Russ Shulman | Fighting the Entrepreneurial Ego

Russ Shulman of Sound Bookkeepers isn’t just a whiz with numbers. He’s also a philosopher of business… and life. In fact, he says that the path to happiness is to be the same person at home and at work.

We get into that, the importance of finding balance, and the fulfillment that comes with doing work you love and that helps people, as well as more practical matters.

Russ says that bookkeeping can be a very powerful tool that can actually grow your business. And if you or your current bookkeeper don’t know how to do the necessary analysis, you’ll want to tune in for Russ’s strategies, as well as…

• Financial metrics you must monitor closely
• Your bookkeeper’s number one qualification (that they probably don’t have)
• The biggest contributor to your company’s growth – it’s not more sales
• How to hire people who are better than you
• And more

Listen now…

Mentioned in This Episode: Soundbookkeepers.com

Episode Transcript:

Doug Hall: Hi everybody, this is Doug Hall, your host for Go for Growth with Doug Hall. And today I’m very happy to have a special guest on, Mr. Russ Shulman, the founder and operator of Sound Bookkeepers here in the Seattle area. So Russ, great to have you on.

Russ Shulman: Thanks, Doug, I’m glad to be here and excited to get a chance to talk to you and help more people.

Doug Hall: Awesome. So when I say Sound Bookkeepers, I think almost everybody knows exactly what you do and exactly what I’m talking about. But what I really want you to do, Russ, is give me a little bit more. I mean tell me about how you started the business, when you got it going, what led you into it, and what angle are you … How are you approaching? What’s your unique spin on helping people with their bookkeeping?

Russ Shulman: Well, so I’ve mentioned this to you once before, but I’m a big fan of the hero’s journey concept that we as entrepreneurs, we either choose to become self-employed or something forces our hand. Some people get fired, they can’t find another job, but they can mow grass or wash a car, so they start their own little thing and before you know it, they’re opening a car wash. So some people just get thrust into it. But there is this journey that we go on where you start investigating, looking for all the clues that are going to help you be successful. And that was kind of the same for me. I came from an entrepreneurial family. My grandfather invented the sandwich bag. And my mom was a bookkeeper, my grandmother was a bookkeeper.

And I didn’t immediately go into bookkeeping, I actually went into taxation, tax resolution, helping distressed tax payers deal with the IRS. And then I owned a mortgage brokerage until 2008, which was doing really well and growing and I was super excited. We did like a quarter billion in loans and over three and a half million in my third year in business. So I was like, “Yay, I made it to success!” And then four months later, the industry just completely lost its integrity, everything dropped away, and I lost 90% of my income like overnight. Over the course of about a few months, three months, I saw it all disappear.

I have this little talk that I do called the entrepreneurs new clothes. It’s essentially that ego that comes with business owners when they’re like, “Oh, look at me, I’m a business owner.” And I kind of had that a little bit until I didn’t have my company anymore. And then I was like, “Oh, boy. How am I going to get back to where I’m making enough money to pay all of the bills?” And that started me on my own journey. I didn’t have any other choice, looking for a job. Everybody was looking for work in 2008.

So I have an acupuncture degree, so I was kind of considering that, but I had been inspired with the idea of making a difference for more people than just in a one-on-one format. But I really wanted to find something that was scalable where when I helped people with it, it made a huge difference in their life and contributed to them and I could see myself doing that on a big scale. Like nation-wide or world-wide. And bookkeeping, thankfully, is one of those things that it’ll take all you have and keep asking for more. There’s no end to the keeping track of all of the numbers for the IRS and for business owners.

So that was kind of my inspiration to … I intentionally chose bookkeeping, because I knew that I could do it and do it well and it would make a difference for people. And it incorporated a lot of those things I learned in acupuncture school like about balancing. Balance the books, we’ve all heard of that. Balancing Chi in acupuncture, it’s the same thing. You’re looking for areas where things are stuck or not moving and helping them move along. And even the interview process is similar. They call it SOAP, Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan. You ask questions, you look at the patient, you come up with what you think is going on, then you come up with a plan, and then you implement the plan. Is that really any different than what we do in business?

