Business Behind the Curtain: How I Found My Role in Bookkeeping

Here’s something you may not know about me.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a stage director when I grew up. Not a famous one. I wasn’t dreaming about seeing my name in lights or becoming some big celebrity director. I just wanted to make a living doing something I loved.

I loved theatre, and I loved the idea of having a vision for something and then bringing all the different pieces together to make it happen. The actors, the set, the movement, the timing, the tiny details the audience might never consciously notice but which all contribute to the finished production.

I wanted to take something that existed as an idea and, with a whole team of people, bring it to life on stage, and when I imagined my future, I had a reasonably clear picture of that too.

I’d get married. I’d have two kids. I’d direct plays. I’d run my own business.

Simple.

Clearly, childhood me hadn’t yet been introduced to the concept of a plot twist.

Life has a habit of rewriting the script

One of the things I’ve learned is that life doesn’t always pay much attention to the script you’ve written for it… Mine certainly hasn’t.

I did get married. I had kids - although I overshot the planned two and ended up with four.

But there were also plenty of things I never could have planned for. My daughter kicked cancers butt. More than once.

Like “The Cancer Years” there were other periods of our lives when planning ahead was almost impossible. When there were simply too many things happening and I was being pulled in too many directions to think particularly far beyond whatever needed to happen next.

Our house flooded one time. Thankfully, we didn’t lose much furniture or the big things you might immediately think of when someone says “flood”. Instead, we lost boxes stored in the garage containing the things that weren’t worth much money but were completely irreplaceable, like childhood memorabilia, things we’d kept from when the kids were babies, little pieces of our family’s history that we thought we’d always have.

Then, of course, there was Covid - let’s not go there.

Some curveballs you catch… some completely knock you sideways…. and some send you off in a direction you never expected, only for you to look back years later and realise that the path you ended up taking has become the best years of your life.

I don’t believe every difficult thing happens for a reason. Sometimes awful things are simply awful. But I do think our experiences shape us.

My experiences have certainly taught me that plans change. Priorities change. Sometimes you can plan five years ahead, and sometimes getting through at least some of today’s to do list is enough. They’ve also taught me to be a little more forgiving of myself when I can’t do everything.

I’m still working on that one.

Plot Twist

Somewhere amongst all of those twists and turns, I found bookkeeping.

Years ago, I worked as an accounts assistant for an accountant, and I was incredibly fortunate that he was the kind of person who believed in teaching.

He didn’t just give me tasks to complete. He taught me. He shared his knowledge. He helped me understand the why behind what I was doing… and perhaps most importantly, he helped me recognise that I already knew more than I realised.

When I left to go on maternity leave, he suggested that when I was ready, I should think about doing this as a business.

After maternity leave I didn’t immediately rush out, quit everything and declare myself an entrepreneur. I went back to having a full time job, and I started bookkeeping on the side.

There was no dramatic “I quit!” moment. No enormous leap of faith accompanied by inspirational music.

I just started.

One client became another, the business grew, I kept working. Eventually, I reached a point where I realised I couldn’t give 100% to my full time job or 100% to my business anymore.

Something had to change.

Interestingly, that’s something I now see in other businesses too. Sometimes the clearest sign that something needs to change isn’t that things are going badly, sometimes it’s that things are going well enough that the way you used to do them doesn’t work any more.

Inner Circle Consulting had reached that point, so I backed myself, and the side business became my whole business.

What I love most isn’t actually the bookkeeping

It turns out my brain does really like this stuff… I can’t imagine many children sit there contemplating their future and think: “You know what? Bank reconciliations. That’s the life for me.”

But it turns out I do genuinely enjoy bookkeeping.

I like solving problems. I like figuring out why something doesn’t add up. I like taking something messy and making sense of it. I like seeing the bigger picture while still noticing the tiny detail that changes everything.

But what I love most isn’t actually the bookkeeping.

It’s what the bookkeeping lets me do for people, I get to take some of the weight off someone’s shoulders. I get to take something they’ve been worrying about, avoiding or simply haven’t had time to deal with and say, “It’s okay. I can take care of that.” I get to sit with someone who tells me they’re “terrible with numbers” and help them realise that they actually can understand their business finances when somebody explains them without making them feel stupid, and I get to watch the moment when something clicks.

