Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sarah Young. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Sarah, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

My mission is to help more business owners build wealth from their businesses. What “wealth” means can be different to everyone, but ultimately it’s about having options, independence, and influence. The idea of more small business owners having more money and being able to positively impact our community is what brings me to work every day!

When I talk to business owners about long-term goals, their exit strategy, and their retirement or financial independence plan, many of them say something like, “I love my business! Why would I want to leave?”

I hear that – I love what I do too – but I’ve seen multiple business owners who get stuck and don’t have options. They get sick, or need to pull back for personal reasons, or something changes and their business doesn’t perform as well. If they haven’t built up assets outside of their business (which requires having a business that generates cash flow in the first place) then they’re stuck in a cash flow trap. They’re relying on their business to keep paying the bills and can’t step away.

Ultimately, if you’ve worked so hard to build up your business, I believe that your business should take care of you!

Sarah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m the founder of Young + Co, a Virtual CFO agency that helps business owners increase profit margins and generate freedom and wealth. After finding that working with small business owners was far more fulfilling than working for large companies, I committed myself and my business to helping business owners be more wealthy AND well.

I’m a CPA and have over a decade of experience in business, finance, and leadership. I started my business as a side hustle and went full-time in 2020 after having my son. My business has very quickly grown to a team of 5 (and still growing!). I started out doing the same things that many CPAs do, but quickly got burned out from the lower-ticket, high volume business model. I saw a real issue with many business owners who were struggling with cash flow, not sure how to manage all the moving parts of their business as they grew, and who weren’t investing and building wealth outside of their business. So I shifted in early 2021 to providing Virtual CFO, tax strategy, and profit coaching to clients and haven’t looked back! We primarily work with online and service-based businesses, and have an offer for anyone from the startup stage to high 7 figure businesses to help increase profitability and build wealth, because I feel strongly that financial strategy shouldn’t only be for 7-figure businesses.

I’m also the host of the Profit + Prosper podcast! When I’m not helping clients maximize their profit to create more confidence and stability in their businesses, you can likely find me hanging with my son and husband.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I started my business as a side-hustle at the end of 2018 and did quite a bit of free work for a while, helping out a business owner that I knew personally who had a well-established business but was still struggling with finance and taxes. Simultaneously, my husband hired a tax accountant to do our tax return the first year after we got married because we had a lot going on, and although the accountant is very highly reviewed online, I found that the communication was slow, they weren’t proactive, there were mistakes on the tax return that I found, and they wouldn’t provide any advice around how to save on taxes. I thought to myself – I could do this better!

During 2019 and early 2020, I side-hustled, providing monthly bookkeeping and tax prep services. It’s embarrassing to say, but I was pricing myself based on number of hours, and I had a couple of clients who only paid me around $100/month for bookkeeping. This was NOT scalable, as I found later on.

My son was born in March 2020 and after maternity leave, I quit my corporate job. By the end of 2020, I had taken on a lot of monthly bookkeeping clients at around $300-400 each, and was getting to be incredibly burned out. Because I have a very high-level skill set, I found myself giving lots of free tax and strategy advice. I just wanted to be helpful, but couldn’t sustain the business model.

In early 2021, I had a friend refer me to my first monthly CFO client. At the time, I was doing CFO work on a project basis, and this was my first monthly retainer client. They paid me $4000 per month and I remember having my mind completely blown, realizing that this was possible for me. Within a few months, I stopped taking on new bookkeeping and tax prep clients and focused on growing my CFO services. By the end of 2021, we did about $250K in revenue (that was my first year full time in my business) and I was able to hire a full-time team member, which made my life so much easier! We’ve continued adding to that growth in 2022!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The hardest one for me has been learning to detach my time from my ability to make money. What I mean is that in 2020, we made $60K in revenue. In 2021, we did over four times that amount – but it wasn’t because I worked four times harder. I spent the first 8 years of my career working in the Big 4 and in the corporate world, where the harder you worked, the more money you made.

I’ve learned that there’s a big difference in being self-employed and being a business owner. When you’re self-employed, if you stop working then the cash flow stops. As a business owner, you have to design processes and systems that allow the business to run whether you’re there or not. I made that shift because I forced myself to step back from the day-to-day and I made the right investments in my business to build my team and learn how to do sales and marketing.

Contact Info:

• Website: trustyoungco.com
• Instagram: @itssarahyoung
• Facebook: Facebook.com/youngcocfo
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-young-cpa/
• Other: Profit + Prosper podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/profit-prosper/id1608220698

Image Credits
Denise Benson Photography