People Process Interviews: Linda Brown

What this episode covers

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. Welcome to the People Processes podcast. My name is Rhamy Alejeal, and today we are interviewing Linda Brown. Linda is awesome. She is a Master Certified Profit First Professional. She's a Certified Preventive Growth coach and she's the founder of Spire Business Inc. Linda supports entrepreneurs in demystifying their business finances and providing guidance to increase business profits so that they can bring more money home. She's often referred to as the Voice of Reasons by her clients, Linda Equis, business owners with the tools, strategies and skills they need in order to create sustainable growth in their business and profit. We're excited to have you on, Linda. Thank you so much for having me. It's a wonderful opportunity. Well, we're glad you're here. So my first question is, and I have to ask this for our people in our field, most kids don't dress up as CPAs and accountants and bookkeepers when they're kids. How did you wind up in the field and doing what you do today? By accident, but most people kind of fell into that one. I was actually in corporate America for about 14 years where I was a securities analyst for mutual fund companies. I didn't have enough people interaction, so I went there to make a profit. Let's just say I worked on a lot of estate plans. But what I realized is that, all entrepreneurs , when they were having their estate plans done, they didn't actually know how much money they were making or how they would bring it into their business. Interestingly enough. At the same time I was a financial planning, I also had started a boat dealership with my husband. So I literally went out on maternity leave and within six weeks, my CPA came up to me and said, "Hey, you know, QuickBooks? I have a couple of clients that need some help. Would you please help them sell for the first five years?" I actually did this for free. They didn't charge it all. I charged nothing. I went home on maternity leave. I said, "Hey, this is really cool." I didn't go back to work. I just helped a couple of clients that the CPA sent to me. Yeah. It was, will you work for free? The answer is yes, I did. I helped businesses grow tremendously and then all of a sudden saying, Hey, I'm helping all these businesses grow and I'm not making any money. There's something that's not right here. So then I started actually creating the business. So if you were one of those lucky clients between 2002 and 2007 and there was no charge. Well, that's it. That's tuition, right? That's you. You got to really learn and do the real life work. That's a great journey. Well, having back in 2002 you've been doing this a while now. A lot of our listeners are CPAs and bookkeepers. Most of them though are entrepreneurs or HR leaders who are in charge of the staffing and organization inside their company when they're listening. A lot of our guests are very successful people like yourself. I try to bring that back because the biggest learning doesn't come from talking to somebody who knows everything. A lot of times it comes from the big mistakes and the problems. So I'm hoping Linda, you will take us to your greatest entrepreneurial failure mistake bad day. And tell us that story, how you got there and what happened. My bad day is actually digging out of the hole right now. To be honest, as most entrepreneurs, I was really good with numbers and business and could run my business really well. And most entrepreneurs start their business for whatever reason they start their business. Yours is HR, someone else might be interior design or engineering, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we know all the aspects of business to run our business. So mine was the numbers. I was really good at the numbers, but the marketing, not so much. I grew for the first 14 years by word of mouth. It was really good. I had enough time to do my stay-at-home mom’s stuff and I had enough time to do business stuff. But when