We were lucky to catch up with Lakeicha Goodrum recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Lakeicha thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. 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

When I started my business in 2019, it started as a home base business. I knew I wanted to expand out of my home so I started building a strategic business plan that included a budget analysis, demographical commercial properties/buildings, marketing and portfolio building. At the time I was only offering tax services and knew that I would need to offer more services as tax preparation is a general seasonal line of work. I started learning more about bookkeeping to offer accounting and payroll services, I started to offer general business services like printing, faxing and notary services. After finding a location and scaling up these services I felt like it was time to expand again, so I went back to the drawing board and created another business plan, I looked for a larger facility that would allow for hiring employees to help manage the operation as we grew, I partnered with another company to sublease space in my new facility to help bring in the additional revenue needed cover the overhead of the expansion. I then added more to my portfolio to offer bill-pay services and also licensed to offer life and health insurance.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a wife and mother of six children and two grandchildren. I am a very family oriented person have always desired to work for myself to support the type of quality of life I wanted to build around my family. I started preparing my own taxes years ago and found that I was good at it and enjoyed doing them so I started doing taxes for family members, then for a few people on the job, then I started thinking maybe I could do this part-time to make extra money so I started working seasonal with a tax company. After two years with the company I had build enough clientele and gained enough education to venture out on my own, this was the best decision I made to help jump start my own business. Since then I have helped hundreds of clients navigate through tax situations, helped numerous individuals start their own business and provided countless services to my community.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I decided to continue my plans of opening my business in 2019, on the onset of a honorific pandemic. When major business were struggling to stay afloat, I used this time to think outside the box to have my business thrive and survive during such an uncertain time. I knew that I provided services that even in the midst of a pandemic people would still need, with the world shutting down, the question became, how would they receive the services? I quickly learned to create remote service products that allowed clients to stay connected to my business from the privacy and safety of their home. 2019-2020 were my best years of revenue for my company.

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

The most effective strategy has been excellent customer service and marketing. Customer experiences really is the seller of your business, the experience determines repeat customers and the likelihood of that person telling someone else about the positive experience and recommending your services. Marketing has also been instrumental because it allows you to showcase your business to prospects, reach the mass and allows you to keep your business relevant and visual.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.fwbstaxpros.com
• Instagram: goodrumkeicha
• Facebook: faithworksbusinesssolutions/facebook
• Yelp: Faith Works Business Solutions LLC

Image Credits
Photo Credits: Tracie Reed@Reid Photography