Jens + Marlys Wiegand

Many thoughts about “Bookkeeping vs. Finances vs. Wealth” have gone through my mind, but I find it hard to put them into words…

The wealth that comes to my mind immediately is the “wealth of knowledge and experience” we acquire during our lifetime. Don’t get me wrong, money is an essential tool for growth, but it has not been OUR primary focus.

We feel we charge a premium price for the “full service” and personal attention we provide. Marlys has found her calling and I support her as much as I can. Our clients believe our prices are worth the beauty we create and the peace of mind they experience. It’s a win-win for all, including our wonderful contract workrooms and installers, and our vendors!

I realize that I will need a bit of professional help to become the CFO of our business and our life. Even with a background in banking and finance, I feel I grasp the big picture of our financials but probably not all the fine points. We just started working with a new bookkeeper. It makes me hopeful that we will soon be able to take the next step and switch to a new accountant who understands our business well and gives us more guidance to run an efficient and more profitable company.

Going from two self-employed owners to hiring our first employee, an office manager, is not an easy decision for us. I need help to make a timely and financially intelligent call on when to hire that key person.

Wow, thanks for the inspiration, everybody!

For me, as a “recovering European,” a right-sized lifestyle is an essential aspect of living a balanced life. Rosemarie mentioned that she and her family downsized to a smaller home, requiring less time and energy to keep up. That is part of our plan also to have more free time to do the things we enjoy (other than work).

I agree it is wise to get help and outsource specific tasks that take up a lot of our time and can be completed by someone else.
There is some strong resistance in me to farm out laundry and house cleaning. I feel my mom is coming through strongly. 🙂

As “foodies,” we prepare and eat healthy, organic meals at home. Fortunately, Marlys likes to cook, but it takes a lot of preparation and time! Having wholesome meals cooked and frozen twice a month by a local chef could be a big time-saver for us and possibly worth the expense!

Back to our business responsibilities, we already outsourced our payroll and bookkeeping. They can do it faster and better than we could, and our accountant and I keep an eye on the results.

I’m grateful for living in this incredible country and do not take the freedom of choices we have here for granted.

Dear Vita and Classmates,

We had our first CV vaccinations last week and are looking forward to being fully protected by early June.
I’m very excited about what you have shared with us so far, and I expect it will take time and assistance to implement these processes and systems.
As a former pilot, I love to follow checklists and flows. That will be the fun part for me.
I’m a bit concerned about how to master the learning curve ahead of us with Airtable and related software. We have asked our IT person to commit to a certain amount of hours each month to offer technical support. Maybe I’m overthinking this, but we are very busy at work right now and need to keep our engine humming.

What’s keeping me up at night (literally) is the task of writing intelligent blog posts for our website. It takes a lot of energy, research, and time. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to accomplish this a bit more easily?

I’m sure Vita is saving more awesome content for the second half of our class. We will all have to put her on speed dial. 😉

Hello!
Just like Brook, we spent Tuesday and Wednesday at the very inspiring Exciting Windows (EW) conference. The only challenge is, where do we start to make changes and apply at least 80% of the valuable ideas? 🙂

Since Marlys and I are not yet able to clone ourselves, our goal is to grow our retail business sustainably. It is becoming very clear to me that the process flows and PMS Vita showed us will help to stay organized. I love the idea of getting away from paper files!
We really appreciate Vita’s offer to share her Airtable template with this entire class! It will be an awesome starting point for us, and we will be able to add to it to make it our own. If it means hiring an Airtable consultant, I’m happy to do so. Ideally, our future office manager (or a capable VA to get us started) should be able to help make this happen.

One of the “nuggets” from the EW conference:
As you are going through your day, ask yourself “which tasks could I hire out to a subcontractor or a less expensive service provider?”

See you soon.

“Which activities create 80% of your results?” Good question, Vita.

– Following the script from the 7 step selling system from WCU to qualify clients, identify their needs, and talk about an investment range.
– Offering a complimentary 30 minute phone or video consultation to potential clients is a real time saver and prepares everyone for the in-home consultation.
– Clearly communicating what we do and do not do.
– Weekly meeting with our Networking Group (normally: in person, now: virtual).
– Realizing that we need to take regular breaks and recharge to be of service to our clients.

When Vita mentioned the 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle), it made me stop and think about which of our activities are creating the best results. Having systems in place that cause approximately 80% of our business to run smoothly sounds like an attainable, clever goal.

Jens [YENZ]