EP517: Teresa Slack - The Road To A Million-Dollar Bookkeeping Business - Part 2

Michael Palmer: At the same time that we were going through this shift in, okay, how do we get the training, the support, the, the coaching that we need? We had a whole other side to this, which was our lack of understanding of how to price our services. 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. It's part 2 of our 4-part series with returning guest Theresa Slack. In this episode, she shares the moment she and her sister Connie hit a breaking point where continuing as they were was no longer an option and a difficult reset became unavoidable. It's compelling stuff. Let's check it out now. Your business is there and you're, you're— I remember meeting you for the first time and it was like, kind of a, do we do this or do we not do this? And so you, you maybe tell that transition because it was, I believe, if I'm, if I remember correctly, it was like you had to get rid of everybody and start anew. So maybe let's jump back into that story.

Teresa Slack Part 2 (Feb 10th 2026): Sure. Yeah. So when, when Connie and I had that talk where it was like, do we shut it down or do we give this one more try and, and kind of revamp everything, we, we call it financially 2.0, because Financely 1.0 was not successful. It was a failure. And that was at the time that we had met you and we were looking at investing in the Pure Bookkeeping systems to give us the, the, the checklist, the systems, the processes, the, the community and the support that we needed to get better at this because we knew that we were struggling with it. We knew how to do bookkeeping. We did not know how to build a systemized process-driven bookkeeping firm that could be efficient and profitable. So when we had met you, and there was an— back then there was an investment to, to do that. It wasn't a monthly, it was, it was an investment, a big chunk that, that we paid. And what we did is we let our 3 staff go because we hadn't learned good hiring systems. We had hired 3 people who were not invested in becoming quality bookkeepers. We didn't have any money, so we ordered— we hired people who didn't have