Doug Hall: Nope. It’s really not.

Russ Shulman: So I just was able to see that so clearly after coming out of school where I interviewed hundreds of patients about what’s going on with them, having this context already of business. Because I was in the tax business, working full time, and going to school full time, so I really had a very unique perspective on it. But even with all of that, it wasn’t enough. I still couldn’t figure out how to drag myself from very severe debt back into anything real until I started getting guidance from a lot of different mentors like Seth Godin, Steven Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art and The Legend of Bagger Vance, he wrote that as well. Bob Burg. Each of these guys. Michael Gerber, they’ve all contributed to me in different ways and helped me to find the little secret formula that’s now doing great. We’re award winning, growing, serving customers that are really high-level and I’m super excited about it now.

Doug Hall: Okay. So you went down the book path, and I normally ask this a little later in the podcast, but if you had to choose your number one recommended growth-oriented book for business leaders, which one pops to the top of your list?

Russ Shulman: That’s a really tough one. It’s really a toss-up. Michael Gerber’s book The E Myth is great. It’s all about systems. But unfortunately, systems aren’t good enough if you don’t choose the right business. We’ve all seen companies where they’re making a lot of money, but at what cost? How is the owner looking at themselves in the mirror each day with a smile and saying, “I can’t wait to go to work?” When what they’re doing at work is destroying the environment or hurting people? Or just something they don’t care about. I know a guy who’s building an app that does something, and I said, “Well why are you … What’s in it? Where are you in this world that has you be the one who should be doing this?” And it’s like, “I don’t know. It looks like it would make some money so that’s why I’m doing it.”

How many people get into it for that reason and then end up years later with a successful business they hate? So The E Myth is great for the systems, but Bob Burg really helps in the book The Go-Giver, really helped me identify that it’s really about your contribution to other people, to society as a whole, to be, when there’s no difference between who you are when you’re at work and who you are when you’re at home, that’s when you’re winning. And I think that that’s really the thing that started it all for me. I knew how to make money. But at some level, in mortgage, making money is always at a cost to somebody. And I was looking for a way to not have it cost anybody anything and still have everybody say, “Wow, this is such a great thing.” And I love things being right.

When I was growing up, I had a lot of hard time with truth. I wasn’t necessarily told the truth a lot as a kid, and so I was always in the investigation of where are the real answers here? And bookkeeping, there’s nothing more truthful than arithmetic. So to me, that struck my heart in a really big way and I was able to build the company around that.

Doug Hall: Excellent choice on Bob Burg’s Go-Giver. I second that. That’s a great book.

Russ Shulman: Thank you. And he’s really accessible, too. You can email Bob and he’ll email you back. He’s a really nice guy. He doesn’t always have the answers, a lot of times he says “I don’t know about that one.” But still, just having him there cheering me on is kind of a nice thing.

Doug Hall: Very cool. So we know that you’re operating within the realm of bookkeeping. But tell us a little more. Do you have any unique angles on that? What does that mean? Do people have any misconceptions about bookkeeping? So just tell us about that service in general. What seems to be most helpful to people and how are you addressing that with your company?

Russ Shulman: Thank you, that’s such a great question because bookkeeping is not sexy.

Nobody thinks like, “Wow, I can’t wait to get onto my computer and start working in those numbers.” I mean some people do, but they’re few and far between.

Doug Hall: Yeah, but they’re bookkeepers.

Russ Shulman: Most business owners don’t care.

