TL;DR
Behind The Hustle: Karl Strube
Some (most) of you want to make more money for the effort you put into your business, right?
There are a few ways to do it.
Get another client to buy your main service
And another. And another. “Always be selling” as the saying goes. This method is part of business. You can’t escape this part. It is the hardest and most expensive. Even if you don’t spend any cash money to acquire clients (advertising, buying emails, buying a business, etc), you still pay with your time. And maybe also pay with your blood, sweat, and tears. How many new clients are you hoping to sign this year? My personal goal for 2026 is 3 new monthly bookkeeping/advisory clients and 20 new FreshBooks Office Hours members. This would equate to an additional ~40k in annual revenue for me.
Get current clients to pay your more
Raise your prices at regular intervals. That includes raising prices on your existing clients. If you do not do this, inflation will reduce your purchasing power and you will be earning less in real dollars. If you earn the same amount while working less, that is ok. But working just as hard or harder than last year while earning the same amount of income means your particular business model is broken and not sustainable.
Add tangential income streams
Tangential income streams are a great way to expand your customer base. If you have any modicum of success in business, you are already a unicorn. Data clearly shows that most businesses fail within the first 5 years, and that will certainly include bookkeeping businesses. So you, brave bookkeeping entrepreneur who will not quit and will weather storms and not be tempted by that job offer, you are already good at this wonderfully nerdy thing called bookkeeping. What is a little bit “horizontal” from that expertise? I’m not encouraging you to look far off from what you already do. Stay inside of “Accounting Land” where you already dwell. But what can you think of that is very tangential to what you already do?
I have a video with a laundry list of ideas that would fit into this category. This one is a “listen while you fold laundry” type of a video. My hope is that the ideas in that video open your eyes to start to see money in more places.
Get current clients to buy more services from you (This is the juicy one, y’all)
This sounds a lot like the tangential income streams, but it is different. It is more vertical than horizontal. This does not require any new customers.
Some general ideas of things you can sell to current clients:
Offer premium packages
Annual reviews
Faster response times
Membership communities
Access to a private learning library
1099 processing
Downloadable resources
The Accountable Plan Template for S-Corps* is a great way to do that. You can just white label the one from Josh Standley. I bought his template and rebranded it and have sold it to clients.
And when all else fails, sometimes I ask myself “What can I do to make more money today?” I find that I can get distracted by so many tasks or meetings, that I might look up and think “Well, I’ve sure been working hard, but have clients put money into my checking account today? Yesterday? This week?
I’m not saying that I ask myself that every day. Or even most days. But there are times in my business where I do need to splash that quick cup of cold water on my face and remind myself that my efforts deserve to be compensated with actual money. And that helps me go make some actual money.
Speaking of…need to go send a proposal to a FreshBooks Office Hours member that has been sitting on my to do list!
Quick shoutout! Thanks so much to my friends at RightTool for their continued support of the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Community.
If you serve clients in QBO, and are NOT using at least the FREE version of RightTool, are you even a serious bookkeeper? If you ever do want to elevate to complete QBO Ninja and want to upgrade to the paid version, use code HUSTLE30 to get 30% off for your first year.
Deals Deals Deals
💰 GrowCon has provided a discount for our community. This conference is exclusively for owners of bookkeeping, tax, and accounting companies. And it is in Utah which is waaaayy better of a location than some of the normal conference cities. Use code KATE250 for $250 off through 2/2 and code KATE200 after that.
💰 Get $500 off Bookkeeper Launch *premier plan with code upgradenow500. This code also gets you the Complete Marketing Arsenal resource for free.
💰 Veronica Wasek’s Complete QBO Cleanup course* discount code is BSH15OFF. Cleanups are a great way to take big steps toward revenue growth for your business.
💰Scaling New Heights Ground Hog Day sale is February 2. Why do they have an annual sale on Groundhog Day? Nobody knows. But it will be the cheapest way to snag a ticket.
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.
