Reading · The Bookkeeping Side Hustle Pub

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TL;DR

Listen to Behind The Hustle on Spotify

Behind The Hustle: Jennifer Anderson

Who here likes podcasts?

I’ve been doing the “Behind The Hustle” interviews every 2 weeks for over 1 year.

That is a lot of real life stories shared by real bookkeeping entrepreneurs who are not trying to sell you anything. And I’m very grateful for everyone who has come on and shared.

Their specific instructions from me are to share “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” of their journey toward building their businesses.

They are all asked the same 8 questions.

Tell us about your educational, training, and career background, and your business.
How did you get your first client?
What is the hardest part of entrepreneurship?
What is the best part of entrepreneurship?
Do you utilize any contractors or have staff?
What is your tech stack? If there are any that you love, share it.
Anything you are willing to share about revenue, income, or how much you charge your clients? And how you initially determined your prices and how/when you have raised them?
Close us out. What is your best advice for a new bookkeeper?

But up until last week, you could only listen to these on YouTube, which is an inferior platform to listen to straight audio content. But it was easy for me to put them on YouTube because I knew how to stream live on that platform.

But a year later, my Operations Assistant and I figured out how to publish them as podcasts, too.

So you can listen to the Behind The Hustle episodes as podcasts on Spotify!

Wahoo! 🙌

Click this link and then click “follow”. 🎧🎙️

Our plan is to upload the old episodes every Tuesday and Thursday until we run out of the backlog of content.

I will also still be recording new episodes every 2 weeks and have no plans to stop.

If there is someone that you think would make a great interview, please comment below with their name or reply to this email. I’ll stalk them online and see about possibly scheduling them.

I’m looking for regular people.

Not the most “bookkeeping famous”.

Not people who are outliers.

I want folks who are changing their lives and their family’s lives simply because they took that courageous step toward earning a living on their own terms in the accounting world.

One other thing I’ll disclose is that we’re taking the transcript of each episode and running it through AI and asking it for a more descriptive title. Up until now, the titles have just been the guest’s name. Which doesn’t tell you if there is anything unique about that particular episode. So as we upload the old episodes to Spotify, we’re giving them the AI generated titles. And I’m trying hard to keep my integrity about not veering too far into “click bait” titles. I’m hyper aware of not wanting to be known for that.

The last thing I’ll mention, for those of you who are still rookies at this business ownership thing… Like, all the technology you need to operate your business is a tax deductible business expense. It is wild.

Even earbuds, which are “ordinary and necessary” for zoom calls with clients. Or for professional development opportunities like listening to accounting industry podcasts.

Just saying…it is a nice perk that I didn’t appreciate until I joined the entrepreneur club.

Thanks to everyone who has already listened to these shows on YouTube. And thanks in advance to everyone who will listen on Spotify.

And double thanks and two kisses and special blessings bestowed on your first born to everyone who comments on or “likes” these episodes on either platform. It really does help.

Deals Deals Deals

💰 Use code July2026 to get a discount on my absolutely life-changing T-Account mousepad. I also applied the discount to the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Guidebook, the printable T-Account Cheatsheet, and the Website Content Cheatsheet. So check those out while you are on the community store.

💰Are you ready to learn QBO from the 2026 Top QuickBooks ProAdvisor Educator of the Year? Whuuutt. Alicia Katz Pollock is offering 10% off her Complete QuickBooks Online Hands-On-Training program* which runs from July 21 through October. The discount is baked into that link but the price will go up soon. This is a soup-to-nuts course that includes lots of hard stuff, too, like job costing, payroll, projects, etc. I think a course like this would be made up of serious students who want a very qualified teacher.

💰Bookkeeper Launch is having a significant 4th of July celebration sale. Use code hbdusa to get almost $1,000 off (so that they could price it at $1,776.* 🙂🎆). This is the course that I took to get started. It has fresh leadership at the helm. A young-ish man who also has his own niched bookkeeping firm in the legal space.

💰Veronica Wasek from 5MB Academy is offering 15% off her entire course library with code 5mbsummer26 . I personally have made a lot of money from my investment in her QBO Diagnostic Review Course (and I don’t even use QBO, but modified her templates for FreshBooks).

Also, I’d say the most important thing she sells right now is her QBO Cleanup Course because it is the most up-to-date QBO cleanup course available on the market right now and it is not even that expensive*.

