Small Business Stories with Carol Rogers

Carol Rogers is the founder of Chromium Bookkeeping, and she helps small businesses save money and stress by managing their books. Her passion is credit control, and she has worked within finance for over 26 years, including 12 years in credit control roles, carrying out payroll, reconciliations, and payment queries. She is also President of Peterborough Lions Club of Lions Clubs International. 

Willingness to Learn   

 Carol started her career in the credit control area, but when she moved to Peterborough and changed companies, she suddenly found herself in a different position. 

 “I moved to Peterborough to be with my husband, and I went to work for a company that was doing pensions and annuities. The day I started, there were two of the people in the accounts department. Within two weeks of me starting, they both left. Initially I was there to do credit control, and all of a sudden I had everything to do with accounts, and I had no idea what I was doing. I looked at courses to do and found the Association of Accounting Technicians, so I started training through distance learning, and I paid for that myself. Then I did Level 2, 3 and 4, and then I thought, why am I doing this for one company when I could do it for lots of other companies? So I thought I would branch out on my own, and luckily, my husband who is very supportive helped me. This month it was seven years ago since I started my business.”  

The Benefits and Challenges of Running Your Own Business 

 Carol confirms that having control over her time is one of the obvious benefits of being her own boss. But getting into the work-life balance is a process in itself. 

 “Time is very important, and we never seem to have enough of it. It's just getting that work life balance, being able to spend time with my husband and my cats, going out on our boat and relaxing. Bookkeeping can be quite a stressful job in itself, so it’s nice just to relax with my Kindle and my cats, and go out on the boat and go slowly. You can't really speed in a boat, so you don't have any choice but to go slow.” 

 Getting your time back, however, requires overcoming some challenges. 

 “I've got a problem of not being able to say no to people. When you first start a business, you just want to say yes to everybody and take it all on, because you don't know when the next paycheque is going to come in. It took me a good year to learn that.” 

 “Another big challenge for me was outsourcing,” Carol continues. “I'm a control freak, so I wanted to keep everything to myself, because then I knew how it was running and what was happening in the background.” 

 She ended up outsourcing her social media roles, and building a website with a blog and Q&A section.   

 Advertising in the Bookkeeping Industry 

 We ask all our guests how they advertise their small business. Carol uncovers that in the bookkeeping business, networking is one of the best ways to get new clients. 

 “When I first started, I wanted to advertise everywhere to get my name out there. That can very quickly become quite expensive. You do have to choose your magazines and editorials very carefully. We have a free magazine in Peterborough that goes out to all of the houses within the area, so that was relatively cheap. But the main one for me was face to face networking. And it wasn't only the people whom I was necessarily meeting directly, it was all the people that they knew as well. It may sound like a cliche, but people do buy from people, and a lot of my first customers came through word of mouth.” 

 Advice for Aspiring Business Owners 

 As Carol has been in her business for seven years, we wanted to ask her for advice for someone who is just starting out. 

 “Even after seven years, I still get wobbles of confidence. But you wouldn't have set up a business if you didn't have some background in that industry in the first place. So do know what you're talking about. Find people who you can bounce ideas off of, find a forum of people who are in the same industry as you, so you are able to talk things through with other people.” 

 “The other thing is that you don't have to know everything. I think that's really important, because you do feel like you’re a failure if somebody asks you a question, and you don't know the answer straight away. But it is perfectly okay to say ‘I don't know that, I'll find out,’” Carol concludes. 

Carol was interviewed in our podcast series - Small Business Stories - here is the link to our sites

To listen to the podcast https://anchor.fm/smallbusinessgrowthclub

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