📅 +February 4: From Leads to Clients: Using Paid Diagnostic Reviews to Qualify, Price, and Close With Confidence with Veronica Wasek. The queen of cleanups, Veronica Wasek, is sharing how to get clients by offering paid diagnostic reviews. Subscribe to the YouTube channel so you don’t miss it!
📅 February 4: Payroll Compliance: A Beginners Guide with Shannon Ballman Theis*. Payroll expert Shannon Ballman Theis is going to give you an over-the-shoulder look at the basics of payroll - who and when you have to pay, whether to pay hourly or salary, and the differences between employees and contractors. Register HERE*.
📅 February 10: QuickBooks Time*. Discover how QuickBooks Time can transform your business operations. Streamline your payroll and boost your overall efficiency with this innovative solution. Join Alicia’s informative course now to see it in action, including importing in a payroll run. You’ll understand how it can be a game-changer for your business management. Sign up HERE*.
📅 +February 11: Behind The Hustle: Sarah Tatum. SUBSCRIBE to the YouTube channel to watch this interview.
📅 February 16-20: The Power to Breakthrough Bootcamp hosted by The Workflow Queen. This free event is for bookkeepers who are feeling overwhelmed by their business and are ready to implement systems that will calm the chaos and allow them to scale. Replays will be available for a limited time. Register today so you don’t forget.
📅 May 4-6: GrowCon in Utah. THE Conference EXCLUSIVELY for OWNERS of Bookkeeping, Tax & Accounting Companies. See Deals section for discount code.
📅 May15: Wave-Seattle. See what happens when Erin Pohan brings together a community of forward-thinking women in accounting and finance who are shaping the future of our industry.
📅 June 14-17: Scaling New Heights in Orlando. The Groundhog Day sale is quickly approaching - that is a great time to grab your ticket!
Subscribe to the YouTube Channel
Featured Posts
🌶️ Jennifer R. detailed her experience going to conferences for her niche. She was a speaker and a vendor. I LOVE this strategy.
🌶️ Michelle S. asked for a round up of what are the most common mistakes that inexperienced bookkeepers make. There are 50 comments and counting. Read this list and see if you are making any of these mistakes. And add any that you have seen a lot of.
Help You Hustle
💪 Karl Strube (that is Stroo-bie) showed up on the Behind The Hustle show with the verve that I knew he would bring. Yay for joyful and smiling accountants, especially in January.
My favorite take-away for all of the listeners (because it doesn’t apply to me at this point in my journey) was how he used all his professional development funds/time from when he worked a JOB to prep him for the skills needed to build the business he wanted to build. That’s some genius level 4D-chess right there.
My favorite take-way for myself was all the advice that he gave about working with family. He has employed both of his sisters and his wife in a part time capacity. One of my sisters works for me and my husband plans to come work for me after the Navy (and hopefully boss me around…bless that day and it can’t come quickly enough! Amen!), so those insights were very valuable.
💪 Ok, most of y’all will be using QuickBooks Online to serve clients (shoot, even I, the FreshBooks gal, still have one monthly client on QBO). And everyone is feeling very unsettled about the enormous changes that Intuit is doing to move all accounting pros to the new Intuit Accountant Suite and away from QBOA. In uncertain times like these, facts are your friends. Here are the places I would go to get unemotional facts about this massive change. Please tell me the names of any other fact-loving, non-marble-losing people who know are deciphering what is going on with all this.
The Unofficial QuickBooks Podcast by Alicia Katz Pollock
QB Power User FB group by Hector Garcia and Dan Delong
The free Bookkeeping Skills Lab* and YouTube channel* (search “Accountant Suite” on that chan) from Akadian Accounting Education.
💪 Sending a lot of love to everyone slogging it out with 1099s. Just a couple more days! If this task is overwhelming to you, you can make changes to your processes for next year.
Implement best practices from the people who have decided to get smart on this topic (heavens, bless). Ask your accounting friends for recommendations about who is teaching how to do this well. The ones I know of are Jennifer Dymond’s 1099problems.io* resources and Nancy McClelland’s Ask A CPA community.
