1533 – How to Get People to Know and Trust You Faster with Ilderton Bookkeeping’s Jordan Ilderton

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:59with us right now it's jordan ilderton jordan you are a growth and profitability consultant and you are the founder of ilderton bookkeeping found on the web at ilderton bookkeeping llc.com jordan thank you for joining us hi josh it's so great to be here yes okay yeah we were just kind of talking briefly about your work before we began, but give us a thumbnail sketch of your impact in the world today. My background is in numbers. I love looking at numbers and data and working with business owners to use that information so that they can become more profitable either in what they're currently doing or when they're scaling and adding new revenue streams.

1:41So I'm always working with my one-to-one clients to see where are we leaving money on the table, whether that's somewhere in their books, like, hey, this expense got categorized wrong. And now we found$4 ,000 of profit that, you know, didn't know it was there. Or, you know, how are we spending our money intentionally? So have a client that stopped taking credit cards, and now they're saving$25 ,000 a year. So looking at, you know, how can we literally use what's there, and then creating strategy, organization, implementation to create more. Wow. You know, I think a lot of us, like, I'm just trying to think of this, like, wouldn't we have already kind of figured that stuff out if we're paying attention to where the money's going?

2:27Like, yeah, you would. It's like the most obvious thing. And yet it's not. I don't know if I can cuss on here or not. So I'm not, But I always say, you know, you can't find more profit or be more profitable if your numbers are C-R-A-P. And that wasn't a bad curse word. Yeah, that's not what I was thinking. But oh, you were thinking of the bad one. OK, yeah, we'll just go with that. But and it's something people take for granted, especially when they are multi six and seven figure businesses of just their books are maybe on autopilot or it's a well-oiled machine. And yet maybe they aren't digging into what's going on or being a scientist or asking questions.

3:06And so, you know, my one-to-one clients, we can do the bookkeeping for them here in-house because I love being in their books and seeing what's going on. And then just digging through and being like, hey, did you know you're spending this on this? Or, hey, let's kind of look at this for the year and finding just more profit in there that's already there. or, you know, just learning to see how, you know, their gross profit is and how can we improve it? Because those are just, I like to call it like the low-lying fruit. People just forget about it. And, you know, if you're trying to get visible, if you're trying to raise your prices, if you're trying to network, all those things are great.

3:44But if your numbers are married, then it doesn't, the profit's not going to go up as easily. Yeah. And I'm wondering, like, if, you know, maybe the ideas that you might suggest as you're looking at the data, like someone like you, you might say, well, you should raise your prices and then sales might push back on that. Or like, I mean, there's a lot of pieces. And it's, you know, as a founder, as a CEO, like, it's tough. Some of those decisions are pretty tough to make, but you're kind of coming in from, again, a little bit more of an outsider perspective, which gives you, I mean, you know, the site that we don't often have.

4:31Right. And it's fun to just kind of ask questions and look at things differently. And it's so empowering for the business owner to see these things. You know, we also had another client just from a simple bank reconciliation. we realized, you know, they have these$17 ,000 invoices and someone on their team closed the invoice, but they didn't accept the payment correctly. So they actually didn't receive that$17 ,000. So, you know, it was there in the revenue number in the invoice, but it wasn't actually received in the bank. And so just simple things like that, that maybe a team member is not trained correctly or something gets entered incorrectly with the books or whatever that is, just really having that, you know, insight there into it and looking at it.

5:17And then I'm just such a big fan of being so intentional and so strategic about what we are adding in the business and really doing that kind of piece by piece, picking one focus area so that we can go all in. You know, I was kind of breezing through your social media. And one thing I saw is this, you know, is engaging in profitable activity. And I know for me, if I'm unhappy with cash flow, I typically like one area that I have to remind myself is it could get easy to start blaming on this or that or these other factors. But at the end of the day, usually my revenue follows my sales activity.

6:04And so then it's like, well, look, if revenue comes from closed sales, closed sales come from sales conversations, sales conversations come from building lots new relationships. Like that's a pretty logical flow that leads me to believe that I could be spending a lot of time on maybe a redesign, but maybe that's, you know, maybe that's appropriate. Maybe that's not. I just know that there are a lot of things that can distract us as founders of businesses? And is that truly what we want and need right now? If at the same time, we're complaining about cashflow, just, I would argue, just, just keep showing up for sales.

6:46Like, honestly, that's going to drive revenue. Okay. That's my take on it. Our brains love that dopamine hit of I'm redoing the website, or I'm getting some new photos, or I'm paying this person to do this. Like our brains love that. And it feels like we're doing something. It feels like, oh yes, you know, this is going to get us the result that we want when literally it's like, you know, when I'm talking to my clients, I'm like, what are the daily sales actions that you're taking? Not like redoing the copy on your website, but like, how are you building relationships? How are you getting in front of your audience?

