EP531: Natalia Zacharin - Zero Experience, Millions Earned: From Clerk To Inc. 5000 Firm Owner

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Part 1 of 2 - Natalia Zacharin had no bookkeeping background, no clients, and no safety net when she started Zacharin Consulting in January 2019. She was 49, a single mom, and her invoicing clerk job was being phased out. In part one of this two-part conversation, Natalia lays out exactly how she went from that starting point to building a firm that now employs 16 people, targets $4 million in revenue, and landed at number 802 on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list.

Chapters

• [00:00] Cold open: asking the right questions
• [00:52] Introducing Natalia Zacharin
• [03:00] From invoicing clerk to business owner
• [07:00] Where the firm stands today
• [10:00] First client via LinkedIn
• [13:00] Self-teaching bookkeeping on YouTube
• [16:30] Hiring a CPA manager — lessons learned
• [19:00] Building the pipeline: 4 clients to 12
• [23:00] Doubling down and working 7 days a week
• [26:00] COVID, the PPP pivot, and early burnout

Starting From Zero — And Meaning It

Natalia's entry into bookkeeping wasn't a career pivot she planned. Her fiancé suggested it over coffee when she couldn't find another job. She enrolled in an online course, started messaging business owners on LinkedIn in January 2019, and landed her first client on January 29th of that year — a landscaping company owner in California who is still a client today. Her prior experience as an invoicing clerk in Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite gave her attention to detail, but she had never opened QuickBooks.

YouTube as a Training Program

When Natalia got into her first client's books, she found the revenue hadn't been recorded — showing a negative $2 million on the P&L. Rather than walking away, she cleaned it up herself using YouTube, watching videos second by second and refreshing the balance sheet after every change to see what happened. "That was how I learned," she says. "I taught myself how to read financials, not how to do just data entry." It was slow, it was self-directed, and it worked.

The Formula for Getting Clients Early On

Natalia built her first pipeline through two channels: LinkedIn outreach and a local women's business group. Her LinkedIn approach was simple — start genuine conversations, never lead with a pitch, and ask questions. "No one likes it when you just come out with a full three paragraphs of what you do. No one cares." At in-person events, she set a clear intention before walking in: she was there to get a client, not just to have lunch. By August 2019 she had 4 clients and quit her day job. By November she had 12 — enough to cover her bills.

Doubling Down on What Works

After quitting her job, Natalia worked 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, iterating constantly on what was generating new business. Her core principle: if something moves the needle, do more of it faster. She avoided prescriptive networking formats like BNI in favour of methods she could control and test. "Selling is psychological, it's not intuitive," she says. "I just didn't give up. I didn't feel like I had other options, so I just kept going."

COVID, the PPP, and a Hard Lesson About Burnout

In January 2020, Natalia called her mother — who had been helping her financially — to say she no longer needed the support. Three months later, COVID hit and her clients' revenues collapsed. She pivoted immediately to helping clients apply for PPP and EIDL loans, achieving near-perfect approval and forgiveness rates. But by August 2020, working alone under enormous pressure, she stopped exercising and started running out of energy. Part two of this series picks up there — with hard-won lessons on burnout, pricing, and scaling a team.

Links Mentioned

• Zacharin Consulting: zacharinconsulting.com
• Pure Bookkeeping: purebookkeeping.com
• The Successful Bookkeeper: thesuccessfulbookkeeper.com

About the Guest

Natalia Zacharin is the Founder and Principal of Zacharin Consulting, a full-service accounting firm based in Maryland that offers bookkeeping, accounting, and fractional CFO services. She started the firm in 2019 with no formal bookkeeping training and grew it to a 16-person team tracking over $3 million in annual revenue. In 2025, Zacharin Consulting was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in the United States, ranking number 802.

About the host

Michael Palmer

Michael Palmer is the host of The Successful Bookkeeper podcast and co-founder of Pure Bookkeeping and The Successful Bookkeeper. He started this work because of his father — a brilliant electrical contractor who worked twice as hard as he should have had to, because nobody on the financial side was in his corner. That gap is what The Successful Bookkeeper exists to close. His view: bookkeepers are the most undervalued force in small business — and every bookkeeper who builds a real business changes two families: theirs, and their clients'.