Doug Hall: No, business owners, yeah. Business owners …

Russ Shulman: Really, so there’s a difference. There’s such a variety of things. So when I was in the mortgage business, loan officers were not licensed, which meant anybody could call themselves a loan officer, then you had literally felons who were in … who’s felony was around fraud. Who were calling themselves loan officers and dolling out million dollar mortgages to people all across the country. Well eventually, Washington state said, “Do you know what? We’re going to have loan officer licensing.” And when that happened, about a third of the industry went completely away because they couldn’t pass the background check or they couldn’t pass the qualifying test. In Washington state, there’s no licensing for bookkeeping. Which means you business owners out there who are listening to this, the person who you have who’s a bookkeeper, most people have no clue whether that person actually is or is not a qualified bookkeeper, they just call themselves that.

The real test, for me, is whether they understand what it means to be a fiduciary, and if they hold that in high regard. Meaning, there’s an administrative bookkeeper who just kind of data enters the receipts, maybe files some taxes. And the IRS certainly requires that you keep good records about your income and expenses. So that piece of bookkeeping is kind of the necessary part. Like making sure your sinks don’t leak should be a plumbers number one job. How they accomplish that, certainly, that’s where the variety starts to come in. But you wouldn’t expect somebody to say, “Your sink is all fixed, but it’s still leaking.” So the administrative piece of bookkeeping is like the record keeping has to be done and it has to be done right.

But bookkeeping done properly actually makes you money and improves your margins. What most people do is they’re so busy doing the work that the bookkeeping is just building up because it’s not really necessary or exciting. But that’s just the business owner’s bad habit that’s affecting the way the business should be running. Because nobody’s going to say, “I don’t really think good bookkeeping is that relevant.” That would just be … Who doesn’t want good bookkeeping? It’s the same as you want your bank to keep track of your money correctly, or you want your doctor to give you factual information about your tests. We’re literally talking about the numbers that determine the amount of taxes that you give to the government.

So we all want that to be accurate. But that isn’t the exciting part. To me, the exciting part is where you take that information and you look at it in a way that helps you know what to do in your business, which helps your business succeed. That’s the exciting part of keeping track of the records, is what you get out of it. I call it the machine called your business. You’re looking ahead, you’re wondering what’s coming up, the only way to know that is to look at the past and see what’s already happened, and then use what you think is going to happen in the future to predict what you think is going to happen with this data from the past, you’re predictive analytics. And those are the same numbers that the IRS wants.

But the IRS wants total income. They don’t care if it was income from services or income from consulting or income from producing manufacturing, it doesn’t matter to them. It’s all income, it’s all taxable. But as business owners, we need to know more than that. We need to know our margins, our cost ratios, our debt ratios, these are important key factors that business owners are not getting because nobody has what’s called the financial planning and analysis department in their small company, the one that actually looks at the numbers and figures out what to do. Nobody’s got that.

So that’s what I think is really exciting about bookkeeping, is being able to offer very in-depth insight into what’s going on in your business at basically the same price you would normally pay a bookkeeper to just keep track of the records. Because they’re really one in the same.

Doug Hall: So Russ, I commend you for apparently, and I’m telling you my own reaction, you’ve actually made bookkeeping sound a little bit exciting.

Russ Shulman: Thank you.

Doug Hall: I like it.

Russ Shulman: I love it.

Doug Hall: Well good, I’m glad you love it. That means you’re called to do it. So what does an ideal client look like for you? How do you figure out where you can have the best impact? So what are the ranges above and below that, however you characterize it?

Russ Shulman: So around this time of year, you know it’s tax time right now, and that means a lot of people are being asked by their accountant, whether it’s their new accountant or somebody from last year, they’re saying where are those financials? Where are the numbers that I need from you in order to file these returns? And a lot of business owners are coming face-to-face with uh-oh, actually I didn’t really do that.

So my phone often rings with people who are just saying, “Hey, I’m really behind. I haven’t done anything. I need to borrow money.” Or whatever it is. “I need my numbers in good shape.” I sell facts and freedom, essentially. My best clients are people that have a strong work ethic, a good moral compass, they’re doing something valuable, and they have a desire to do even better in some way. People who have doubts and fears and uncertainties about whether they’re doing things right, all of these people make up the bulk of my client base.

