EP175: Kirk Simpson - Why You Should Have Empathy For Your Clients

Michael Palmer: All the research pointed to the fact that 50, 60, 70%, depending on the research you looked at, said that that amount of people were using spreadsheets, shoeboxes, deferring it to tax time, and then dumping it on an accountant. And we looked at that and thought, there's gotta be a better way to solve that problem. And really, that's why we got passionate about this space. 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 am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a good one. Our guest is the CEO and co-founder of Wave, an award-winning financial services software company. Kirk Simpson, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. It's great to have you, and I'm looking forward to hearing this story because you've, you've built a lot and had an amazing journey in this industry. And so, I'm excited for our listeners to learn a little bit about you. So, Kirk, to start off, can you tell us about your career journey leading up to this point?

Kirk Simpson: Yeah, sure. So, just on the personal side first, I'm in my mid-40s, married, live in Toronto, 3 kids, 14, 12, and 9. And, in 2009, my co-founder and I, James Lockery, got serious about starting Wave. In 2010, near the end of 2010, we launched the product. Before that, I had started a couple of tech companies. My first, in my early 20s, was of all things an adventure webcasting company, which most people really don't know what I mean, but bottom line is, is it went bankrupt in 2000 when the whole dot-com scene sort of exploded. But a really good sort of lesson coming out of dropping out of university to start that business on what it was going to take to be a successful entrepreneur. It certainly didn't work out that time. I then went to work for a bunch of Canadian large media companies that were making the transition from print to digital and had some amazing experiences working in those environments where you could be very entrepreneurial and where the whole move to online was happening very rapidly. I started a second business along the way, another outdoor