Issue #50 - When Done Beats Perfect
Publish that social post (then go touch some grass)
Welcome to “Get Work Done,” where we discuss the complexities of efficiently running accounting and bookkeeping firms. This newsletter is brought to you by Financial Cents and delivered to your inbox every 2 weeks.
Small Change, Big Results
We hear it all the time from firm owners: I know I should be marketing, but I have no idea where to start. So I don’t.
If that’s you, welcome to the club. Now, promptly get out. (Kidding, kidding—but seriously.) To help you find your way to the door, we recently hosted a virtual panel with four small-firm owners who’d rather do almost anything than market themselves, and we asked them to share their best advice for getting over the hump.
The overarching consensus: marketing your firm is way less complicated than all the fancy marketing consultants would have you believe.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest culprit holding firm owners back is—you guessed it—perfectionism. Accountants are wired for it: everything has to tie out to the penny. Panelist Angela Jenkins of Mindfull Money Matters confessed that she’s sitting on a mountain of unpublished social media posts simply because they aren’t 100% flawless.
But that’s about to change, because her new standard is built for shipping: “Is it good? It goes.”
It’s a mantra we can all live by this summer. Your firm doesn’t need a full rebrand or a complex marketing plan with content scheduled weeks in advance. Just do something. Pick the one platform where your clients actually hang out, and start showing up there authentically. As Christine Salvatore (more on her below) advised, volume and consistency are the real keys to success. Her words of wisdom: “Reps over research.”
Done truly beats perfect—and done is the only thing that gives you the data to learn what’s working and what’s not. So if you’ve been waiting until you feel ready, consider this your permission slip to skip that step.
Read the full session recap below and steal the panel’s hard-won, refreshingly un-fancy advice.
Community 🫶
The National Association of Enrolled Agents (NAEA)
The National Association of Enrolled Agents (NAEA) is the nation’s leading community for tax practitioners, from aspiring enrolled agents to experts with decades of experience. NAEA meets you wherever you are on your career path, seeking to protect, promote, and provide for the EA profession throughout the halls of government and beyond—supporting an EA’s right to practice and the taxpayer’s right to representation.
Scaling to CEO: A Free NexPath Coaching Community
NexPath Coaching helps accountants, bookkeepers, and tax professionals turn overwhelm into opportunity by strengthening leadership, improving team alignment, and building systems that actually work. Most firm owners think they have a people problem, but what they really have is a leadership and structure problem. Without clear expectations, accountability, and communication, even the best teams struggle. NexPath Coaching’s free Scaling to CEO community offers members weekly trainings designed to help growth-minded bookkeepers and accountants get their businesses under control. Join now and start learning practical strategies you can implement right away to create more clarity, consistency, and trust in your business.
H🔥t Today
The IRS is reshuffling who watches the watchdogs
Starting June 28, the IRS is merging its Return Preparer Office and Office of Professional Responsibility into a single Tax Professional Management Office. The new TPMO will be led by Chris Pleffner, currently director of the Return Preparer Office. But the AICPA has strongly opposed combining the two, arguing it would inappropriately consolidate credentialed and uncredentialed preparers and create confusion among taxpayers. The IRS insists that despite the single entity, each side’s mission will remain separate and independent. It’s a story worth following if you care about how the profession’s guardrails get enforced.
Summer is the advisory sweet spot; don’t sleep on it
With Q2 estimates behind you and extension season not yet roaring, your business clients are now sitting on roughly six months of real data. That makes mid-summer the perfect time to revisit year-end projections, stress-test estimated tax payments, and surface entity-structure opportunities—exactly the kind of proactive work that moves you from preparer to advisor. Clients are relaxed and reachable right now. Use that to your advantage!
Economic optimism down since last quarter
Finance leaders are getting nervous about the broader economy: in the latest AICPA & CIMA Economic Outlook Survey, just under a third of the CEOs, CFOs, and controllers surveyed said they were optimistic about the U.S. economy over the next 12 months (down from 39% the prior quarter) and 81% flagged inflation as a concern over the next six months (a sizeable jump from 56% in the first quarter). Perhaps most interestingly, these leaders’ confidence in their own organizations actually ticked up. Translation for your firm: your business clients are uneasy about forces they can’t control, but they still believe in their own footing. That’s precisely when proactive cash-flow conversations and scenario planning land the hardest. Reach out before they come to you!
Swipe this workflow template
Swipe this Weekly Marketing Tasks Template from Denise Williams
Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.
Meme
Relatable? 😆
Firm Spotl💡ght
How Christine Salvatore built a thriving entertainment-niche firm from a hotel side table in Ohio
In the spring of 2021, Christine Salvatore was on a six-week, no-itinerary road trip across America when she opened her laptop in an Ohio hotel room, created an Upwork profile, and started replying to bookkeeping postings. Two clients said yes that same day. As a former production accountant who’d spent years on set, she realized she could speak the language of bookkeepers and film crews alike—a combination so rare almost no one else could do it.
Five years later, In Line Management serves around 25 clients across the entertainment industry (they even handled the production accounting for the new Rory McIlroy documentary) based almost entirely on word-of-mouth. Christine’s story is a candid and inspiring look at what can happen when you take the leap and bet on yourself.
Check out Christine’s full story in Two Cents Magazine →
Events
📍 Summer Workflow Camp — Tuesdays in July (Virtual, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)
Our free four-week live workshop series is built with one goal in mind: creating a firm that runs without you. Each Tuesday in July, firm owners and operators will walk you through real workflows, delegation frameworks, and client-communication systems that ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Plus, you’ll build something tangible and immediately usable in every session. Register your firm’s “cabin” (up to 10 people) or join as a solo camper, compete on a live leaderboard, and walk away with the complete Out of Office template bundle. Heads up: the first 25 cabins to register get a campfire mug with hot cocoa shipped to everyone on the team!
📍 IRS Nationwide Tax Forum — Summer 2026 (Multiple Cities)
Registration is open for the IRS’s annual three-day forums built specifically for tax pros, featuring 40+ seminars on federal tax law updates, IRS procedures, and emerging issues, with up to 18 CE credits available.
Noteworthy
The hidden six-figure cost of a manual month-end close
One firm owner with 100 clients had never put a dollar figure on the time her team burned every month chasing uncategorized transactions, missing receipts, and stray W-9s. Then she finally sat down and did the math.
At roughly two hours saved per client per month and a $70/hour billing rate, she discovered about $168,000 a year in billable capacity that was silently leaking from her bottom line. This piece walks through where those hours disappear (the spreadsheet ping-pong will feel painfully familiar), why 1099 prep doesn’t have to be a January fire drill, and how automating the most tedious parts of your month-end close process can give you that capacity back—so you can take on more clients without adding more headcount (or just give your team a little more breathing room).
Curious what a smoother month-end close might be worth in your firm? Use the built-in calculator to run your numbers through our formula.
Happy Fourth of July to all who celebrate! 🎆 See you in two weeks. 💚