Because a lot of times it’s more valuable for somebody do know that something is being done right, because then they’re not afraid to grow the company out of fear that the thing they were doing wrong could get so out of control that they could lose everything. So just by having me say, “Hey, I did your return, everything’s filed, this is how much you owe,” they start to feel like very confident in their ability to go get more work. Or people who, especially with like hair stylists make up a good portion of my client base, I really like working with stylists, and they just want to cut hair and do colors. They don’t want to think about the numbers. But sometimes their fear of doing it wrong stops them from doing things like selling retail products, because they get concerned about the sales tax and how that works.

And when I’m there, I just say, “No problem, here, we do it like this.” And then they start selling product and now they’re more profitable just because I’m around. And that’s the kind of clients that I think then call me and say, “I’m so glad I came by your office. I just felt so much better the second I left there. I’m sleeping better now.” And all we’re doing is really keeping track of things but it just happens to be the one thing that they’re not that good at.

Doug Hall: So they don’t just get their numbers and tax prep you’re feeding the CPA, they actually get some peace of mind?

Russ Shulman: Yeah. They get so many things. The list of things that I’ve seen happen. One of the examples I really like to use is this: So I have a client who fixes fire trucks on location so that the fire department doesn’t have to put the fire truck in a shop to get it fixed. And he fixes the communication equipment between the fire truck and the fire station. Seemingly a pretty important thing to have working, I would think.

Doug Hall: I would think so, yeah.

Russ Shulman: Right? So the way I feel about it is, bookkeeping saves lives. Because my ability to help him stay in business and stay profitable enough to pay his bills means that those fire trucks are getting fixed. I have a client who does hyperbaric chambers. I have a client who does storm water engineering, that helps clean up storm water that’s accumulating. I have a pre-school as a client. These are all businesses that are thriving in the community partially, and I’m not certainly going to take all the credit, but partially in thanks to the fact that I know what I’m doing and they can afford my service and they feel good about it. And those kind of clients seem to be increasing, people that are just looking for at least one trustworthy bookkeeper who knows what they’re doing and is affordable. And that’s where I start. I don’t even think about anything beyond that. If my services aren’t affordable to the masses, then I’m doing something wrong because my goal is to be able to provide it to everyone.

Doug Hall: Awesome. So do you do all the bookkeeping yourself, or do you have staff?

Russ Shulman: Oh, no, no that would make me … I’d need more arms, I would think.

Doug Hall: You wouldn’t have time for this interview on my great podcast. That’s the truth.

Russ Shulman: Yeah, especially during tax season.

Doug Hall: Exactly.

Russ Shulman: So following Michael Gerber’s philosophy, I’ve always been a big believer in building systems and processes that other people can follow to produce better results than I can produce myself. So I consider myself a really good bookkeeper, and if it was just me and one client, I’d knock it out of the park every time. But if you give me 50 or 60 or 100 clients to work on, there’s no way I can deliver that same level of service to all of them. But with my staff, that allows me to do that because most people, most companies, they need a bookkeeper about three to five hours a month. And they need somebody really good, who understands their business, and can do all these things that we do, but they really only need them like three to five hours a month. Especially restaurants. They just vendor bill pay and keeping track of food costs. So they’re two primary things they need done, neither of those things take that long but they just kind of have to be done.

So I find a way with enough clients, I can keep adding more and more services and just splitting that up so I can have one person who works on 40 different clients one hour a week. It’s still just one full-time employee to me. But everybody gets the benefit of that one person. I just keep scaling that way and I don’t think that’s going to fail to work because I’ve built it with those systems in mind.

Doug Hall: Awesome. So when you think about your business, and you’ve been out there several years now building Sound Bookkeepers, what’s the biggest challenge that you’ve had in growing the business?

Russ Shulman: Well, finding good people is always a challenge. Because I think, as business owners, we want people to work for minimum wage, but produce the work of a $300,000 a year full-time CEO. And so, there’s always a balance between those two.

