The One About Working For Free

TL;DR

Behind The Hustle: Sarah Tatum

Leads To Clients with Veronica Wasek

On my firm website, I list prices. Some are set prices. Some say “Starting at”.

One of those prices is for a service I provide called a Paid Diagnostic Review. Currently the price reads $435. Over the last couple of years, I’d just slowly bumped up that price every few months or so.

I distinctly recall that I charged a client $125 the first time I ever had the guts to charge for a service like this.

It was 3 years ago and Veronica Wasek had just come on the Bookkeeping Side Hustle channel to discuss the overall concept of what a Diagnostic Review is and explain how to sell this service. I was so inspired that I snagged her Excel templates and sales scripts inside her Paid Diagnostic Review course.

I worked my way through the training materials. I tweaked her spreadsheet for my FreshBooks clients (her template is based on reviewing a QBO file). I practiced saying the lines to myself in the bathroom mirror. I printed some of the scripts on paper and taped them on the wall right above my camera on my computer monitor (I’m not kidding y’all).

I knew exactly what I needed to do. And one day I finally had the chance to say those frightening words “I recommend a Paid Diagnostic Review…” to a prospective client I was staring at on a Zoom screen.

That prospect said “Ok. Sounds good.”

Oh crud! Now I’ve got to actually do the thing! Gah!

I don’t track my time, but even with the tools I had from Veronica, I know that doing that very first diagnostic review took me many hours to complete. So $125/ALOT is a very low effective hourly rate.

But who cares. Because when you are at rock bottom, the only direction to go is up!

And now I charge $435 and I have refined my custom template that I use to do a FreshBooks file review. It takes me about 2 hours to fully complete my process for a prospect’s FreshBooks file.

There was a time when I couldn’t imagine telling someone they had to pay me real American dollars to just look at their books in order to give them a quote for my services.

Now I cannot imagine NOT charging someone to look at their books.

It is like Veronica gave me the tools to adopt a new identity. The identity of a professional whose time is valuable.

And the only reason I was able to even start was because of what Veronica taught me. That is why I was glad to bring her back on the Bookkeeping Side Hustle YT channel last week so more of you can adopt that identity, too. I hope you caught that live stream.

Our conversation was a bit different than when she taught this material 3 years ago. Because 3 years ago I was as much of a student as you are (if you don’t charge yet). But this time I was able to offer my own insights in the conversation as someone who is also in the “I don’t work for free” club.

Over the last 3 years, I have made thousands of dollars from charging for Paid Diagnostic Reviews. Nothing to sneeze at. I like thousands of dollars as much as the next person.

But that is not even where the real juicy part is.

Because I have made many tens of thousands of dollars from the engagements that followed those reviews.

And they are better clients overall. And the cleanups have gone much better and been much easier to price because I knew what I was getting into.

If you are ready to join the “I don’t work for free” club, Veronica has two resources to help.

• Smart Review Checklist*: This free resource will show you how to win quality bookkeeping clients with the 15-minute review system. I’d consider this the “training wheels” resource.

• Paid Diagnostic Review System course*: This course (lifetime access) gives you her proven system for confidently uncovering messy books, presenting findings with clarity, and winning profitable cleanup and recurring clients.

Whenever it happens for you, I hope you will let me celebrate with you when you send your first invoice for a Paid Diagnostic Review and join the “I don’t work for free” club. Send me an email or make a post in the community Facebook group (lmk if you need a link to that).

Check out what is included in the course via the banner graphic below. You can use the evergreen discount code BSH15OFF when you are ready to purchase.

Deals Deals Deals

💰 GrowCon has provided a discount for our community. This conference is exclusively for owners of bookkeeping, tax, and accounting companies. Use code KATE200 for $200 off*. Will I see you in Utah (yep, I’m going!).

💰 If you are looking for a feature-rich bank for your own business, you can start your account at the bank that I use, Relay Financial*. Funding with $50 gets you a $50 signing bonus. But the really fun part is that Relay’s referral program will allow YOU to start to recommend Relay to your clients and get sign-on rewards plus monthly revenue share based on their balances and spend.

💰 Veronica Wasek’s updated Complete QBO Cleanup course* evergreen discount code is BSH15OFF. Cleanups are a great way to take big steps toward revenue growth for your business. Hopefully those clients also turn into monthly recurring clients for you, too.

• And if you like Veronica’s teaching style, you can view her entire course library here*. There are many free resources!

💰 The Workflow Queen Alyssa Lang released a new resource called The SOP Method. Priced at $77 through Feb 16 when it will go up to $197.

• That first bullet on her landing page saying “The Google Doc titled “Untitled Document” hits a little too close to home for me. Such a sick burn. 😭

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 17: Behind The Hustle: Amanda Timcoe. SUBSCRIBE to the YouTube channel so you don’t miss the next installment of Behind The Hustle. Join us live HERE.

📅 +February 18: How Soft Skills Make Financial Literacy Stick and Transform the Bookkeeping Relationship. This session is all about how relationship-first mentorship transforms both mentors and mentees and why soft skills matter just as much as hard numbers. Mariette Martinez is our guest instructor.

📅 +February 25: Debits And Credits Made Simple. Margie Remmers-Davis from Akadian.

📅 +March 4: Debits And Credits In The Wild: Advanced Bookkeeping Scenarios. Margie Remmers-Davis from Akadian.

