Today we’d like to introduce you to Rebekah Polley

Hi Rebekah, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?

Pre-kids I was working in accounting departments within different corporations and industries. In 2019 we got pregnant with our 3rd biological child, and were foster parents to some pretty amazing young teens, and something in my schedule needed to give. The companies I had worked for were amazing, and tried to support the needs of my family’s schedule – but with having to juggle court, normal family events, and working, it was hard for me to get my hours in during their work day. So when we got pregnant with our 3rd biological son, we decided something needed to give – mainly my flexibility to be able to work evenings and on weekends and around what my kids’ schedules. So we launched Perfectly Polley July of 2019. It started out as a Virtual Office Management Company. I was willing and able to help my clients with all sorts of administrative needs, but I honestly was getting bored with it. I started to see that my clients needed some help understanding their financials and making decisions based off of that. I was also surprised at how many didn’t operate on a budget for their business, and I saw them saying yes to things that didn’t help the business, and actually stole their yes at an opportunity that would help their business. So I started to transition away from any administrative tasks to focused on bookkeeping tasks. I was able to make sure their financial data made sense to them so they could make decisions on real information, not feelings about how they were spending their money. Since I had experience in most accounting tasks due to jobs I had worked prior and the CPAs who were willing to teach me the theory behind the application (leaving the taxes to the CPAs), I was able to bring consistency and transparency to their transactions. I was also able to help them understand what their Income Statements and Balance Sheets were telling them based on their spending patterns. The biggest thing, and what felt like the biggest win, was helping them create budgets that allowed them to manage their money, and not vise versa. My team was able to watch our clients transition from being reactionary in their spending, to proactive – giving every dollar a job to help their business grow in a steady manner.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

The road has not been smooth. I launched Perfectly Polley about 6 months before COVID shut down the world. At the time I was a one woman show, so assisting clients with a new baby and kids having to be home for school created a scenario that I regretted starting my own business. Businesses, especially the smaller businesses and entrepreneurs (who were my ideal client at the time), weren’t bringing on outside help due to them not knowing if they were even going to be able to service their clients due to everything shutting down. The first 1 year, I just broke even – which was ok for our family since I didn’t have to pay for childcare since they were all home with me. The 2nd year I actually had a small profit. The 3rd year – I doubled in profit every quarter. I was not expecting that type of growth, and anyone who has a business who is growing understands the pain that is associated with growing. I was now walking the tension line of needing someone on my team, and needing to adjust my invoicing to be able to cover someone being on my team. The 4th year we were experiencing the same growing pains – and needed to hire again. I was needing to change my business model, and was not prioritizing the time to work ON my business. This created some unnecessary bottlenecks in the workflow. We are just now getting some of those bottlenecks removed, and I have a wonderful team that has allowed me time to actually focus on getting the processes and procedures out of my head and onto paper. We are still feeling the struggle, but we are also starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?

Perfectly Polley is a done for you bookkeeping firm. Nothing too special about the bookkeeping part, except that we prioritize meetings with our clients so they understand their spending patterns and how it holds up to their budget. But what sets us apart is that we want to protect our entry level positions for young adults aging out of foster care, or have recently aged out of foster care and are prioritizing their education. 1 in 5 young adults in this situation take advantage of their access to free college, and only 1 in 50 of those graduate. It is hard to go through school without a support system and a flexible work schedule – so we want to provide that as well as life skills trainings (think how to create a budget, how to apply for scholarships, how to wash laundry) and transferable working skills (how to be coachable, how to research answers we don’t know, etc). We want them to become fluent in bookkeeping, and we would even love for some of them to want to become bookkeepers or work in the accounting world – but our overall goal is to support these young adults as they work hard to break generational cycles with real life skills trainings.

The other thing that we are really excited about is Ezekiel’s Bookkeeper – a bookkeeping course for entrepreneurs who want to understand what is happening with their financials, as well as train people who are interested in running their own bookkeeping business. We have launched the first part of our theory training, working on launching the 2nd part of theory, and then we will be working on how to apply it different accounting softwares out there. Ezekiel’s bookkeeper is named for our son that we lost at 17 weeks pregnant. When we miscarried, there weren’t many people talking about what they experienced when they miscarried or experienced a stillbirth – and the women I did talk to had an aura of shame that made me so sad. So I wanted to honor our sweet baby boy that we didn’t get to know on this side of Heaven by naming the course after him, but then also creating a path to talk some about infertility and infant loss. The “teachers” in Ezekiel’s bookkeeper are named after sweet Angel babies from mama’s who were willing to tell me their story and loved the idea of honoring their babies as a “teacher”.

I’m not sure if you can tell, but I love when I can use something I am already doing to help shed light on situations that most people haven’t had to think about.

What are your plans for the future?

We want to just keep growing and assisting clients. We want to be able to create more internship positions or help companies feel comfortable doing something similar to what we are doing. We want to create an option that people can hire young adults in vulnerable situations that they can also tap into the life skills training classes we have already started to develop. We also want to finish developing Ezekiel’s Bookkeeper so that it can open up more doors for people to be able to work from home, support their families the way they need to, and also be able to experience this world without having to be stuck behind the same desk.

My husband graduated from ASU in 2022, and we were able to drive across the country and camp along the way so that he could walk across the field for graduation. If I had still been working for corporate America, I wouldn’t have been able to take my laptop with me and work while driving, and then be able to be present with my kids at our stops. I would love to help more people be able to find their opportunities like that.

Pricing:

• Ezekiel’s Bookkeeper $297/month
• Done For You Bookkeeping Monthly Package starts at $500/month
• Done For You Bookkeeping Weekly Package starts at $1500/month

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.perfectlypolley.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/perfectlypolley/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/perfectlypolley
• Other: https://www.ezekielsbookkeeper.com

Image Credits

Mandy Liz Photography
Mammoth Creative Group