7:17How are you getting in front of other audiences to really cultivate that? If you want to, at some point do a redo on your website, let's be really intentional about it. Cause I'm of the, if you're a website person, And then you need a really great website. But otherwise, I'm like, good is good enough. You know, like we want to have it converting, obviously. And that's when we're looking at Google Analytics and seeing like, okay, what's the conversion rate if we're having someone take an action step? Are they doing that? And what's that percentage? And then maybe the percentage is really good, but the numbers aren't there.

7:51The traffic isn't there. So while the conversion is good, we need more traffic. So really looking at like solving the right problem to see where the kink in the hose is, excuse me, where the kind of blockage is instead of just going for, oh, we need to redo this whole thing. Yeah. And when you engage, can you talk about the relationship? You know, because obviously your website is IldertonBookkeepingLLC.com. However, a lot of what you've been talking about, Jordan, is more almost like, you know, kind of like the language that a CFO would be using. Right. Yes. Thank you for bringing that up. I started my business seven years ago.

8:31My background was accounting. I don't want the CPA route. I started my business when I had my first child. She was two weeks old. I've since had two other daughters since then. At that point in time, I could have never imagined doing this now. I just knew I loved bookkeeping. I knew I loved the numbers and it served people so well. And then at about year five, I felt more comfortable and confident talking to my clients, like, Hey, I'm sending you these reports, everyone. Like, there's some things that I feel like someone should be talking about, or, you know, this elephant in the room. And my kids were old enough to kind of start being all in some sort of preschool.

9:07So that's when it started with this, you know, kind of advisory. And now I'm even like, is it advisory or coaching? I'll call it a mix between, you know, meet in the middle. Because I do talk mindset with my clients. And we do talk about some of their fears and anxiety around money and what's kind of coming up for them and how that's determining what they're doing today. So it did start originally with bookkeeping and a love for supporting business owners that way, and then grew into something so much bigger of, I want these business owners to be in here for the long game. You know, I don't want them building businesses that they want to burn to the ground.

9:44Let's be really intentional about it. And then I'm kind of that hybrid of, you know, the advisor that really looks at the numbers or the coach that can coach, but doesn't really know anything about the data. I'm kind of that in-between person that is bringing it together and making it easily digestible for them. I sometimes will look at my clients and they're just kind of looking at me and I'm like, okay, let's pull back a little bit and refocus. Like what, what's the problem we're solving now? And where do we go from here? So it, my business has grown and evolved. I love it. And, you know, I love my one-to-one work with the clients.

10:19It's just so fun. And it's fun being like a detective with them. Yeah. And, you know, someone might be listening to our conversation and they say, oh, CFO. CFOs are really expensive and those are for bigger companies. How do you meet the needs of, because I think you work primarily with SMBs. Is that right? Yes. Yes. All my clients are, you know, they're, I don't even want to put a revenue range on it, but they go up to, you know, multi-millions. Their teams are typically under 20. You know, I would even say probably smaller than that. So, you know, I am, I used to call myself a kind of holistic CFO, but even that felt too formal.

11:05You know, this is more of tailoring it to them and what they need. So I'm not coming in every month. We obviously look at reports and we look at metrics that matter to them, but it's not this very buttoned up caller. We only meet once a month and I'm throwing a bunch of numbers at you. This is three times a month. We are digging into some stuff. Maybe we go down another road, but it's not really, when I think of that CFO, it's a little more buttoned up, I guess, than the work that I do. some of the work I can do with them, they might get a little messy or, you know, there's emotions that come out and, you know, I'm totally there for that.

11:46My framework is mindset, strategy, organized, implement. So we're kind of in one phase of that framework at any point in time. So I feel like that kind of expands beyond the CFO role. Yeah, right, right. Well, I love this because I truly believe that, you know, and anyone that knows my background is, you know, I was a consumer, I've been a consumer advocate for like 16 years. And, and that consumer advocacy leads to, you know, small business advocacy. And like, as a business owner, you deserve to be able to make decisions, not just based on gut, like, unfortunately, far too many founders are doing.

12:27Oh, this feels like the right thing. Well, yeah, what's the data saying? But more importantly, um again is you've got clarity because the data you're using are the numbers rather than you know a magic eight ball and some smurf smurf berries i mean you know we got to use the data and what what what are some common things that that you find that numbers reveal that might be hidden to most founders well something that just came up for me when you were talking is i just had a call with someone yesterday and, you know, they were so excited. Their revenue was like 1.1 million a year. And then they told me their, um, you know, net income profit number.