Doug Hall: Yep. That’s a pretty big gap to fill.

Russ Shulman: Right?

Doug Hall: Yeah.

Russ Shulman: But at the same time, one of the biggest challenges, really, that I face, is that I have a hard time prioritizing making enough time for meditation, contemplation, thinking about how to answer a particular client’s question. Each of those things, to really do it in an extraordinary way, requires quieting your mind and hearing through conversations you need to have with people and identifying maybe things that you missed that you need to put in place in the next setup that you do. And I definitely get my time in, at least a few times a week. 30, 45 minutes of just sitting. But that’s really a big challenge to make … I think probably more like two to three hours a day of that type of time is beneficial, but it’s just really tough to come by.

Doug Hall: Yep. I agree. So on the other side, the flip side, what’s been sort of your best growth hack? I mean something like wow, when I did this it made such a difference? Anything come to mind?

Russ Shulman: Definitely one thing that stands out among everything else is, in my business, and I’ve seen this in a lot of other people’s businesses, you ask somebody, “Well what do you do?” And they say, “Well, so I have this program, and it’s really big, and it’s very complicated, and I’d probably need to show it to you, and it’s going to take a while to explain it.” And those kind of businesses don’t do that well. In my experience, the ones that do the best are just the really simple, regular thing. Everybody knows what it is, everybody understands why they need it. And if you go back to the days of the wild west where there was a cobbler and a blacksmith and a coal maker, I think that the reason that those things existed was because people needed them. And if somebody needs your service, and you do it well at a price they can afford, then you’re going to grow. Because historically, that’s already been proven. You don’t have to re-invent what it is to be a successful auto mechanic. You just open a shop, be honest, do good work, make sure you’re educated, keep your numbers right, and just keep going and you’re going to make it.

That actually is kind of what got me into bookkeeping. One day I was in my meditation, thinking about my suffering of life and why I didn’t have enough money, and my wife had started a pre-school working out of the house. She had three kids come in consistently, one of them wasn’t paying, but still. People were showing up. And I came down from my little meditation area that I had at the time in our attic, I just had to find somewhere to put it, and I said, this is not going to necessarily sound like the nicest thing to say, but I was really being nice about it, “I don’t understand. I know so much about business and you don’t know anything, but you have three clients and I don’t have any. So what do you think I’m doing wrong?” And she said, “I think you need to do something regular.”

Because I was trying to be like a business consultant, software guru extraordinaire, know everything. And it’s hard to sell that product.

Doug Hall: Good point.

Russ Shulman: So I started this little group, again, after reading The Go-Giver, I started this group called the Business Owners Insight group, which was just a free, let’s get together as business owners and talk about what it is to be business owners. And that turned into my first bookkeeping client, which turned into immediately two referrals and then I thought, “You know, I guess I’m just going to be a bookkeeper, because it looks like there’s a need.”

And that’s, I think if you start with where is there a need and how does that fit with my heart, that’s the secret. You’ve got to have both of those things.

Doug Hall: Yep. That’s excellent advice. Where is their need and how can I serve it?

Russ Shulman: Even what Gerber, yeah, what happened with him that had me see that is after I started hanging out with him a little bit, I thought that we were going to be building something around his E Myth business systems thing, and then one day I heard him explaining on this one video that he had discovered that actually a lot of businesses, they never kind of got in touch with their heart before they started their businesses and then so even though the business was working, like I said before, it just wasn’t that fulfilling. So he started this dreaming room program that he’s doing now where he helps people get connected with that. And so I figure if a guy who’s the world’s number one small business guru is saying, “Start with your heart,” then I should probably do that.

Doug Hall: Yeah. I think he’s credible. I’ll give Michael Gerber his due. So you’ve built Sound Bookkeepers to a certain level of success right now. So what I’d like to know is, what do you envision is the next level? In your visionary thinking, what do you see next? Where are you going?

