When I decided to be a self-employed bookkeeper many moons ago, I remember interviewing with my first real client*, Joe, who seemed to be a simple man who sold ladders at local home shows. I impressed him by having the answer to a challenge he was having and he wanted to hire me on the spot.

The problem was, he had paid his previous bookkeeper $15/hour and I was asking for $20. I told him I would agree to $18/hour for 3 months, at which time, if he didn’t believe I was worth $20/hour, I would find and train my replacement and smile as I shook his hand goodbye. Two months later, he raised my pay to $25 an hour.

When we parted ways 8 years from the start, I was working with him full-time, earned 6-figures, and had experience in retail, project management, inside and  outside sales, residential and commercial property sales and management, international shipping logistics, and human resources. We had developed a production arrangement with a call-centre, created a local commercial, built a custom CRM to handle orders and shipping, moved warehouses three times, had local office and warehouse staff, and a team of salespeople from New Brunswick to British Colombia, with storage and a transportation system to support them. (You’ve got to love, Joe… he even sent a free ladder to my dad in Newfoundland so he could honestly say on our website that we shipped from coast to coast! 😆)

Oh, what a time that was! Now it is merely a line at the bottom of my resume. Lucky for me, the lessons and sense of adventure it brought still remain.

…

* a.k.a. not my boyfriend who started a small business a year before and said “here, do this” 😆