13:09And it was like 19%. And of course I'm like, if we only raised it 5%, you know, that's like an extra$48 ,000 a year, you know, like it was just fun to like see the potential and see what, um, could happen if we kind of just like, it's not this big mindset thing or this big strategic thing we need to do. It's literally like, can we increase profit margin by this percent? Or can we increase conversions, you know, from 6 % to 7 %? Like it gets so exciting to play with the data like that and not to feel so charged in terms of like, yeah, I have this gut feeling and like, I'm going to go for it. And it's like, if it doesn't feel exciting, then I'm not going to do it.

13:50But literally looking at Like, well, what if we went from six to 7%, like, or went from 19 to 24, like just little, you know, 1 % moves could make such a big difference. But, you know, with your question just now with things, you know, to really dig into really, I'm always the first place is, you know, revenue and expenses and looking at those every month. And even with my clients, when we first start working together, we'll look at the past year together. Like we'll go through the numbers, go through the expenses. And they're like, oh, snap, I was paying four grand a month for these website services.

14:24And I'm like, OK, yeah, how's that converting for you? Or how's it doing? And they're like, we're not doing anything with the website. And it's like, OK, like problem solved. Like, let's ditch that or go back into what you originally hired them for and re-up that. So that's kind of the low hanging fruit that is just digging into the numbers first and then using them for the decisions later on. I don't know. Did that answer your question? Yeah, certainly. And Jordan, for someone that's listed for a conversation, they're already aware of you. Maybe they found this podcast because they're like, oh, I want to learn more about Jordan.

14:59What does that initial engagement look like? And maybe some kind of ballpark and like, this is typically how often we work. This is kind of where I fit in with you and your team. Or kind of like, is there just, your team can provide the bookkeeping services and then kind of the consulting as an add-on or how is that structured? That's a great question. We typically do one-to-one work with my clients. So that looks like three meetings a month. They have Voxer support in between that I'm always checking into. We use a platform called Teamwork to really track our task and deadlines and takeaways.

15:39We do the bookkeeping as an add-on. For two years, we haven't had bookkeeping spots just for bookkeeping, but one of my bookkeepers is actually opening capacity. So we do have just bookkeeping spots. But people typically tend to hire me when they are feeling a little overwhelmed with the numbers or they're not feeling like they're taking home what they should be for the amount that they work or for the revenue level that they have. They don't really understand where the money's going or, you know, if it's giving a return for all these expenses and investments that they've made. I offer free calls.

16:13So I'm a huge fan of getting content and getting out there exactly like you're doing and we're doing now. Consistent content is just so helpful, even if you are getting a lot of clients from referrals. But if you have content out there that people can binge, they just get to know I can trust you so much faster. So that is the free call that I offer, that consistent content for consistent five-figure months call, which I know sounds so weird for an accountant to be offering that, but my brain just loves to create strategies and create simple action steps. And so that's what the free call is around.

16:46So people can get out there. A lot of business owners feel really uncomfortable doing that, or they feel overwhelmed. And so that's that just kind of free initial call. And I love to give people value on that. And then from there, if they want some help implementing all of that. That's where we come in. Wow. All right. Your website, IldertonBookkeepingLLC.com. To our friend that's listening to our conversation right now in your podcast app, just click around, just start clicking on stuff and you'll probably find the show notes and we'll have a direct link, Jordan, to your website. And, you know, speaking of maybe content or next steps, you know, when they go to your website, what would you recommend that they do?

17:25Book the free call. I mean, it's there. Take it. I love doing these. It's so fun for me to connect with business owners this way. And it helps me know, like, you know, I've literally talked to like four people this year who have spent$4 ,000 on a website or around that, you know, amount. And so I'm speaking to that in my content because they're like almost in tears. They've spent that much money and yet they have zero clients to show for it. And it's like, well, you don't have a sales process to get your website in front of your audience or help them take the next step when they are on your website.

17:57So it's things like that where I can really help people like realize like, yes, you can have these expenses, but how does it fit into your sales process and that sales journey that your potential client is on? So it's just a bigger, you know, piece of the puzzle. And so, um, you know, I love that free call and invite anyone to do it. I also have a Facebook group, peaceful and profitable entrepreneurs. Cause those are like my big words, peaceful and profitable. I go live every Wednesday. Um, so I give tons of value. I'm out there all the time. I love to connect in any way that I can support any of your listeners.

18:30Yeah. Awesome. All right. The website again, IldertonBookkeepingLLC.com. Jordan, Jordan Ilderton, you are the founder and again, a consultant to the stars on making sure that the numbers are aligning and helping you get the results that you want, help you make the impact in the world, again, as a growth and profitability consultant. So Jordan, wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Josh. I appreciate it.

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