EP236: Ean Price Murphy - Why Your Business Systems Always Need Improvement

Michael Palmer: If you give me the numbers, I can make them make sense. But I had no idea how to help people strategize. And I was also seeing that when they were turning to their CPAs, who are compliance professionals and tax professionals, many of those people, again, highly skilled, also that wasn't their focus. So they didn't have those answers either. 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 fantastic one. Our guest is the owner of Moxie Bookkeeping, and she is a Profit First professional, Ian Murphy. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you. And Ian, you— it's actually not your first time on the podcast. You were part of a live interview that we did with Ron Zaharian and on the Accounting and Finance Show of the Americas this fall. And so it's great to have you kind of back. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, today I really like to focus on and help our audience understand and get to know you a little bit better. So before we get into everything you know about running a bookkeeping business, tell us a little bit about your career journey leading up to this point.

Ean Price Murphy: Sure. Well, uh, let me start by just saying I was not born a bookkeeper. I always thought that I was going to be more in the arts. My father is a professional jazz musician. My mother is a or was, I should say, she's retired now, a pediatrician. So she ran her own business with a partnership of people. And, you know, I always had interest in art and theater, never in music, never very musical. But that was always my assumption. And so that was what I went to college for, was just a general liberal arts degree. And, you know, my parents being good, solid sort of middle-class people, money was not something that we discussed. So I had no idea what we were working with. You know, we, um, I know that they were very frugal people, but it just wasn't something that, you know, that we sort of talked about. Their idea of teaching me money management was to give me a substantial allowance very early in life. I don't know if these