EP201: Kerry Smithies - How To Handle Clients That Don’t Embrace Technology

Ad Read: I think also too, you know, there's a little fear sometimes, a little distrust when, oh, everything's going onto the internet, or, you know, I'm going to be paying my bills and the bank's connected. You know, I think sometimes that fear would hold people back, but it's something they've all had to get over pretty quickly this last 6 weeks, that's for sure. 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 Welcome to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a great one. Our guest is a finance and accounting consultant and founder of MyCloudBookkeeping.com, Kari Smithies. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Michael. It's great to be here. Well, it's great to have you. And just before we actually got into this conversation, we were talking a little bit about where you and I met and the fact that you are completely cloud-based and can work anywhere in the world. And I'm really looking forward to having this conversation and sharing about that. So, Kerry, before we get into some of that, please tell us a little bit about your career journey leading up until this point.

I used to be Australian. I was born in Australia and while living there, went to school and became a chartered accountant. I worked in public practice mostly and then in 1991, I was married to somebody with Canadian citizenship and was fortunate enough enough to get to move here to Vancouver, Canada. So I worked in a variety of different organizations but kept being drawn to sort of the small to medium businesses, often with a bit of a tech bent, which still surprises me. I'm ridiculously tech savvy but still in denial about it. So I'd be working with a lot of different businesses, helping with different computer systems, or a lot of tech startups. Some nonprofits, those types of organizations. I then took off to the Caribbean for about 3 years and worked for a large organization there and realized I didn't like it at all. Came back to Vancouver and the whole cloud world had just really evolved in the time I was gone. So I was away volunteering in Peru and they were using QuickBooks Online and