When they understand why cash has been tight or they actually can afford to employ someone. When we put a system in place that gives them hours of their week back, when they stop dreading tax time because the money is already sitting there waiting.

That’s the good stuff.

Understanding “Busy”

There’s another reason I think I approach bookkeeping the way I do.

I understand busy.

I’m running a business while raising four kids. I’m a wife. I’m involved in theatre. I sit around board, trust, committee and industry advisory group tables. I mentor. There always seems to be another project I’ve put my hand up for… occasionally followed by me wondering why on earth I put my hand up again.

My own to-do list doesn’t magically get completed every day just because I’m a bookkeeper.

I know what it feels like to have seventeen things competing for your attention and to decide that something can wait until tomorrow, I know what it’s like when tomorrow becomes next week, and I know that sometimes life outside the business turns up and demands your attention whether or not there’s room for it in the calendar.

Small business doesn’t happen in a vacuum - there’s a whole life happening around it and I think that has influenced the kind of bookkeeper I’ve become, because I’m not particularly interested in creating a theoretically perfect system that nobody has the time or inclination to use. I want to create systems that work in real businesses, run by real people, who have real lives happening around them.

Bringing something to life

Back to the stage and theatre life… It never really disappeared. These days I’m involved with Warkworth Theatre, sometimes on stage and sometimes behind the scenes, helping in the many different ways it takes to bring a production to life.

I still love it.

I love that process where a script starts as words on a page and slowly becomes something real. Actors, Sets, Props, Costumes, Lighting, Sound, Publicity, Ticketing, Budgets, Front of house, and a small army of people doing things the audience will probably never know happened.

Actually, now that I write it down like that, perhaps bookkeeping and theatre aren’t such strange companions after all.

A lot of the work that makes everything possible happens where nobody sees it.

When you go to a great show, you’re probably not thinking about the person who found the props, built the set, balanced the budget, organised the programme or made sure everyone was where they needed to be - you just get to enjoy the result.

Business can be a bit like that too.

Your customers don’t need to know that your accounts are reconciled, your GST is accounted for, your cashflow is being watched and your systems are working properly. But you need those things happening behind the scenes because they give you the freedom to concentrate on what’s happening out front, and when I think about what appealed to me about directing all those years ago, perhaps what I do now isn’t quite as different as it first appears.

I like seeing the bigger picture, figuring out how all the pieces fit together, finding the thing that isn’t quite working and working out how to fix it.

And I love watching something move from:

“This is what I’d like to do.” to: “Look what we’ve created.”

That's what happens in theatre, and, in a very different way, it's what I get to help people do in business.

Maybe I did get to have it all…

When I was younger, I thought I knew what my adult life would look like.

I'd get married. I'd have two kids. I'd run my own business. I'd direct plays.

Well, I got the husband. ✓

I overshot slightly on the children. ✓

I built the business. ✓

Theatre even found its way back in too. ✓

So perhaps the life I imagined wasn't completely wrong, it just took a few detours!

Maybe that's one of the biggest things I've learned through all of those forks in the road. You don't have to do it all perfectly. In fact, you don't even have to have it all at the same time.

There will be periods when work gets more of you, times when your family needs you more or there’s things you'll have to put down for a while. There might be plans that change completely, opportunities you weren't expecting or things you'll get wrong.

Be forgiving with yourself.

I've spent enough of my life being pulled in different directions to know that doing your best doesn't always look particularly impressive from the outside.

Sometimes it just means doing what matters most that day, and (at least for me) success has never really been about what was written on the job description anyway.

I'm pretty happy with the life I've ended up building… I get to make a living doing something I genuinely love. I get to give clients help, confidence and (hopefully) a little bit of relief. I've created enough space in my life to give my time and knowledge to organisations, people and causes I care about. I get to be a wife and a mum.

And I still get to play on a stage.

The teenager who wanted to be a stage director might be slightly confused about all the bank reconciliations, but I think she'd be pretty pleased.

And as for actually directing? I'm not writing that part of the script off just yet. For now, let's start in Warkworth and see where the Yellow Brick Road takes me… Maybe one day you'll find me directing a big Broadway show. Probably with a beautifully reconciled production budget.

Who knows? There's still plenty of the script left to write.