Use a tech tool throughout the year to help in January. I hear Double (formerly Keeper)* is invaluable at this.
Or you can take that wicked smart accounting brain and just build a business that doesn’t fiddle with 1099s. I made of $120k revenue for my firm work and did not handle a single 1099 (that revenue is strictly client services, not Bookkeeping Side Hustle stuff).
Jobs
💼Anyone live in the Nashua, NH area - an in office job was posted in the Job Guide! Go check it out and the other jobs that were added HERE.
Don’t forget the standing opps on my Find A Freelance Job article. 1099 and W-2 opps.
My Family Circus (44F, 40M, 14M, 12F, 11M)
🎪One of my written goals in 2026 is to deliberately listen to my children when they talk positively about a teacher or staff member of their school, and then write a short “Kudos” note to the school administration.
I just did it last week, and it was so fun!
My daughter hopped in the car after school and immediately started eagerly chattering about how magical their literature class had been that week. She explained how her literature teacher is so gifted at teaching about poetry.
So once I could get a word in edgewise (chip off the old mama block! 🤣), I asked her if I could start a voice-to-text recording in my Google Keep app to capture what she was saying.
Then when I was back at my computer, I paraphrased a few of the best sentences and sent off the email to the headmaster, assistant headmaster and the two deans of students. I also separately forwarded it to the teacher.
Think about all the LAME emails public school administrators and teachers receive. I’d wager that their inbox is probably worse than the inbox of a typical small business owner like yourself.
What if every person reading this newsletter committed to sending more awesome and encouraging emails!
Kate Builds In Public
🎢 Like I have told you the last 2 years I’ve done this, I signed my business up as a sponsor for our school’s charity auction. Y’all, my logo has been in the weekly school newsletters every Friday in January and will continue to be until April. It will be displayed all over the venue the night of the party. After our church, our school is the #1 place where I want our charitable giving to go (though this is formally a business expense instead of counting as charitable giving on our personal tax return). I’d be giving a lot of money to the school anyway. But this method of contributing to the school gets me a little more than just the warm fuzzy feeling of normal charitable donations.
🎢 I held 7 interviews for my Digital Operations Assistant position. I selected two people to invite for a paid demo day. One was Friday (yesterday). One is Monday. All of this is not for the faint of heart. “Playing HR Department” is very uncomfortable. Probably not so different of a feeling from someone who doesn’t really know bookkeeping trying to do bookkeeping. Yet I press on.
🎢 I received a rejection notice for all the speaking topics I had submitted to the Scaling New Heights conference. That never feels good. But in that very same week I was asked to speak on a panel at GrowCon in May in Utah. If you have ever wondered why the little emoji I use for this section is a roller coaster, this little bullet point illustrates it perfectly. How have you experienced the roller coaster that is owning your own business?
🎢 My children were unexpectedly home for 3 full days this week because Texas had about 1 inch of snow. 🎢❤️🙃🎢❤️🙃🎢❤️🙃
From The Vault
⚡Wanting to share more content? Struggling on where to begin? What to do? Need ideas? Check out this video with Jeremy Wells about rapid content creation for bookkeepers.
Letters To The Editor
✉️Thanks for all you do to support our treasured bookkeeping community!! Jennifer D.
Classifieds (Clickable)
Keep hustling!
Kate
-Chief Hustler-
Get your copy of The Bookkeeping Side Hustle Guidebook: Actionable Steps To Becoming A Virtual Bookkeeping Without The Overwhelm
Easy and FREE ways to support Bookkeeping Side Hustle
Follow @BookkeepingSide on Twitter
Thanks for reading The Bookkeeping Side Hustle Pub! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
I am down right rabid about transparency and full disclosure. If a link, including Amazon Links, has a * beside it, it means it is either an affiliate link where I might receive compensation if you make a purchase, at no additional charge to you. Or it could be a tracking link that another business provided me to see how many readers click on that link.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.