EP424: Jackie Koch - Navigating Hiring & Firing: A Practical Guide

Michael Palmer: You help, you hammer home the importance of being on time to the whole team, but then you never follow up with that one person who's late all the time to tell them that you've noticed they're late and they need to start showing up on time. That's not the same as having that direct conversation, right? That's a very remedial thing, I guess, or entry-level issue. But you'd be surprised how many people actually try to beat around the bush of giving real feedback and having real candid conversations. 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 founder of People Principles, which provides hiring and people strategies for startups. Jackie Koch, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Excited to be here. It's great to have you, Jackie. You help people bring great people into organizations, and I think that's— it doesn't get any less valuable. It's only getting more valuable to find talent, in my opinion. And I'm sure my listener right now feels the same way in the accounting industries, particularly the bookkeeping industry, finding great people to work in your firm. Is always getting more challenging. So I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourself and your career leading up to this point, and then we'll get into talking about your expertise.

Jackie Koch with Payworks ad (June 25): Totally. You're right, accounting is, uh, is becoming harder and harder to find people for. Although I feel like there's always been industries that have been that way, right? Where you go, it goes in ebbs and flows on you can find people, you can't, but accounting is definitely a challenging industry to find folks for. So we can totally dig into that. But I've been in recruiting. I'm one of those weirdos that is still doing what they went to school for forever ago. So I went to school, graduated with a degree in business and a minor in HR, actually, and started my career in recruiting. And I did that for a temporary staffing agency for about 5 years and ended up transitioning out into more of a