Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Morgaine Trine. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Morgaine, thanks for joining us today. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?
When I originally started the business it was just me, however, I quickly hired support on client delivery doing a small number of hours each week. I did this because I knew I was good at the client delivery but great on the business development side and wanted to build out a team so I could focus on the things only I could do.
I started by hiring a friend who I knew had the soft skills needed (attention to detail, initiative, problem-solving, integrity) but didn’t know the technical side of things. She knew she was the first hire and that I would be figuring out what it meant to run a team using her as the “beta” test. It allowed for a lot of space and honest feedback; taking the pressure off of being perfect. This helped in the long run because I was able to develop leadership skills while working with a friend and it made it so I’ve had a very solid training and process library from the start, while also verifying that soft skills are more important than hard skills for our firm. We also made a “friendship contract” as part of our work; basically it was an agreement that if either of us felt the working relationship was jeopardizing our friendship that the friendship came first and we’d stop the working relationship, no-harm-no-foul. We’d both seen situations where friendships went down in flames after working together and didn’t want that to happen. We also made clear boundaries when we talked if it was a friend call or a work call so the two relationships wouldn’t get entwined. It was a success and when we ended the working relationship, the friendship still remained strong.
Since then, we’ve done hiring about twice a year which has really helped to refine our process. By learning that soft skills are the more important qualifications for working at our firm, I developed the application and interview process to focus on getting a sense of the type of person instead of if they have x number of years of experience. For example, a question on our application that everyone must answer before moving to the interview stage is “how does integrity show up in your work?” Because integrity is one of our business values and very important for our industry, it allows us to assess culture fit first. For this reason we get a number of people who have educational experience but this is their first hands on experience. While it does take more training and effort from me at the beginning because there’s a lot of “this is how it translates into practice” support, we end up having a great longer term outlook because the team member has the soft skills to succeed in the long run. This approach doesn’t work for everyone and as I’ve gotten busier it’s meant other team members have stepped up to help with training (which allows for their own career development). Every time I’ve hired based on experience and hard skills it hasn’t worked out. It also means the team is excited to get their first chance at working in the industry and appreciate having the space to grow, make mistakes, and learn from it instead of being expected to be perfect.
The major pain point with our hiring process has been timing. Because we have a busy season (Nov – March) I learned the hard way that hiring in that period is a bad idea because there’s too much to do to effectively train. So then it becomes a guessing game of how busy that season will be, how many new clients will come in, and therefore how many new staff we’ll need. We end up hiring in August for this period and that has caused issues when the expectation doesn’t match the reality. We’re still figuring this balancing act out, and it’s meant we have to be very upfront and honest to new team members about the uncertainty of the workload. It’s not a perfect solution, but that approach aligns with our values and allows the team members to have a clear expectation about the uncertainty and not feel blindsided. If I could go back, I’d spend more time figuring out the timing and how to create a more predictable starting workload for new team members.
Morgaine, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am the owner of Honestly Bookkeeping, a boutique bookkeeping firm helping owners with a portfolio of businesses to stabilize, strengthen, and create sustaining financial systems. I started the firm in 2017 because I realized that my undergrad degree (Ancient Mediterranean History) didn’t provide the type of lifestyle I wanted. So I moved to the Mediterranean and started a remote business to be able to facilitate the type of life I wanted. I am a third generation entrepreneur, but I’d resisted it for so long because I had seen the behind the scenes of business ownership my whole life. I knew the pitfalls and downsides, whereas the image portrayed online of owning a business was sipping mai tais by the pool. Despite people encouraging me to start a business my whole life, I resisted it until I realized it was the way to align my work needs with my life needs. Once I had that realization, things clicked into place in a way that was the easiest experience of my life.
