with the successful bookkeeper community. I know I have received so much help from the podcasts that I have listened to and, and uh, it's just a great pleasure to be able to give something back.
MP: 39:29 Beautiful. Well, thank you. And for the listener, the work you do is honorable. You help small business owners grow their business. And without you, I don't know where the heck we'd be. So give yourself a pat on the back. You do great work. Keep on doing it. And uh, if you need any help, you've got people like Nancy out in the community that can help you and so many others. So don't do it alone. Put your hand up if you need help. We're always here and we want to help you. And, uh, and with that, that will wrap another episode of The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. To learn more about today's wonderful Gaston to get access to all sorts of valuable free business-building resources, you can go to Thesuccessfulbookkeeper.com.
MP: 40:12 Until next time, goodbye.