💰The sarcastic accounting merch store TB4A is having 25% off when you buy two or more items with code JULY. You can see if you can also stack our evergreen community code HUSTLE for 10% more off. I have their “Your email finds me unwell” shirt which I wear when I am in a mood. I also have their “A=L+E hat.

Please always send me any news of deals that you hear of that others might benefit from.

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.

📅 +July 8: Behind The Hustle: Hope Brown. Subscribe to the YouTube channel to watch and catch up on all episodes in the series.

📅 July 16: Learn a simple framework to turn your diagnostic reviews into actionable proposals that help clients move forward and help your practice grow. Led by a Xero expert & Cleanup expert, Corry Jankowski. Register for this free webinar here.

📅 July 21 - Oct 8: QuickBooks Online Complete Hands-on Training*. Over 12 weeks, you’ll build real QuickBooks Online company files step by step, using practical case studies that mirror the daily work bookkeepers and business owners actually do. Learn the full bookkeeping workflow, ask questions as you go, and walk away with practical confidence, 72 CPE credits, and lifetime access. (Whoooo daddy, the lifetime access part is what really melts my butter).

📅 +July 30: Behind The Hustle: Catherine Bonds Pabon.

Subscribe to the YouTube Channel

Featured Posts

🌶️ What do you put as your title? Stacy-Anne wants to know.

Help You Hustle

💪 We interviewed Jennifer Anderson for Behind The Hustle. She was a teen mom and high school drop out. But then became really smart at accounting. She shared her current revenue figures and the figure she believes she needs to be able to retire her husband. Is there a “tip o’ the hat’ emoji? Because that is what I want to use as I type about her.

💪 The 2026 State of the Virtual Bookkeeping Industry* survey results have been published. See how your business compares to this data set of industry peers. Here is a very short list of just a few of things I found interesting in this report:

They show what the max revenue is that people are doing as solo operators. There really is an income cap (which is not necessarily a bad thing, but must be acknowledged).
There is a really big shift in AI from the previous year’s results.
They asked respondents if they have raised pricing in the last 12 months. Yikes, y’all!

Thanks for reading The Bookkeeping Side Hustle Pub! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Jobs

💼 A few jobs were added to the Job Guide!

If you are hiring, please feel free to post your job description so we can share it here in this list.

For Fun

Speaking of earbuds and podcasts, the (admittedly slightly nutty) guys over at The UnAccountable Podcast are inviting everyone to join their livestream accounting trivia and comedy show. It happens every other Friday at lunch time. They’ve apparently wrangled some cool prizes from vendors (I’ve heard things like an Oura ring???). These guys do a good job of keeping the show clean. Register to participate in the trivia shenanigans here. Why NOT, y’all. Why not, I say. Go make friends in our industry and add some levity to your life.

My Family Circus (44F, 40M, 14M, 13F, 12M)

🎪 Talent shows

I’ve been to 2 family reunions over the last two weekends. One for my side, and one for my husband’s side.

And do you know what they both had in common?

Talent shows!

For my family, these talent shows have been a tradition since I was a wee redhead the 1990s.

For my husband’s family, I may have bulldozed this great idea into the mix the last couple of years. 🙂

Now, when I say “talent show”, well, there are a few very talented folks and many more not-so-talented folks.

Here are some “talents” just so you have an idea of what we are talking about:

When I was little, I had some little 2nd cousins who would “break dance” in the 1990s, but it seemed more like rolling and kicking around on the floor. Without a doubt, every time we gather, we ask those guys (who are fathers themselves now) if they want to break dance this year and everyone smiles at the memory.
This year, my nephew caught a mini-Oreo in his mouth that his dad tossed to him (it took 8 tries to catch it, so it turns out he was not actually that talented at this sideshow trick).
One cousin used a rope to tie himself to a tree trunk and showed us how he could lean back “like a mountain climber”??? He was very proud of his idea.
My daughter and her closest cousin spent a lot of the afternoon choreographing a dance. They took it pretty seriously.
Typically some tween/teen has had to recently learn some poetry or prose recitation in school, so that usually gets on the set list.
There are always a couple of corny summer camp skits that typically require just a few moments of rehearsal in the afternoon.
There is one cousin who tried to “make it on broadway” when she was in her 20s. She’s legit and has occasionally sung for us over the years.
This year one older cousin sang Amazing Grace with her 3 daughters and nephew on his guitar. It wasn’t planned or practiced. They just jumped in and did it. These 20 year olds said “This is a little embarrassing. We’re only doing this as a gift to Grammy”. Their Grammy is my aunt. She came up and kissed and thanked each of them when it was over.
My artistic son spent some time drawing pictures of his favorite NBA players earlier in the day and just showed it to people.
There are some crowd pleasing songs that usually get played so the group can sing along.