Russ Shulman: Well, so we’re trying right now to get aligned with some people who work with self-employed individuals so that we can start providing the bookkeeping services as part of like the HR package. Solo salons are one of the places that I’m looking at, some of the like We Work or REGIS, some of these places where small business owners are coming in, some of them don’t even have their business license yet. So, we have a couple small programs that we’re going to be offering, like $200 to get you set up with an LLC and get your city business license set up, help you get your first bank account.

We have our introductory package, so it’s like you’re a new business owner coming into solo salons as a new stylist, we’ll help you get your CRM set up and integrated with QuickBooks and get your categories figured out and make sure your sales tracking is working and just trying to get a little bit closer to the river, I like to say, of the place where people are getting into I have this need for good bookkeeping services. Because we’re finding people through search engines and advertising online and what not, but really, life is short. I may only have 30 to 40 more years on this planet, and my dream’s pretty big. So I’m looking for ways to get more bookkeeping of our quality into the hands of more people at a higher level.

So that’s one of the things that we’re working on now. And then also, the innovative reporting. Like I said, most companies don’t have an office manager, they don’t have an auditory, they don’t have a controller, they don’t have a CFO. And the owner acts as a CEO, but they’re usually not that well qualified to know what the actual tasks are that the CEO is supposed to do. So what I would like to be able to do and what we’re doing for some of our clients, is we take all of your QuickBooks data from the previous month, crunch it together into a report that actually points out your hedgehog factor, from good to great, kind of points out that thing.

Just kind of points out that one or two things that you need to do in your business this week or this month that’s going to make the biggest difference for you. That could be you need to talk to more clients. That could be you need to spend more on this particular piece of marketing that seems to be working. It could be you need to hire another staff because your productivity’s falling and you’re under your threshold for ratios on payroll expenditures. I think that kind of intuitive reporting is really what business owners are looking for. And I like to say what I’m creating is FitBit for your wallet. You should be able to look at any moment in your business and in your finances and identify exactly what the next thing is for you to be able to do.

Right now, there’s no app that does that. But combined with truthful bookkeeping, we can make the QuickBooks app deliver a lot of that information to our clients. Because we know how to … I’m a data scientist of sorts, I’m a programmer. So I know how to kind of standardize the technology so that it reads across different platforms. Then we can aggregate that information into really intuitive reporting for our clients. Which, again, is what a lot of the interim CFOs are trying to do. But the teeny-tiny small businesses starting out that are making 100,000 gross, they can’t even afford an interim CFO.

Doug Hall: No. No. And I find even companies with five to 25 employees still don’t get the idea of an interim CFO. It doesn’t come naturally. So I think they get their bookkeeper, and bridging the gap to that CFO thinking, I think that’s a very valuable thing if you can bring them that thinking and get them going there. That’s terrific value add.

Russ Shulman: Thank you. I’m kind of the key of starting things out. Anybody, whoever says, “I can’t seem to get going on such and such,” all you have to do is show me the problem, I’ll get it sorted immediately. I’m really good at that. So anybody who’s in that like, “I need to move up the ladder from wherever I am,” we’re the perfect catalyst to enable people to do that.

Doug Hall: Excellent. So one of the things that’s a challenge in growing a business is the two-sided coin of leadership and management. Any particular discoveries in your team or things you’ve observed with clients in terms of best-practices in being a good leader and being a good manager?

Russ Shulman: Yeah, I have had the … I don’t know if I want to say good fortune, but it is kind of good fortune, but I’ve had the opportunity to work with some really awful people in my life as employers. And I got to see-

Doug Hall: You know what not to be, then, right?

Russ Shulman: Yeah. I know what it looks like to work for somebody that calls their employees names to their face. You jerks, whatever. The people who treat others kindly tend to be more successful. Conscious Capitalism, the guy who started the container store, is a big fan of that organization and it’s all about, again, connecting with your heart, doing good in the world, and being nice. But that extends to your staff, which to me, I work for my staff. If I’m doing my job right, I’m enabling them to come to work, do their job successfully, and leave feeling like they’ve accomplished something. And so, speaking kindly, being responsible for my stuff, not bringing my personality to work in ways that are going to be disruptive to people, setting up my staff for success, and then also dreaming really big. Having great visions for the business, but not burdening my staff with too much of that.

