Behind The Hustle: Catherine Bonds Pabon
Behind The Hustle NOW on Spotify
There are few better ways to get an authentic behind-the-scenes look at real bookkeeping businesses than listening to the Behind The Hustle interview series. And thanks to Ai reading the conversation transcripts, I’ve been able to add more descriptive titles after we’ve done the live stream. 😁
Should I keep this series going? Chime in on the comments and give me some “Keep Going, Kate!” energy.
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From Burned-Out Teacher to Six-Figure Bookkeeper with Lynsi Ingram
How This CPA Built $160K Bookkeeping Business Working Just 2 Hours a Day with Amber Reusch
He Quit the Factory Job to Bookkeep Around the World (calling in from Thailand!) with Chris Kocina
From $63K Debt to $100K Side Hustle: Building a Profitable Bookkeeping Firm From Scratch with Shaan Rizvi
From High School Dropout to $400K Bookkeeping Business with Jennifer Anderson
From Side Hustle to Full-Time Tax Pro with Yehuda Tenebaum
Bookkeeping Mistakes That Keep You Working at 2 A.M. (And How to Avoid Them) with Hope Brown
She Grew Her Bookkeeping Firm from $24K to $100K in Just 3 Years with Jennifer Adams
She Built a Team, Found a Business Partner, and Replaced Her Teaching Career with Ellen Oliver
“I emailed 100 people” - To Get My First Client with Barb Skinner
Growing a Bookkeeping Firm: Hiring, Pricing, Mistakes & Big Money Moves with Dawn M. Slokan
How a Recent Finance Graduate Turned Bookkeeping Into a Thriving Business Without Corporate Experience: Jordan Weinstein
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At the end of each episode, the last question I ask each guest is for them what I call “the money question”. As in, how much money do you make? They all take slightly different approaches to answering it, but each has provided helpful, real life context about what sort of income is possible when you bet on yourself as a bookkeeper.
Many thanks to RightTool for being our original sponsor. And thanks to Double for their current sponsorship as well. It is funny, a LOT of the guests mention both of those tools in the “tech stack” question (though I did not let the sponsors have any say in who I asked to interview).
🎙️If you know of someone who would make a great interview for this series, please reply and let me know who and why you’d like to hear them be interviewed.
🤝 If you are vendor to the accounting industry and would like to sponsor, let’s talk!
Deals Deals Deals
💰 Advisory Amplified tour is going to 6 cities this fall. You can use code KICK for 20% off. These are affordable one-day events.
💰 Get over 50% off the CAS Academy* with code Hustle100.
As a reminder, if/when you decide to invest in any courses, coaching, or accounting industry software, there is about an 85% chance that I have rounded up a discount code for y’all readers. Just ask before purchase. And please always send me any news of deals that you hear of that others might benefit from so I can include them here in the newsletter.
Be There or Be Square
Items with a “+” are hosted by me. All these events can be viewed and registered for in the DESCRIPTIONS of each event on the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Calendar.
📅 August 4 - Oct 22: Updated dates for the QuickBooks Online Hands On Training*: This course is put on by the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Educator of the Year, y’all. She had too many people tell her they were on vacation in July, or that they couldn’t swing the cost. So they fixed both of those problems. Click here to see slightly later dates and noticeably reduced pricing*.
📅 +August 5: Your First 60 Minutes With Claude: Hands-On Workshop with Bookkeeping Side Hustle and Opzer. Learn how Claude can help you with your bookkeeping business.
📅 +August 6: Behind The Hustle: Andrew Parks: Watch live on YouTube.
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Featured Posts
🌶️ The Mac vs PC debate for our industry is always spicy.
🌶️ Are quarterly clients ever a good idea? How can you scope them and still have them be lucrative to your bottom line and not just a pain in the patooty.
🌶️ There are 110 comments to Sarah F’s question “Do you genuinely like bookkeeping?”
I made a video a year ago with my exact thoughts on this. This is one that every person considering bookkeeping entrepreneurship should watch.
🌶️ A client’s business has significantly slowed down. It clearly shows inside their books. They ask for a discount. What do you do?
Help You Hustle
💪 The latest Behind The Hustle interview with Catherine Bonds Pabon. It will be uploaded to Spotify by next week.
She shares her effective hourly rate at the end (though she is sure to clarify that she doesn’t charge her clients hourly).
She was able to bring her husband home from his job, which turned out to be a bigger blessing than they could have imagined because soon there after he faced some very serious health issues.
She did not have an accounting background. She comes at this from the IT nerd angle.
💪 The Ambitious Bookkeeper has released a limited time audio series called “The Advisor Activator”*. The purpose of these 6 episodes is to let you determine whether you are actually ready to step in to advisory work (and start charging advisory prices…cough cough). And if you aren’t ready yet, you’ll understand what you need to do to get ready.
💪 The QuickBooks Online Complete Hands On Training* begins on August 4 and runs through October. Your technical bookkeeping skills in QBO will sky rocket. Taught by the 2026 QBO ProAdvisor Educator of the Year.