📅 May 4-6: GrowCon in Utah. THE Conference EXCLUSIVELY for OWNERS of Bookkeeping, Tax & Accounting Companies. Use code KATE200 for $200 off.

📅 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.

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Featured Posts

🌶️ Taylor E. asked what is your favorite AI platform - go add yours to the chat!

🌶️ Jack W. provided an extremely thorough list of additional adjacent income streams that accounting pros like us can charge for. Go check out his comment.

Help You Hustle

💪 I hope you caught Sarah Tatum’s Behind The Hustle interview. Two things that stood out to me:

• The explanation that she was drawn to the bookkeeping/accounting/tax industry because she has always been a little bit nosey. 🧐Boy, do you get to see very deep into people’s lives! Anyone else a bit nosey? Anyone NOT nosey but have seen way more behind-the-scenes drama than you ever thought you would?

• The explanation of how she and her business partner came together when they realized their strengths were a perfect match is a pretty text book example of how strong partnerships should be formed. I was also tickled to learn that they met inside the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Community!

💪 Watch the replay of the live stream with Veronica “From Leads to Clients: Using Paid Diagnostic Reviews To Qualify, Price, And Close With Confidence.” This conversation could be one of those main milestone markers in your business that you look back on for years to come.

Jobs

💼EIGHT jobs were added to the Job Guide! Go check it out 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)

🎪 The gift of lunch dates

I know some of you follow along with the highs and lows of my love life, including the recent low about how I flubbed things on my husband’s birthday last year.

So I shall tell you about a “high” that is going well.

For Christmas, I gave my husband a magazine, a homemade coupon, and a 12x repeating monthly calendar invite.

Might sound lame. But it isn’t.

Allow me to explain.

I was at the grocery store and saw a magazine called Fort Worth: The City’s Magazine. The front cover said “Best New Restaurants in 2025”.

I had a moment of gift-giving inspiration (which was good because it was about December 18 and I had nothing for him for Christmas except a heavily discounted, used Patagonia vest I saw in the Returns section at REI, which is one of my all-time favorite places to shop).

I bought the magazine. I made a coupon that said something like “12 lunch dates in 2025.” And I sent a recurring calendar invite to his work email address so that no one could book something on his calendar or mine.

The magazine allowed me to have something to wrap and put under the tree, but the real benefit is that it is reducing the decision-making costs because we just pick from the list of restaurants featured in the magazine. Making the “where should we go” decision a bit easier is a real blessing.

The subject of the calendar entry says “K&C Planning Meeting”, so it is a little discreet since I know that people in the Navy can see each other’s calendars. 😂

We just had our second iteration of these 12 dates last week. Really good Thai food on a random Thursday (plus good leftovers for lunch on Friday!). Felt so luxurious. We also are being pretty intentional about our conversations because in spring of 2027, he will retire from the Navy which will be absolutely jarring for our family that has only ever known a military lifestyle. We need intentional time to process this and plan for what is next. And to plan a retirement ceremony and party.

To wrap this up with one more gift-giving pro tip, the other Christmas gift I gave him was an extendable back scratcher that is in the shape of a hand. Which I promise you is the gift that everyone in your life really wants.

Kate Builds In Public

🎢 Well folks, I did it. I hired the position I have been telling you that I was trying to fill. Whew! Not for the faint of heart. And the relief I felt was short-lived, even though I am extremely optimistic about the benefits this new hire will bring.

• Now there is onboarding.

• Explaining all the jumbled mess of things in my head.

• The humbling moments of letting her see how many unread emails I have in my inbox when I share my screen when I’m showing her how to do something.

• The pressure to succeed and increase revenue because now she and her family are counting on my business to have continued and increasing success.

🎢 In addition to my full load of 1-on-1 FreshBooks training clients, I signed 2 new FreshBooks Office Hours members and one clean up client. The clean up client is pretty small though.

• My cleanups pipeline is not where they need to be at this time of year. I am not sure what I am doing wrong. But this is supposed to be the time of year where I make a relatively high percentage of my income in high dollar project-based engagements, and as of this writing I only have 1 in process and 1 proposal out (that I have low confidence he will say yes). It might have something to do with FreshBooks offering 2025 cleanups for free inside the app with their new GL software partner Kick (it is complicated to understand, and you are probably not a FreshBooks Accountant like I am, so don’t worry about the details). So I’m spending more time than I thought I would thinking about sales and small pivots I can make to improve my pipeline.

🎢 I have not worked much this week. On Monday I subbed for 7th grade Latin (thankfully a part of the assignment they worked on was Roman numerals which I am great at because I was a mathlete, but I could not help at all on the actual language part of the assignment), on Thursday I had Bible study at church and then went straight lunch with my husband (see above in the My Family Circus section), and Friday I volunteered all day for our school’s annual day of service. All good stuff, but none of it will keep the lights on (well, technically the subbing will pay me a small amount of money).

Letters To The Editor

✉️Did you read the last newsletter? Neural Foundry had some excellent feedback:

Absolute gold on the vertical upsell strategy! The part about asking "what can I do to make money today" really resonated—I started doing this last month and it shifted my whole mindset from busywork to actually revenue. What's underrated is how that cold-water-splash question forces you to prioritize client acquisitions and proposal follow-ups instead of getting lost in admin tasks. The tangential income streams video sounds perfect for my commute.

✉️Thank you Andrea F!

Packed with great info, as always! I love the idea of the SCorp templates! I’m gonna grab those!

Classifieds (Clickable)

Keep hustling!

Kate

-Chief Hustler-

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