EP484: Geni Whitehouse - The Secret To Making Clients Feel Smart & Seen - Part 1

Michael Palmer: Welcome back to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fun one. Our guest is the founder of the Impactful Advisor, Jeanie Whitehouse. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Michael. I'm honored to be here. It's great to have you. So I always like to start off with introducing you to our listener. And so if you want to share your journey to doing what you're doing today? It's kind of a long one. I'll try to keep it short, Michael. I love the stories, so take your time.

Geni Whitehouse: 15 years in accounting. In 7th grade, I decided I wanted to be a CPA, and so everything I did after that was to be that and, and eventually to be a partner in a CPA firm. Um, started with Deloitte, did all the usual Big Four stuff for a period of time, did corporate accounting, ended up finding my way to computer consulting, built my own practice in Atlanta, which I then took to a firm to help grow and expand. And also because I had more work than I could handle, and I really liked the, the computer stuff. But I was also doing tax because that was my background. So I took it to firm, grew the practice, I brought in a lot of work because that was the stuff that I really liked to do. I like to talk to people and realized the day that I made partner that I was going to be stuck doing taxes for the rest of my life. And I realized Two things. One, I wasn't that good at it. I had to work way harder than everybody else just to be average at it. And secondly, I wasn't making a difference for those clients, and I really cared about them. And I think that's one of the things that unites us as accountants is that we are really motivated to do good for our clients. So we really want to help them succeed. And when you're handing them a tax return, they don't get excited. They don't hug your neck, Michael. I never got that response. Basically, they had a dedicated drawer for tax returns to go in. They just shoved it in there and went about their business. And the worst thing is if the client owed money. So I left there, I went into high tech. I had a client that was a technology company and I started doing training and I realized that that was something that I really enjoyed doing. Taking concepts and making them connect with people is ultimately the, the thing that drives me forward. From there, I went into a software company. I worked for Navision Software, which was accounting software, and my role was to