Inspiring Conversations with Maya Weinreb of Solvency Now Bookkeeping

Today we’d like to introduce you to Maya Weinreb.

Hi Maya, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.

I was born in Israel, but my parents left right around the time of the Gulf War. I went to school in England for a few years and then went to high school in Florida.?I started doing Bookkeeping straight out of high school. It was fun, it was challenging, and it paid?better than the other entry-level positions. I did Bookkeeping for several different companies for?almost 15 years. I moved up the “Corporate ladder” inside small businesses and had many?different positions starting at an accounting assistant and moving up AR Manager, Treasury?Manager, and finally CFO. During this time, I had started taking freelance clients as my side?hustle. I got to the point where my clients were paying me more hourly than my boss was. I?decided to risk it all and quit my job to start my own Bookkeeping Firm.

I am now in my fourth year of running a business, and I love it. Not because I work less,?nope, I work twice as much, not because of all the money. Nope, most of it goes back into the?business, but because I am building my own company and creating my own destiny.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?

Many challenges…?When I finally decided I was going to just build a business and not work for anyone else, I immediately got an amazing job offer that paid over double what I had ever made before and way more than I was making in a brand new business. I curled up in the fetal position and called all my friends, asking what I should do. They all said I should take the job and I explained to each one why I shouldn’t… that’s when I realized I had already decided.

?Then always the ever-present struggle is making enough money. I boot strapped the company and invested a lot into it. I took out personal credit card loans, etc. to make it happen. You have to just stay insouciant enough to know that you are on the right path and just keep swimming.

?One of the first things that happened was business owners would hire me to do their books. I would give them a quote, and they would ask if we could get it cheaper if I didn’t do part of it. Or if there was a faster way to do it. I still had an employee mentality and would agree to do it in a “shortcut” way. It never worked out. Their CPA would yell at me. It would never get the books actually done and always caused problems. So my first policy was to not let clients bulldozer me into doing something other than exact standard bookkeeping. Even now, I tell my bookkeepers, “the client does not know best. They hired us because we are the experts. If we do everything exactly how they ask, we get into trouble.” Of course, you have to navigate this carefully and politely, but we know what your books need to look like, so we will explain to you that we are doing just that. We of course, take client requests and do a lot of handholding, but when they ask us to do something that is against standard bookkeeping policy, we won’t do it.

Employees! Hiring! I had to learn the hard way that your company is who you have in it. I have gone through a lot of people to find the amazing team I have now. When clients say its hard to find a good bookkeeper, I just say, “you’re telling me!? I have looked high and low. I can train new bookkeepers too and have done that several times, but that’s not what I need to be concentrating on as a new company. I need to be finding qualified people and showing them my standards and then going back to marketing sales and quality control.

?During the pandemic, I was very worried about my clients. I researched the PPP and EIDL loans and called all my clients to check on them and see if I could help. I helped many of them secure loans that probably saved their businesses. As a result, I didn’t lose any clients and actually grew my business with the policy of helping as much as I could.

As you know, we’re big fans of Solvency Now Bookkeeping. For our readers who might not be as familiar, what can you tell them about the brand?

Our Mission Statement is “Perfect and Complete financial records for your peace of mind.” My personal purpose is helping business owners succeed.?Every single person who started a business, whether its an artist or a doctor, did so because they wanted to be an artist or a doctor. They didn’t start it so they could do piles of paperwork every day, get scary letters from the IRS, or figure out their numbers on an excel sheet.

That’s where we come in. We handle the books so the business owner can do their job. We have several artists, actors, and influencers and I definitely specialize in making this stuff easy for them. We also have doctors and lawyers, and honestly, this kind of paperwork is hard and not fun for almost all of them. Even the ones that mostly know how to do it don’t have the time for it as a business owner. Their time is gold. It is worth tens of thousands of dollars in potential sales and expansion in the time they were trying to fill out one form.

We will get their books in perfect shape, ready for the CPA, and ready for the business owner to make the tough financial decisions because they have all the info they need to do that. We send them reports every month, and any time they need additional data, we will send it. We can handle all their payroll needs, pay their bills, give them their budget for the week/month, etc., and fill out those pesky end-of-year reports for the state and IRS.

One of the things that set us apart is that we are a fully remote bookkeeping firm. My bookkeepers are all over the country, and so are my clients. In order to do that, we have had to work out technology and systems to keep track of everything. We are constantly meeting clients on zoom, tracking recurring projects and one-time tickets, onboarding new employees and clients fully online, etc. We are basically a tech company but our tech is bookkeeping.?

The other thing I find that sets us apart is that we have strict communication policies. We reply to all communication within one business day. I have many new clients come to me and tell me that their bookkeeper took 2 to 3 weeks to reply to them and they never receive reports and they have no idea what the bookkeeper is doing. I find that completely unacceptable in an internet age. It might be a lot of work to do the work and answer emails as well, but if you don’t, you will lose clients. We except fast communication these days. I know I do, and if I do, so do my clients.

We really strive to be there for the client and help on anything we can. We will schedule a zoom call and go over their financials if they don’t understand or?have questions. We will translate for the CPA. We will make sure they are compliant in all their forms and corporate structures. I think because we really care. I really care so that is our corporate culture.

We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?

I’m not sure… I talk a lot, lol.?Maybe that I am Israeli and still an Israeli citizen even though I have been in the US since I was ten… gotta go do that citizenship test, lol.?And I love sci-fi movies.

https://voyagetampa.com/

Maya Weinreb |?Founder & CEO

813-336-1574