They don’t need to know that I want to open a business, a bookkeeper/office manager training institute and what role they’re going to play in that two years from now. That’s cool that I know that’s going to be happening. My staff just needs to know today’s task is this, and this is how you perform that task. And if you do it well, you’ll get a raise. They prefer that.

Doug Hall: That’s very-

Russ Shulman: I’ve done the wrong part in the past of either treating people unkindly or over-speaking. All the different things. And yeah, I just see that it’s the people who seem to be the happiest are the ones who are just always nice to everyone. I had this boss, Aubrey, when I worked in the health food stores back in my 20s, and I learned from him to say to people, “It would be such a huge favor for me if you could please help that customer.” Instead of like, “Hey, there’s a customer over there, go get ’em.” Your staff is there to help you, and they’re donating their life’s energy to your purpose, your mission. And one way you can reward them is by saying please and thank you.

Doug Hall: Mm-hmm (affirmative). If you could think over all the things that have worked for you, things that didn’t work for you, too, what would be your number one piece of advice for somebody that’s building their business? They’re in a growth trajectory, they don’t want that growth to stop, they want to keep growing. What’s the first piece of advice that comes to your mind?

Russ Shulman: I hate to be a broken record, but you should definitely know your numbers. If you don’t know the numbers-

Doug Hall: That’s okay, I mean I expect that from a numbers guy.

Russ Shulman: Yeah, but you know Napoleon Hill has a really great way of looking at that. He says, “Faith is the only known antidote to failure.” And when he says faith, I used to hear that and think he was talking about religious faith, because he tends to be a little bit heavy on his interpretation of Christianity and the bible. But I don’t think that’s what he meant. I believe what he meant was that when you can see the future being played out, you see it’s going to work. You can see all the pieces happening. That’s informed faith. And that is the recipe for success. That’s the key to overcoming any potential failures, is really being able to see that what you’re doing is going to happen, it’s going to work. And that’s way different than just crossing your fingers and saying, “I believe.” You really have to be able to see it. And each little thing you do is going to allow you to see that a little bit better.

But the thing that seems to be most powerful is when a second set of eyes is looking at the same thing you’re looking at. It’s like if you’re SCUBA diving with a partner and you see something under a rock and you kind of get your partner’s attention and you show them, “Hey, look at that thing down there,” and you both look at it at the same time. That creates a shared experience between you and the other person that wasn’t there until that second set of eyes, that second conscious saw that.

And if you’re in a business and you’re trying it by yourself, which I did for many years while I was looking for the right partner, it’s way harder. I kind of have to ask your spouse to believe in you, or you have to ask your kids to believe in you, or your best friend, or you have to look yourself in the mirror. And when I didn’t have people telling me the right things, I used my voice recorder on my phone and I made recordings that said the right things to me, and I would listen to that. Because that programming, you know the neural linguistic programming, and Tony Robin’s The Power of Questions, these guys are not wrong. The power is in really getting those good, positive messages coming into your mind that you can do it. You can be a millionaire, you can be a billionaire if you want to, or you can serve people at the highest level and trust that the money’s going to work itself out as long as you have taken the time to kind of figure out if you can make it work.

Doug Hall: Well I think that’s inspiring and practical at the same time.

Russ Shulman: It’s worked for me. We’re growing. Every year we’re growing. I took on a partner last year who is a guy I know from the mortgage industry. And now we’re the same vision and he’s quite successful in his own right and he looked at what I’m doing, and he said, “I love what you’re doing, it feels good in every way, and I want to help you do this.” And that informed faith then tells me, “Okay, it’s cool to take the next step.” Because I’m getting the right feedback from my community.

Doug Hall: Right. Well good stuff. Thank you for being on today. Any other parting thoughts before I kind of wrap us up?