This is a fun, easy, and $0 tradition. We look forward to it every reunion. Some people prepare ahead of time and others figure out a talent the day of. All ages enjoy the show.

It is a great way to get to know each other. A great thing to do after the “Hey Cousin Bob, how’s life been going for ya” conversations have all played out. A great way to pass time without folks just scrolling their phone screens. And to avoid the super long and nerdy board game that the weird cousin keeps jingling the special dice in his pocket and asking folks to play.

Family reunions are WORK, though. From asking folks to clear their calendar, picking a venue, making sure there is food.

But I am so blessed to have had something like this be a part of my life since I was a little girl. And that my husband’s family has started to do a gathering, too, over the last 10 years. Plenty of folks that have married into the family have said “This is really special. My family doesn’t get along so I’ve never seen anything like this.”

If you want to add a talent show to any gathering, just pick up a piece of paper and use powers of persuasion to just walk about and ask everyone “Can I put you down for something for the talent show”? Ninety percent of folks will say “Oh, I don’t have any talent”. But you just say “Oh, come on, what about…”. And you can usually convince enough folks to have a good list to get started with.

And I guarantee you, once you start, at least a couple more acts will get added during the show. Gramps will remember that he knows a card trick. A grandmother will convince her very littlest grandkids to just sing a long to a song that she plays on her phone. And some 7 year old(s) will do an unrehearsed “break dance” or “tree/mountain climbing” or “catch a cookie in my mouth” bit.

Kate Builds In Public

🎢 Seriously y’all, I’m not working much at all!

In the last 14 day period, I’ve slept in 4 different places for multiple days each stretch (My trip to Orlando for the Scaling New Heights conference is not included in that 2 week period).

Also during the last 14 days, I was responsible for leading our school’s softball camp from 9:00-12:00 for 4 days. I’ve never led a softball camp, so there was no past infrastructure to build off of. So it was a lot of planning time in addition to the time sweating our brains out (it was so hot that two sweet 6th grade girls vomited…but they came back the rest of the days, so I consider that a win!).

No business building. But glad to have unlimited UPTO (UNpaid time off 🤣). Though I’m ready for a much more chill July (hopefully!).

🎢 I did create one “opt-in form” for my website to try to capture new email addresses for prospects. It is part of a larger idea for a series of videos. I will make 4 videos that point to the same downloadable resource called “Buttons that I like and Buttons that I DON’T like in FreshBooks”. 🤷‍♀️

🎢 I guess I can also claim that I did work to finally push that “publish a podcast on Spotify” that I mentioned above. That won’t benefit my firm at all, but it certainly took effort these last few weeks. Thankfully my Operations Assistant provided a ton of support on this task and will continue to help execute the plan. But it involved lots of discussion between us and some zoom screen share meetings. Projects like this are really a pretty heavy lift to get off the ground. The internet will tell you that “it’s not that hard”, but I call Bull Poop on that. The sum total of little tasks adds up to a lot.

Deciding if you want to pay for hosting to do something free to get started
Creating a new account on Spotify as a “creator”
DIY Canva-ing for the show art (or communicating with a designer or with AI if you don’t do the art yourself)
Deciding on an upload schedule
Downloading and saving all the transcripts
Asking AI for a compelling title and talking back and forth with it about it
Creating a logical organizational structure and SOP so you don’t lose things on your Google Drive

I believe this new podcast project will eventually not be hard. But, like most worthwhile things, it is hard at first. Which is why it took so long for me to do this thing that I should have done a year ago. Business is just one long journey of doing something hard and then that thing getting easy and then needing to do something hard again so you don’t get left behind by the competition.

Letters To The Editor

✉️ Kristen C. watched the short 2 minute video produced by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families: From Military Spouse to Entrepreneur: Taking Back Control of My Career

Just watched the video you did with the institute. Beautiful video, Kate!

Classifieds (Clickable)

Keep hustling!

Kate

-Chief Hustler-

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