EP325: Karla Dembik - How To Build The Road Map To A Successful Bookkeeping Business

Michael Palmer: Sometimes you just feel this fire inside of you that you have so much more to give to other people. And being in an environment that doesn't appreciate you or your experiences or what you can bring to the table really starts making a person focus on other things. 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 am your host, I'm Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a good one. Our guest spent 14 years in the military, first as a US Marine and later as an Army intelligence officer and a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot. These days, she's the owner of Phoenix Payment Processing. Carla Dembek, welcome to the show. Hi, Michael. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to have you. And, you know, from your intro and your military background, I mean, it's just so interesting. I mean, anytime you hear somebody flying a Black Hawk helicopter, I mean, it's a head-turner, I got to say. Ears perk up. It's like, what, you flew one of those things? That's amazing. Whenever I hear that or I see someone's career in the military, doing these extraordinary things, it's always like, yeah, of course you're in business for yourself because you can tackle just about anything when you do something like that.

Karla Dembik (Oct 18): Oh, thank you. Yeah. I guess it's not every day that it's the norm that you talk to, you know, a 5'3" girl and they're like, oh, I flew helicopters. That's cool. So, I can understand the kind of the shock and awe of when I mentioned my background to some people, but, you know, finding the, finding my own business and taking all of those skills over to my own company has really, really helped in helping others as well. Yeah, I can imagine. Well, let's, let's jump back. Let's jump in the time machine. Tell us about your career journey leading up to this point. You know, I'd love to know how you found yourself in the military. Let's go from there. Okay. So, from a very young age, I knew that the military was going to be my initial purpose. I just loved everything about it. And I was in, uh, Civil Air Patrol, which is like a junior ROTC program. And I was in