We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Keila Hill-Trawick a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Keila, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard
Historically the standard for tax and accounting firms is to take on as many clients as possible with a focus on completing tasks. Clients submit their documents and firms process that information to complete specific tasks (i.e. tax filing, bookkeeping). As a result, the experience for clients feels very transactional. I heard time and time again that business owners were frustrated by the lack of transparency and communication, oftentimes they would only hear from their provider at the beginning and the end of the process. There is also a rampant issue of accountants not being reliable and delivering on time. It is not uncommon for tax clients to have no idea what the status of their filing is and learning only after the fact that it wasn’t filed by the deadline. .
I created Little Fish Accounting as the antithesis of the industry standard. The client experience is our number one focus and everything we do is aimed at ensuring our clients feel supported, educated and have peace of mind when it comes to their finances. Our services are year-long partnerships, not just at tax time, with a focus on strategy as opposed to tasks in meeting our client’s needs. We have an in-depth onboarding process to ensure clients understand what to expect at every step of the process and we encourage them to reach out to us with questions at any time. We also have an on-time filing guarantee so clients can rest assured that their taxes will be submitted prior to the deadline, no surprises.
We focus on empowering entrepreneurs to make strategic decisions by providing financial insight, guidance, and interpretation support to meet their business goals.
We strive to relieve the stress that comes with managing finances so entrepreneurs can focus on the parts of their business they enjoy and do best. And they can trust that it will be done with integrity, transparency and honesty.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I started as a corporate accountant, eventually moving to government accounting and internal audit. While the work certainly felt challenging, it wasn’t fulfilling, and I often found my work siloed, with no idea of how what I did traveled down the line to completion. It wasn’t until I started Little Fish that I began to understand that what I was missing was connection and education – a direct understanding of who I work with and for in order to provide guidance from start to finish on how to handle accounting, finance and tax matters. From the beginning, we’ve focused on the smallest of small businesses – micro businesses with one or two owners and very small teams, working to thrive in industries across professional services to help them get time back and focus on what they started the business to do.
I’m most proud of our team at Little Fish. Everyone is incredibly engaged and willing to help. We work hard towards a spa like experience where it is easy to work both with AND for us, and take constant feedback where improvements could be beneficial. Overall, I’m honored to lead a team of women doing their absolute best to take care of our clients while taking care of themselves. It shows in our services, the work we deliver, and in our client interactions. We care about our work and our customers and it shows.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
The most impactful thing that helped us build our reputation is providing exceptional service to our clients. We go above and strive to provide a spa-like experience for our clients that exemplifies our core values of respect, integrity and care. In doing that we have established a reputation of being dependable, trustworthy and trusted which is not common in the accounting industry. We have heard countless stories from clients about their past experiences with accountants that took advantage of them, altogether disappeared after taking their money or didn’t live up to their promise. The intentionality that we put into the client experience has resulted in an extremely low turnover rate for existing clients and a high referral rate for new clients. We are extremely proud to be an outlier in the space and to have established a strong reputation in a relatively short amount of time.
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
I never saw myself as an entrepreneur. I was living my best life at my government job as an auditor but I started getting restless and bored. I didn’t like the way that my work was siloed and I was struggling to see the impact of what I was doing. I considered looking for another job but my husband suggested that I get a hobby instead. Around that time I had a couple of friends who were creatives and consultants who were lamenting about the business side of things. They really wanted to be able to focus on doing the work and not be bogged down with all of the accounting functions. I offered to help them out on the side with getting their bookkeeping in order and before I knew it, it evolved into a full fledged business. I came up with the name, created a website and had a roster of clients but I was still working my full-time job. I said to myself ‘why would I quit when I have a great salary, benefits and I get paid on time every two weeks’. This was in March 2018.
Fast forward to a year later, the business was doing pretty well as a side hustle, bringing in decent income and I was really enjoying the work. I thought about pursuing the business full-time but I had a lot of fear about walking away from a stable job into the unknown world of entrepreneurship. So I toiled over the idea for months. Ultimately I leaned onto the fact that if it didn’t work out I could always find another accounting job. So I decided to take the scary leap into working for myself.
It was just me for the majority of the first year but I eventually hired a few contractors to help out. I was building the services, the primary point of contact for clients, managing my own marketing/branding and doing the accounting work. And it was exhausting. I was struggling with how to price services because it all felt arbitrary. And I fell into the trap of creating custom packages on the fly in an attempt to sign on as many customers as possible. I was also focused on accounting tasks like annual tax filings and bookkeeping which was much more transactional. The business has gone through several evolutions since then (thank goodness) and what started out as a wobbly toddler has emerged as a mature grown up business.
The team has now grown to 6 employees and the focus of the business has shifted to being a strategic advisory consultant to clients, forging year-long partnerships rather than ad-hoc tasks.
Three lessons I’ve learned along the way:
– Hire early and intentionally. The capacity for the business to grow will be constrained if it’s just you. It’s not possible long-term to wear all of the hats by yourself. Early on I brought on an administrative assistant and it was one of the best decisions I could’ve made. Having help to manage the day-to-day operations freed me up to focus on more strategic initiatives for the business.
– Be good at saying no. I always want to help which is one of the reasons I started the business. But I came to a point where it wasn’t sustainable. I had to start saying no to potential clients that aren’t a good fit, putting a limit on the number of clients we accept and decline unscheduled phone calls which were disrupting the work.
– Do it scared. Doing new things will always be uncomfortable but there is great reward in pushing past the fear and challenging yourself beyond your comfort zone. I often think back and think about what I would have missed out on if I allowed fear to keep me from quitting my job, or changing our services, or from hiring. So don’t let the fear of the unknown hold you back.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.littlefishaccounting.com
- Instagram: @littlefishaccounting
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/littlefishacctg
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/littlefishaccounting
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/littlefishacctg
Image Credits
DANIELLE FINNEY SHEKEIDRA MARCHÉ