EP179: Justine Lackey - How To Keep Your Staff Happy & Productive

Michael Palmer: My job is not my life. My family is my life, my husband, my children, my friends. So when I started to go out and seek employees, it was very important to me that they felt that they had this job that they could design around their lives. And one of the first questions we ask after a new hire is, it's actually during the hiring process, is what is your dream job, right? Like, what are the dream hours? What's your dream wage? What's the dream benefits? And that helps us create a scenario where somebody wants to stay, they're motivated to stay, and more importantly, they have access to the tools and to the things that motivate them so they excel. 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 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 a great one. Our guest is the owner of Good Sense Bookkeeping, Inc., which provides professional bookkeeping services to artists, creative professionals, and small businesses. Justine Lackey, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Michael. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you. And I, when I saw that you serve creative people, I just thought, wow, so interesting. And artists, I'm always interested in hearing those kinds of stories. And I, I'm so, I'm excited to to have you on the show today, as well as a few other things that I thought were pretty cool about your story. And so before we get too far into all of that, let's let our listeners know a little bit more about you. Justine, tell us about your career journey leading up to this point.

Guest: Sure. So, um, it seems amazing, but I actually started doing bookkeeping almost 25 years ago. I was a young 20-something living in Brooklyn in Williamsburg, which is now world famous, but at the time it was a really bad neighborhood and a friend of mine. This was really at the rise of the internet. It was like 1995. It was sort of the first commercial ventures. And I always think of this period of time as the rise of the gig culture. Prior to that time, you didn't really hear about subcontractors or 1099 workers. And, um, I had a friend who was a freelance