We recently connected with Dorothy Korbe and have shared our conversation below.

Dorothy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Talk to us about building a team – did you hire quickly, how’d you recruit the first few team members? Any interesting lessons?

Our firm started out with just me. This was the situation for a couple of years, at which time I just could not keep up with the demand. Looking for the right first staff member to join the team started out rocky. Like many business owners, we found ourselves in a very uncertain time. I knew I couldn’t do it by myself any longer and I needed someone I could count on to help complete the work. I admit I committed many of the usual errors on this path to the first employee including:

* Waiting until it was a critical situation as I didn’t have the time to complete my bookkeeping to know if I could afford someone.
* Not having a solid interview and testing process.
* Cutting the process short as we didn’t get many resumes and I was worried I would loose someone, then finding that the person hired wasn’t the right fit because of the lack of knowledge, skills, or didn’t fit in the work environment.
* Finding someone that was hired was so inexperienced that the workload left behind was even more overwhelming with corrections on top of regular service.
* Repeating the poor process multiple times before finding a good fit.

We used many of the usual sites to advertise/find someone and used some industry posting boards as well. It is interesting that were we found our first right fit team member came from a social media site and not a typical hiring source. This was painful and I can say there were many things learned along the way, including to trust your ‘gut’.

We are a small business that takes pride in the services we provide and we are now trying once again to add to our team. I am finding myself facing many of the same challenges that I faced with the first hire, however, now there is are additional obstacles we are facing that appear to be created from the COVID programs. The shortage of qualified candidates comes with unmatched expectations for workplace (ie. remote versus onsite) and lack of affordable options. Where can business owners like me find people to provide the services to clients that meet our quality expectations in this environment? Thoughts anyone?

Dorothy, 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?

Getting into bookkeeping and accounting for me is probably the most common and that is my mother was in the industry. Although it is a common way for me to get started it certainly wasn’t what I intended to do when I was growing up. In fact I had intended to go into the legal industry, but as we all know “life happens” and I was pulled in this direction.

What truly started me down this path happened in the later part of high school and in college. While taking business courses including accounting in school and drawing on the knowledge my mother shared as I grew up, I found that bookkeeping and accounting came easily and I enjoyed the work. I also found that people came to me often for assistance with the accounting course work and I ended up in employment positions that were bookkeeping and accounting related too over the years.

I have held many positions at various levels. Started as an accounting clerk (accounts payable and accounts receivable) and this bloomed into full-charge bookkeeper, a controller/CFO and then an auditor. This experience provided a solid background in all aspects of accounting which helps us provide our clients with services beyond general bookkeeping. Also, having worked for business in many different industries we have the ability to understand the special requirements that need to be addressed.

Our services are customized to meet each clients needs and range from initial setup of bookkeeping system for those clients just getting started, to cleanup for those that have had inexperienced assistance and have errors (often over many years) and on to regular bookkeeping service or review for those with internal bookkeeping and Controller/CFO level services for those looking to have higher management of financial information. A lot of this is covered in our website (https://dkrkservices.com) and if you refer there, I think you would get lots of details that could be usedful in understanding what we have to offer. The Controller/CFO level services have been added to and as this is an even more customized service it is important for there to be a conversation to see what is needed in order to determine what we can do. It would be best for the Controller/CFO service needs for the company to contact us as it would be difficult to cover how it could help each company here.

For us not only does the depth of experience (from both me and my staff) put us in a unique position to assist not only in general bookkeeping, but understanding special requirements of some industries, being able to help clean up books so that business have a more complete picture of the financial health of their business and providing the next level of service without them having to hire a full time Controller/CFO is what makes us an amazing partner to our clients and sets our services apart from the competition. Our services come from in-house staff and we work together to ensure our clients receive the best we have to offer.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

We learned as we ‘grew up’ that business owners are looking for a partnership with the companies they use. That is especially true for the service providers they hire in the finance industry. What I mean by that is when you are involved in the money aspect of their business they are looking for not only the service you have to offer, but to know that you are: 1) knowledgeable; 2) reliable and responsive; and 3) trustworthy. Not necessarily in that order. Our clients are trusting us to do many aspects of the accounting for their company and many times also for them personally, thus it is critical that they be able to convey those characteristics as well as others. Over the years we have been successful in sharing that with our clients and in response they have been able to assist us with building that reputation not only with them but publicly so that others see that with the many positive reviews. We are very grateful for the opportunities we have had to help our clients with their accounting/bookkeeping needs and for their continued trust.

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

DK/RK Services started out as a part-time after hours business and had only a couple of clients. These clients were not very hands on and the work (after on-boarding) didn’t require much interface time needs. Further, it had been a simpler on-boarding process as initially we had the “undivided attention” of the business owners and the business had just started so no multi-year cleanup work.

When I took the company to be a full-time venture and the needs were more real-time it became quickly obvious that how we had learned to communicate with clients was not going to work and the expectations by both parties were not necessarily going to align up without clear outlining of services.

We were discovering that clients were struggling with the on-boarding process for a few reasons: 1) they were surprised by the initial assessment of the condition of their books; 2) there were so many requests for information/documentation from us to determine what was needed for the clean up work; and 3) clean-up work (especially for multi-year errors) took time. Keeping in mind that many clients had only been using the profit and loss financial statement as financial information regarding their business things like the balance sheet were overlooked.

It was clear that there needed to be more upfront communication that provided background on the assessment, the expectation of how the work would be conducted, the extent of the information/documentation that could be needed and most of all that this would be ‘painful’ and take some time at first, but the end result would be rewarding. The result would give them the financial tools to help them manage the company and make those all important decisions to grow and thrive.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dkrkservices.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dkrkbookkeeping
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DKRKServices
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/20106745/admin
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DKRKbookkeeping
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD_mQxPkcA-egIKU-GzKbuQ
• Yelp: https://biz.yelp.com/home/ngSPqdGMfzUaRKnltqk_mQ

Image Credits
KBenfield Photography Kimberly Benfield