When people hear I have a degree in Ancient Mediterranean History the next question is inevitably “how did you go from that to finance?” As I was figuring out that I wanted to be able to travel and work, I was working admin & ops at a Registered Investment Advisor and my boss one day told me “you know Morgaine, we’re in people’s safe space more than any other service provider” and it all clicked into place. I really resonated with the realization that finance is a very intimate and vulnerable profession and it takes a lot of trust to work in that area. More than once I’ve had a conversation with someone (sometimes that I’ve just met) and they tell me something only to follow it up with “I’ve never told someone that before”. I naturally have the ability to create an environment of trust, which is a very important skill to have in the finance world and helped me understand why I was enjoying working at that advisory even though it was a totally different industry than my education. One of the great (and bad) things about bookkeeping is that you don’t need a degree to work in it, and because I didn’t want to go back to school to change professions, it was the perfect fit.
Using the foundation of honesty, trust, and integrity as the starting point for building the firm, I started working with small businesses all over the US and honed our offers and types of clients we work with. Now, we’ve niched in two ways. The first is that we are very process and technology forward. We’re helping clients to create a consistent and predictable process of working together, so that they trust we’ll do what we said we’d do, when we said we’d do it. Secondly, because we are process forward, we work really well with owners who have multiple businesses. We don’t require that all their businesses work with us (although inevitably most clients move all their bookkeeping needs to us) but the mentality required to run multiple operations fits really well with our style. Again, you have to trust things will work well and without a lot of hands on direction when you run multiple businesses, and we’ve delivered on that trust.
Currently, our firm provides Xero-only bookkeeping services, including cleanups and monthly bookkeeping, to a wide range of small businesses all over the US; mostly to owners with a portfolio of businesses. We also advise on best bookkeeping processes and technologies to create an ecosystem of business finances, instead of having the bookkeeping be a time consuming afterthought. Many of our clients build custom software that we help integrate with their bookkeeping to streamline operations. We also provide a digital product helping any business learn what finance technology they need to create their own ecosystem.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Each time the business grows, you have to readjust your mindset because what use to work may not work for the future. This is a lesson I’ve kept coming back to again and again, each time taking a different shape. As we get more clients or team members the needs of the business change and how we have something structured no longer functions as well as it did before. It’s a constant process of refining and pivoting. For example, we’ve played with our pricing structure a lot over the years as the clients change. For a while we were doing hourly pricing for the first six months and then switching to a flat rate using those hours as the average. Clients liked this because they found it fair and could see directly why a flat rate was what it was. However, as we grew, that structure became more cumbersome to administer. We got to a point where it wasn’t worth the admin time on our side and we had enough data to then create a pricing matrix to start quoting a flat rate up front. It took the mental switch of knowing we had the history to be able to accurately quote upfront.
The most recent example of this is the switch around best practices. When you’re an expert it means you know multiple ways to reach a client’s desired outcome. We do a lot of work on systems and processes but also have historically taken an “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” mentality. However, that means a number of our clients have unique solutions and setup. We can make it work because we’re excellent in making systems function, however, it causes some backend complications. By switching into the “we’re the expert and know the best practices” mindset it allows us to work with the best system not just a good system for our clients, even if that means making them switch softwares or processes that work fine. It’s a mentality that didn’t work when we were just starting out, but now is mandatory. It would be a detriment to clients and staff to not utilize the absolute best methods, even if it means turning away more prospective clients.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
The best choice I made when first starting the business was to do coffee chats. I got on as many calls as possible to just meet other business owners. It wasn’t to sell or gather names to later market to; just to make the connection. By approaching the outward interactions on genuine connection and community, it made it very easy for people to refer to us when they came across someone needing bookkeeping support. It’s true that people remember how you made them feel, and by focusing on connection and authentic conversations it was easy to build a reputation that aligned with our business values: honesty, integrity, security, and a heck-yes attitude. It also doesn’t hurt that our name clearly communicates one of our values and an important foundation for working in the finance world. Then we delivered on what we said we would. This created a circle whereby existing clients would refer their friends because we’d lived up to the expectation and it all feeds into a solid reputation.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://honestlybookkeeping.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/honestlybookkeeping
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/honestlybookkeeping
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgaine-trine/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@honestlybookkeeping
Image Credits
Katie Grace Photography Rachael LaPorte