Russ Shulman: Yeah, one thing that I wanted to mention. Jim Rohn has this talk he does about The Law of Sowing and Reaping, essentially if you plant a handful of corn, you don’t get back a handful, you get back a bushel. The laws of giving to others creates this wave of giving back to you that I call karma harvesting. You just do enough goodness that when it starts to pay off, it pays off in such a huge way that it’s way more than you need. And it’s a good feeling to know that you’ve invested so much goodness into your future that now you get to kind of live into that. It’s just a delightful place to be and I really want to encourage anybody who’s hearing these words to just be a good person. Do something good for the world. Because life is short.

Doug Hall: So one of the little good things that I know you did is you created a business tax guide. And I wanted to slip this in at the end in case folks wanted to read a little bit and get a little bit of your wisdom and advice. So tell us just a little bit about that guide.

Russ Shulman: So again, Bob Burg has kind of spurred me onto this idea of give, give, give, and just trust that it’s going to come back to you. And one of the ways that I give is that every year, I’ve been giving out these business owner tax guides. At first it was one page, then it was two pages, and this year I decided to really go all-out and I made it into a booklet that’s like 25 pages. And each item in there is just one of those things you need to look at as part of your bookkeeping to make sure that it’s being done right, whether you have a bookkeeper or you’re doing it yourself or you’re not doing it at all. This booklet will help you to go through each thing where you might need to make a mention to your accountant about something you missed, or each thing that you should make sure your bookkeeper is being on top of, and you can just cross them off as you go. And it’s available in download, I think we talked about you’re going to put the link up for me, and then also I can mail you a copy or you can come by.

I also do free consultations. You can go right on my website, sbk2.co, literally it’s the letters S-B-K and the number two and then dot C-O.

Doug Hall: Number two dot C-O. Okay great.

Russ Shulman: Yep, sbk2.co. You can also get to me by going to soundbookkeepers.com, and then it’ll redirect you. Or just google Sound Bookkeepers. We’re the top link every time for that search.

Doug Hall: And I think you’re technologically able to help people outside the greater Seattle area, too, right?

Russ Shulman: Oh yeah. We can actually, what’s nice about bookkeeping is, although the state tax filing rules are different from state to state, the IRS is the same everywhere. We do one-off projects all over the country, we have the ability to help people. I have an attorney down in California that I’m working with to do some stuff. And yeah, there really isn’t anything that you would think of as relates to numbers in business that we can’t either directly help with or put you in touch with somebody who can. And I just happen to know all the people who can do those kinds of things for business owners. But I love to offer my free guides to people. We have some other things, too, like other offerings that I give to people. Again, in that evaluating, diagnosing kind of idea, we do bookkeeping cleanup, we do tax prep, we do our double-check service, which essentially you think your books are good, why don’t you just let me take a look? I can just give you a quick look-over, double-check, make sure you haven’t missed anything.

We also have our ongoing service for anybody who just wants regular bookkeeping. We get your books set up nice and clean and perfect and we keep them that way all throughout the year. These are all services that we offer to our clients. And everything starts with that free guide or, if you want, I’ll come in and do the free guide on your business and tell you what I see, and we also offer the free consultations by phone.

Doug Hall: Excellent. Good. Well, soundbookkeepers.com or S-B-K, number two, dot co, or go to resources for CEOs when you find this link for my podcast with Russ. Hopefully there’ll be a download link there. I’m going to work with my webmaster to do that. And we’ll get you guys information out there. So it’s been a true pleasure, Russ, to have you on today. Thank you for sharing with us.

Russ Shulman: Thanks. Been able to make it work.

Doug Hall: Awesome, man. I know my listeners out there will have questions, so I hope they get ahold of you directly or through me. I want to share a little help and love out there, and I appreciate your attitude on that, appreciate it.

Russ Shulman: Thank you.

Doug Hall: Excellent. All right, good. Thanks, Russ, have a good one.