We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Paul Swiderski. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Paul below.

Alright, Paul thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Almost every entrepreneur we know has considered donating a portion of their sales to an organization or cause – how did you make the decision of whether to donate? We’d love to hear the backstory if you’re open to sharing the details.

Our businesses are a representation of who we are. We create a persona for our businesses that reflect who we are as people, and I am a firm believer of giving back to the community that supports your business. My company does this on 3 different levels: we donate money, time and talent.

Ten percent of our revenue (before expenses) is donated to charity. The charities we support range from local churches to non-profits that provide equine therapy for autistic children. We prefer to donate to smaller charities that use a majority of their funds to support their programs. We also donate to our non-profit clients by writing them a check for 10% of what they pay us.

We also encourage our employees to donate their time to the charity of their choice, and we allow each employee to take four hours of company time per week for volunteer work. To set as an example, I volunteer each morning at a local organization that provides meals and resources for the homeless by playing guitar and singing for their daily morning church service.

Lastly, every tax season we work with local churches and charities to refer us people who happened to fall on hard times and cannot afford professional tax preparation. We contact these individuals to offer to prepare their tax returns free of charge, making it clear that we are offering this service with no strings attached – we simply want to help them in some small way.

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

Microbiz Accounting Financial and Business Services, LLC was founded in Wyoming, PA in 2003 to focus on an underserved group: small businesses. A second office was opened in Lewes, DE in 2019.

Small business owners, who needed the advice of an accountant the most, were often ignored and treated like a burden. Many of the clients who came to us from other firms told me how badly they were treated by their prior accountant, and the complaints generally fell into the same categories: my accountant doesn’t return my call/message; my accountant talks down to me and I have no idea what he/she is telling me; and my accountant lets me know I’m not his/her priority. We decided to change that by treating each small business client as though they were our only client.

Our job isn’t to just give you a stack of paperwork and an invoice. Our commitment to you, the small business owner, is to understand your goals, help you understand your numbers so you can make better decisions, and and to help save you money in taxes. When you work with Microbiz, you get someone you can rely on.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I started my business on March 1, 2003 without the intent of making it a permanent full-time venture. My wife, at the time, was diagnosed with cancer, and I took a leave of absence from my position at work (which required me to travel 5-6 days a week) so I can stay home and take care of her and our (almost) 2-year old daughter until my wife recovered. The company terminated me and I was denied unemployment, so I paid our bills for the remainder of the year and used the $300 we had left to place a few ads and open a booth at a local flea market to advertise tax preparation services just hoping to make enough money to help us get by while my wife was recovering. Tax season ended six weeks later, and I made enough money to forget about conducting a job search.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

It should go without saying, the first thing you need is a website and pages/accounts with the key social media platforms: Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (depending on your target market’s age, you may want to sign on other platforms as well). Many hosting companies offer a social media tool that allows you to post across all your social media accounts in one click, instead of manually posting to each one. If not, subscribe to one like Hootsuite – it will save you a lot of time.

Now that you’re all set up with the above, make a commitment to do the following every day your business is open while you sip your morning coffee: write something, add a picture and post. That “something” should be relevant to your business and your customers/clients. It can be general advice from a reputable website, humor related to your industry/profession, information on current and upcoming trends, a promotion, or something featuring one of your products/services/employees. If you have writers block – and you will occasionally – flip through your social media accounts and see if you can share something relevant. Make sure you use hashtags in each of your posts – they increase visibility.

My favorite way to build an audience is to use Facebook groups. Find and join as many relevant groups as possible, and share the day’s post to all your groups. This is called building organic content. If you’re consistent in these two steps you will eventually see that you’re reaching hundreds of people daily.

Contact Info:

• Website: mysmallbusinessaccountant.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/microbizafb/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MicrobizAccountant/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulswiderski/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MicrobizS