My Why

I don’t know if Simon Sinek was the first person to encourage people to “find their Why” (in fact, I’d bet a pretty penny that he is not), but he’s certainly one of the most well known individuals to do so. He describes your Why as “the purpose, cause, or belief that inspires you to do what you do.”

My Why is the most accountant sounding Why in the world. I love cataloging things, and I love efficiency. That probably sounds crazy to you, but everyone’s Why is different. I wouldn’t particularly understand someone with a Why of making custom fitted skirts for labradoodles, but I’m going to guess that individual is probably out there somewhere. These differences in people are part of what makes our economy work. (In full disclosure, I did not do well in my economics classes, so I may not be correctly remembering exactly what makes it work.)

At any rate, cataloging has been something I’ve enjoyed for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I collected sports cards. Primarily baseball cards. As I collected them, I would log them in a giant Quattro Pro spreadsheet. Quattro Pro, for those of you who don’t know, was the precursor to Microsoft Excel.

I also had a somewhat robust book collection as a child, and these I kept organized by genre and, within each genre, alternated between organizing them alphabetically by title or alphabetically by author.

When I played baseball on my Nintendo classic – which, at the time, was simply known as a Nintendo – I had a notebook where I kept stats for each individual pretend player. I’m probably the only person alive that was annoyed by the fact that the Nintendo 64 baseball games kept the stats of all players for you. Really took the fun out of playing the game, in my opinion.

We had a foreign exchange student live with us for a year when I was in high school. During that year, he and I played numerous pool games on the pool table in our house. I would say countless pool games, except they actually can be counted. To this day, I still have the notebook which contains a log of every game we played, detailing who won, how they won (pocketing the 8 ball, opponent scratching when attempting to put in the 8 ball, opponent accidentally pocketing the 8 ball, etc.), and even how many balls the loser had left on the table at the conclusion of the game. Just typing this makes me want to go key this information into Excel for easy reference.

All that to say, cataloging and organizing is kind of my thing. And cataloging and organizing is exactly what a bookkeeper does. Since I know that most people out there hate to do it and think I’m crazy for enjoying it, it just made sense for me to start a business to offer my services to those who could benefit from them.

I also thrive on efficiency. I hate working on something twice when it could have been worked on just once with better planning or a slightly longer up front time investment. I love setting up systems on the front end that save hours, days, weeks, or months in the long run on the back end. Every time I do something, I ponder how it could be done more efficiently or quickly the next time.

According to the US Small Business Administration, roughly 50% of all businesses fail within their first five years of operation. One of the primary reasons small businesses close is poor financial management, which is where my services come in handy. Running the day to day operations of a small business can be time consuming and overwhelming, particularly to those with minimal financial training. Outsourcing this function can alleviate stress in your life and give you time to focus on actually running the business.

I find joy in using my Why to help other people be more successful at their Why, so ultimately that’s why Staley CPA, PLLC exists.