EP285: Bruce Gerstenfeld - How Time Management & Big Dreams Create Successful Bookkeepers

Bruce Gerstenfeld: It's really important to make sure that you have that balance in your day so that you can get work done while at the same time having spots allocated for the other tasks that are required of you when running a business. 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 an inspiring one. Our guest is a CPA from Florida who owns Gerstenfeld and Company and is a member of the Accelerate to Advisor community with Lisa Campbell, and he's also a pure bookkeeping licensee. Bruce Gerstenfeld, welcome to the show. Hi, Michael. Thank you very much for having me today. It's great to have you, and I'm so excited to hear your story and get into some of your journey and what your business has been like over these years. And so before we get into all of that, Bruce, tell us a little bit about you and what you've been up to leading up to this point.

Ad Read: So I'm a little bit of an unusual case in that I came to accounting as a second career. I spent 20 years in IT and digital marketing before making the decision to shift gears and move over to accounting and pursue my license as a certified public accountant. I came out of college with an undergraduate degree in telecommunications, which is a fancy way of saying broadcast journalism. But I came out of college during Y2K and was offered a job as a software engineer, which led me down that first path of my career. I became pretty strong with databases, and that resulted in me being picked up for the digital marketing department as those started to grow because I was able to analyze the customer data and find the right people to receive messages at the right time. Unfortunately, I found that career to be a little boring after 20 years and woke up one morning and decided I was going to apply to go back to school for a second master's degree in accounting so that I could pursue the CPA license. I didn't tell anybody. My wife found out about it after I actually filled out the application. Once I was accepted into the program, I didn't tell anyone at work. I kept it pretty contained