We were lucky to catch up with Jennifer Barnes recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jennifer, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? We’d love to hear the backstory the illustrates how you grew the firm

We have been fortunate enough to offer a service that every business needs, so scaling up was not as challenging as it is in other companies. It is however extremely challenging to surpass certain milestones in our industry, such as having more than 30 W2 employees, or providing a consistent service when you have over 100 clients. We are proud of our achievements and making it on the INC5000 two years in a row, going from $3 million to $12 million in a 5 year period, while also having high retention is something we are proud of.

A challenge for every service based company that sells people, is that you need to keep great people retained. We have found that our space is notorious for turnover and we strived to be different from the beginning. One thing we made a huge focus on is having happy team members who genuinly feel appreciated and valued. We go above and beyond for our team, and its paid off. Although our profits are slimmer than our competition, we are fine with that as it just means that we have invested in our people and pay them more than most. Having high retention has helped us scale as our reputation for low turnover shows in the number of referrals we get on a regular basis.
Another area where we have been successful at, which has directly led to us being able to scale is our risk tolerance. In order to scale, you usually have to take risks. We are always hiring in advance of the need and it means our speed of execution is unbeatable. I don’t know a competitor around that you can talk to during a sales call and who can have a team of people there the next day. We don’t overthink things and produce elaborate proposals, we just get started! We have enough capacity on our team, at all times, that we are able to personalize our services for each customer and we are able to start quickly. This is a very expensive route to take and comes with risk becuase if you dont get the clients quickly then you have people sitting on the bench, which is never good for too awful long. Especially when they are on salary!

Jennifer, 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 started off in Accounting at Petco and then escalated my career quickly with a combination of talent, opportunity and luck. I fell into consulting at a pretty young age and was fortunate enough to have some bad things happen to me, which forever changed my path. I had the great fortune of being fired at age 33, just before my wedding and it forced me to start my own company. After 6 years of running that company and scaling quickly, i found myself in a bad partnership and had to exit that business. Thats a story for another day.

I was so blessed to have the series of events that again forced me to start my own company, this time without partners. I founded Optima 3 days after I left the first company I started and have never looked back.

At Optima, we have a team of accounting and HR professionals that can help businesses in all industries and from start-ups to medium sized organizations. We even love to help non profits. Our goal is to put the right people in the right position for your business so you can focus on what you are good at.

Optima Office provides Outsourced Accounting, Fractional CFO & Controllers, and Human Resources Services. We serve nearly 300 companies across the United States, with a concentration on the West Coast. Our team members work onsite with our clients or remotely. We bill hourly so the team can be flexible to our client’s needs. At Optima, we focus on retention so that our clients have the utmost consistency. Our team is reliable, kind, and efficient.

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

As mentioned in the first part about scaling, building a strong reputation is critical. You are only as good as what the masses say about you, and the way you make your customers and employees fee. Our speed of execution, the way we personalize our teams for each company and are able to pivot quickly regardless of what is thrown our way, makes us the first company that people refer or turn to when they need a solution to their accounting and HR needs. We are known for having amazing people and we are known for keeping them! That is super important to me, and why winning the best place to work from multiple publications year after year is my favorite award. We are also a company of our word. We will always make things right, will always take care of those around us and will always

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Word of mouth! Honestly though, we focused on referring other people. We went out of our way to refer CPAs, banks, wealth managers, law firms, etc. We did so much referring in our early days that we were always top of mind. We started recieving a ton of referrals back, and it never stopped. It was never a strategy as I simply love to connect others and refer people who do a good job, but it ended up being a strategy over time because we realized our valuable it was to be mutual referral partners with the right people. We have narrowed our referrals over the years and expanded our network, but its working. Not only do we get referrals from strategic partners now, our clients actively send us to their friends. There is no better testimate than that!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.optimaoffice.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OptimaOffice/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-barnes-optima/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNVVPGORId2LF8YGCKw1eww