EP270: Courtney DeRonde - What You Need to Know About Networking

Ad Read: where we can provide the most value is by helping them in a proactive way to maximize that financial information to make decisions and to be more profitable and to minimize taxes. So that's really our sweet spot. The foundation of us being able to do that is completely reliant on those clients having accurate, timely records. 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'm your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a good one. Our guest is the managing partner and director of business development at TDC CPAs and Advisors. She has 19 years of experience in public accounting and serves on the firm's executive committee and leadership team. Courtney Durande, welcome to the show. Thank you, Michael. So glad to be here. It's great to have you. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I mean, you've been at this a while, and I just, I always know there's, you know, 19 years of experience is literally, we could do an episode for every year of business, I'm sure. So Courtney, tell us a little bit about your career journey leading up to this point.

Courtney De Ronde: Sure. So I'm a CPA, and I started out in public accounting at this firm TDT in client service. So, I did some tax and some auditing work early on in my career when we were smaller, and I found right away that I loved auditing. Part of it was I liked being out of the office and just working on-site at clients, working in a team, but I liked the work and the thought process of it. And so, what I got to do early in my career was develop an audit business unit, an audit practice area in our firm. So instead of having people do a little bit of both, I got to develop a team that only did auditing. So I got to be part of delivering that service and growing a practice, hiring team members, training them, developing them, adding new clients, figuring out our processes and our systems. And I just learned a ton about developing a division and developing a team and gaining new clients and building their trust and their loyalty. And I got to do auditing as well. And so that was a big chunk of my career. And then