EP428: Tyler Otto - How Saying No Will Help You Grow

Tyler Otto (July 23): Nowadays, I fire people. I fired one client last month. They didn't even make it 2 months in, but the way they talked to my staff and scope creep and demanding a lot of things that we never agreed to, I let them go within, you know, a month and a half where before I would suffer those clients for a year because you always hear the customer's always right and it sounds stupid to give up good income. 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. Welcome back to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fun one. Our guest is the founder and owner of Specialty Bookkeepers, Tyler Otto. Welcome to the show. Hey, sir, thank you so much. I'm excited to come join you all today. Hey, we love having guests on our show, even better when they know a little bit about book— the bookkeeping industry, which you do. And with that, let's hear about you. Tell us about your career journey leading up to this point?

Yeah. So Specially Bookkeepers were the outsourced bookkeeping and tax firm for a large section of the hospitality industry. That's our sweet spot. You know, the backstory, as you asked, basically I used to be in corporate hotel finance. So I was, you know, corporate director of finance for an asset management company. I was with 5-star luxury and my wife who has a master's degree in biomedical engineering one day decided she wanted to do something new and she's like, I think I'm going to start a bookkeeping firm. And I was like, yeah, I can help you with whatever you need to learn along the way, whatever you don't learn from online programs. Fast forward to 2020 and I don't know, world events happened and it wasn't great for hotels. They really suffered. The company I was with had to sell off a lot of their contracts and I was at a point where I, that company I knew was going to go under. And the question was, do I look for another role in corporate America or my wife and I, after, you know, 3 years of her doing a small $20,000 a year side hustle,, we said, do we take this bookkeeping firm full-time? So I essentially usurped my wife's company. She gave me the