My name is Sara, and I’m the Founder of Accountrepreneur (A4E). Yarty is our other co-founder and my husband, and together we’ve built and grown A4E to a business that has replaced our corporate career.

It’s been a long journey, a difficult one, but one that we’re proud of. We hope our journey and findings can help benefit you in your journey to becoming a founder and owner.

How it all started

My journey with Accountrepreneur began when I attended and graduated from Babson College, a school known for entrepreneurship. I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur and one day own my own business, so everything I did was leading to that eventual path.

After working for ten years in the public accounting industry with firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and BDO, I realized that corporate life just wasn’t a fit for me anymore. With my husband, we both decided to quit our jobs and take an opportunity to travel the world. We ended up backpacking throughout Southeast Asia for months, and it was such an incredible experience. Here’s us below in Indonesia:

After returning home from our trip, I had a deep reflection on whether I wanted to go back to the full time corporate grind or try something different. I asked myself, “Would I regret this opportunity of running my own business?” That was enough for me to realize that I needed to take this chance now.

In terms of what business to start, I felt it was natural to start with a bookkeeping and tax services business. I had had a few customers already while working full time, and I knew the business model very well because of my corporate experiences.

Being in this particular industry for so long, I realized small businesses and startups didn’t have convenient ways to have the essential accounting services. Typically, owners have one bookkeeping service, a separate tax accountant, and maybe another financial advisory (e.g. CFO) service. All of this just adds up to unnecessary added expenses and headaches.

How we decided to package our services to provide better value to our customers

With Accountrepreneur, we analyzed the pain points our customers were experiencing with other accounting providers and decided there had to be a better way. With this in mind, we decided to package our services.

Currently, we offer three packages to help entrepreneurs, startups and business owners with their bookkeeping, tax returns and financial management:

  • Starter packages start at $299/mo and covers bookkeeping and tax returns for solo founders just starting out their businesses
  • Essentials packages start at $499/mo and covers all the essential accounting and tax compliance services for a small business
  • Premium packages start at $999/mo and covers all your bases such as bookkeeping, tax returns, payroll, as well as providing budgeting and analysis to help businesses grow.
  • We also offer individualized services for businesses looking for one-off services such as tax returns.

Because I’m a licensed CPA and Yarty was a corporate finance expert working with CEOs and CFOs, it made sense for us to combine our services and provide these valuable services to our customers without the exorbitant prices.

How the journey has been for the past year

Starting out, I thought it made sense to do the work first since that was what I was most comfortable with. Although it was important for us to get our first customers, it also led to some bottlenecks in our process. That bottleneck being me of course.

I was doing sales, marketing, service delivery, accounting, customer support in addition to being a wife and mother. It was just too much!

So I decided to take a step back and ask myself, “I can’t keep doing this forever.”

That’s when I read the book “E-Myth”. That book changed how I viewed business and realized I was spending too much time being the “Technician”, not enough time being the “Entrepreneur”.

That needed to change. Immediately.

So in the past couple of months, we’ve streamlined the operations by creating documentation behind our service delivery, automating recurring tasks using tools like Zapier, brought on my husband full time to support sales and marketing, and invested in tools to grow our business.

Here’s a video tutorial we created using Loom on how to pay contractors

Simply, it’s been a life saver. I’m no longer doing everything and I’m no longer scared that things may fall apart (although that fear is always there).

Where we hope to be in the next year

Although the start to 2020 has been a bit bumpy with the stock market collapsing and the coronavirus spreading, I’m optimistic that we’ll bounce back, that small businesses and large will rebound.

Given this, we’re still investing into the business and planning for our next year and forward. We’ve already planned a number of sales and marketing initiatives to grow the business, hiring more staff, provide more opportunities, and continually streamline our operations.

My mission has never been to extract profits and generate millions in sales.

It’s always been to help business owners with their business, and we do that by taking the stress off their plate with their books, taxes and other financial aspects.

That will never change.

And although 2020 will be unpredictable, I’ll be staying optimistic and continuing to serve our customers the best we can.

Thank you for reading our story! It means so much to us, and we’re always looking to help and support other businesses where we can.

If you’d like to follow along our journey, feel free to subscribe to our blog or find us on social media: Twitter @MeetA4E, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Finally, you can reach me at sara@meeta4e.com. Feel free to reach out and say hi ?.

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