💪 New Non-profit Bookkeeping Certification*. Don’t be fooled by the descriptor “non-profit”. There is definitely money to be made serving non-profits because they have unique accounting needs that the average bookkeeper doesn’t understand. If you learn it, you can charge a premium.
💪 The Fall 2026 cohort of the Theater of Public Speaking is starting August 5th. Sorry for the late notice. I took this course. It is really helpful if you want to be someone who can be confident speaking in front of others. It is also somewhat of a “door-opening/wheel-greasing” club of sorts for our industry for people who want to get on stage.
In the past I’ve been able to pass along an affiliate commission to you instead of getting it for myself. I forgot to ask the leader for her to create that set-up for y’all this year, but if you want to take the course and get a discounted price, let me know and I’ll follow up and connect you with them so you can get a discount.
And sorry gents, this one is ladies only. Please tell me about the speaking courses for men, and I’ll share it!
Thanks for reading The Bookkeeping Side Hustle Pub! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Jobs
💼 The Job Guide has been updated! Do you live in West Kelowna BC? Dayton, OH? Central Oregon? Atlanta? Grand Rapids, MI? A few remote jobs were added, too!
If you are hiring, please feel free to post your job description so we can share it here in this list.
My Family Circus (44F, 40M, 14M, 13F, 12M)
🎪 Please plan a vacation here
One of the best new museums was built very close to me. It is just 10 miles south of the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. And I hope to convince every one of you to visit it!
The National Medal of Honor museum opened in 2025, and was voted Best New Museum by USA today.
We had some out of town visitors coming to visit, so my husband took a day off and we all went to the museum.
Y’all, it was awesome. As in “makes you stand back in complete awe at what these brave heroes did above and beyond the call of duty” kind of awesome.
Because it is a brand new museum, it boasts all the fancy new museum technology. It would be worth going just for some of the new tech and shiny displays.
I think 3-4 hours is plenty of time for a visit. You could definitely stay longer. We paid a bit more money for the 1-hour guided tour. Totally worth it.
Here are 2 stunning facts I’d like to share:
There are less than ~3,500 recipients of this award, the nation’s highest military honor. That is out of over 40 million Americans who have served in the military since the Civil War (which is when the award was created).
No Black service members who served during WWII were awarded the MoH until a review of their heroic actions was conducted in the 1990s. Fifty years later, y’all. By the time this injustice was rectified, only one recipient was still alive to receive it in person. The side-by-side stories of the selfless and honorable individuals compared to the collective wickedness that systematically chose to exclude them from the award when the war ended makes your stomach churn.
So consider making your next vacation to the DFW area. You can line dance at Billy Bob’s. Catch a Rangers game (their stadium is air conditioned!). Get your thrills at Six Flags amusement park. And plan for some emotional inspiration at the National Medal of Honor museum.
It is worth the trip.
Kate Builds In Public
🎢 We had our dearest friends from Virginia visit for 3 days last week, so I didn’t work those days at all. And there is a lot of time focused on getting the family ready for the school year which starts in 11 days! We’ve had multiple orthodontist consultations so we can start braces. Sports physicals. School supply shopping. And cross country practice has started. Grateful for the flexibility my business gives me to manage all of this.
🎢 Work-from-home with kids is not all glam. It is the time of summer where my 3 children and I are getting short tempered with each other and are all ready for school to start. Bless all you full-time homeschool families! I’d like to think we would have a better routine if we were a homeschool family. But I get annoyed to be at home working while they are all sleeping and lounging and require that I make a list to notice all the things that need to be done so our home does not devolve into a frat house. Ain’t nobody else making me a list of all the stuff I have to do. Please tell me I’m not alone. (Kids…if you read this one day, I sure do love you and think you are great. But please pick up your socks!)
🎢 My dashboard in the billing software I use for my firm (which is only my revenue from bookkeeping clients) says I’ve billed $76k from Jan 1 - July 31, 2026. And thanks to a cleanup I billed in July, my July revenue trend has ticked back up from the downward monthly trend I’ve been on. So that is good news for me, if any of y’all have been worried about some of the revenue woes I’ve been sharing over the last few newsletter editions. And you know what…I’ve worked more in July than I did in June. Fancy that. Turns out grandpa was right. The more I work, the more money I make.
From The Vault
⚡Speaking of homeschool families, here is a replay of the panel interview we had with with 3 bookkeeping entrepreneurs who also homeschool their children. One of them has 9 kids.
Letters To The Editor
✉️ Thank you for sharing Nancy M responded to my “I almost got scammed by Microsoft Teams” video. Everyone needs to watch it.
I shared this with my entire team! Almost all of them also run their own firms, so this could be the thing that makes all the difference for us, them, clients, or personal safety. Thanks, Kate
Classifieds (Clickable)
Keep hustling!
Kate
-Chief Hustler-
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