Ep. 29 – Jamie Solo – Why I Walked Away from Corporate to Help Tax Pros Reclaim Their Time

Jamie Gruol: There was a time when I believed I had to sacrifice freedom to be successful in accounting. But what if we’ve all been sold the wrong blueprint? What if your business could actually serve your life, not the other way around? Hi, this is Jamie Gruel and in this solo episode of Diary of a Tax Practice Owner, I wanted to share with you.

My journey, my story, and what my North Star is. So hang around with me through this episode and learn more about how I got here to teaching you as a small tax or accounting practice owner, how to automate your practice and why technology is the keystone to you having a business that makes sure that you are loving life and enjoying every step of the journey. So let’s take it back. I had a, a father who was the CFO of the local hospital, and he always came home sharing his stories of accounting and I saw my dad work long hard hours.

He oftentimes, you know, was going through audits and he was going through, you know, just. Important monthly state or closes and all the things that A CFO does and when they’re responsible for a multimillion dollar hospital. And I knew I wanted to go into business, but I wasn’t sold on accounting because I saw how hard my dad was working and, but I went to Oregon State ’cause I knew I was called to go there.

I knew I wanted to go into business school. So I did that. And when I got into the business school, I kind of, the first year you’re like, you get to try everything. I tried all the things and accounting was the thing that clicked for me that I enjoyed. It was like solving a problem or a puzzle and it just felt really good to me.

So I went with it and I continued my track with my major being, , a focus in accounting and I got to the end of my undergrad and it was time to make the. Ever important decision of what do you do next? So all of the, I think it was Big eight at the time, now Big four, uh, came and they did presentations and they were trying to woo all of the young college students to come and work for them.

And I learned about the culture of the public accounting space and the expectations that they had for this grind environment that required a fifth year of school and sitting for the CPA and working 60 to 80 hour weeks and, and. Having to work yourself up from the bottom. Now, I am not a girl that shies away from hard work.

That is not my thing, but I do have a North Star. I. That is freedom. And I knew in that moment, following my heart, following my intuition, that for me the right next step was not to go the public accounting route, not to, uh, go into that environment. And so I opted not to. I returned back home to my hometown and found an amazing job.

Working in a private agriculture company that allowed me to be a staff accountant. So I got to put all those accounting skills to use and learn about how to run a corporation and from the accounting side of things, and that was fantastic. I enjoyed it. I did it for several years, but I soon learned that I didn’t love having the relationship with a spreadsheet.

I wanted more, I, I needed more interaction with humans. I needed more problem solving. And so I, after several years, kind of went my other way. And through a chain of events, I ended up, uh, getting my MBA and going to work for a healthcare IT nonprofit, out of Portland, Oregon, where we were implementing softwares into community health centers across the United States. And this was a great opportunity for me to, again, build another set of skills. And I found project management and loved it. And so I got to kind of test a lot of different technologies, implement a lot of different softwares. Probably implemented over 75 or a hundred different softwares in that 10 years that I was there.

Um, but I also got to implement six and seven figures, very large scale projects into community health centers. And what this taught me was, one, the importance of learning new skills. I, I was learning new skills all the time. I was, I was learning new softwares all the time. I was learning how to roll those out to either our team internally or into community health centers and external partners of ours.

And having, you know, how important it, it’s to make sure that those integrations happen smoothly. Well, at the time when I was kind of. About, I don’t know, seven or eight years in, I had A-A-A-C-O-O that I was working for, and she was a grinder. She would go in, she was working a minimum of 60 to 80 hour weeks and she started to push on our team to working more hours that like the minimum we should be working is like 43 to 45 hours a week that we need to be available 24 7.

We’re gonna have to travel a ton. And it just started feeling. Incongruent with who I was. And so I started having babies and my life started changing and luckily the company was able to flex with me a bit, but it just started to become that hustle culture. They wanted to grow a ton and they were bringing on all these, projects that were just felt very haphazard, and it just didn’t feel right to me.

So I continued to build that position and stayed on for several more years and. Then one day I had a wake up call. I got a knock on my door from fate that there was this world out there of people doing small level software implementations into online businesses. And I found that niche and I opened the door and I was like, Hey, I can do this.

And so that path. Of doing the large software implementations led me to working with several small online businesses, helping them implement some client management systems into their small businesses. And so this became a little side hustle for me, which was really fun. And through that side hustle, I had the wonderful fateful moment where in a Facebook group of 35,000 people I met the wonderful Jessica Smith, our co-founder here at Workflows for Tax Pros.

And as it would be. Fate and my true calling was behind a 30 minute call with Jessica where she and I just connected as moms connected as small business owners and just left that call with like, Hey, a new friend. But a few months down the line, Jessica and I reconnected and. She said, Hey, guess what? I found this amazing new software that is transforming my life because she was seeing how technology was able to transform her small practice and just like the healthcare IT work that I was doing and helping these community health centers transition from the very paper.

 Burdened, manual processes of their community health center to electronic medical records. Jessica was seeing what that transition could do for her. And so when Jessica said, Hey, I’ve cracked the code on the software is transforming the way I’m working. I’m showing my colleagues and they’re saying, wow, this is amazing.

I want it too, but I have no idea how to teach them how to do this. Would you be interested in checking it out? So I followed the little path of intuition and fate and , I shared with her, I was like, Jess, this is amazing. I love this. You and I know this other software that is very similar to, I would love to check it out.

By the way, I also have an accounting degree. Because I never leaned into the accounting thing, so I never shared that broadly. But I had an accounting degree. I had an MBA, I had all the fixins to be able to talk to small practice owners and help them. Plus, I had all the skills that I had drawn from my 10 years in corporate.

1. Implementing software into these healthcare or into these community health centers where I was guiding and training and teaching and building systems and efficiencies and making technology do what it needed to do for the practice that it was being implemented into. And so it gave me the opportunity to take all of those skills I had developed.

Implementing tech and automations and then marrying it with my ability to talk accountant, thanks to my undergrad degree. And so what this all brought forward for me is that I realized that my skills and my path and my journey. We’re for a reason. I don’t know how woo you are. I’m pretty woo. But I knew that my skill was deeply needed in the tax and accounting world, especially for these small practice owners because I saw the disconnect.

I saw these brilliant mission-driven professionals who were drowning in admin and stress. We’ve had over a thousand practices go through our workflows for Tax Pros program, and of that, hundreds of people have come back to us and said, this changed my life.

This allowed me to be the present mom that I wanted to be. This allowed me to take a spring break trip with my child that I never thought I would ever be able to do. This allowed me when I had a health emergency during tax season to communicate with my clients effectively and took such a burden of stress off of me when they needed to be healing and recovering from this event.

I have seen firsthand what technology can do to allow people to have the life that they want. And those are like the big ones because the ones that really are, you know, seen across the board is people able to take care of their health. Again, moms being able to homeschool their children when they never thought that they would be able to do something like that because they had a small practice.

People being able to relieve the stress of their lives and not have this burden of always having their brains on and being able to actually live happier lives. And so much of this is because of the power of the systems that we help them implement. And we love Taxstone.

You know, we love Taxstone here and we know how powerful that tool can be. It is just a tool unless you have the strategies and the systems and the structure behind it to plug it into, because when you try and flip on a tool, you are gonna find that as a big empty box. And when you try to build with what you already know, you’re missing out on so many opportunities.

To see new and improved ways of working to see new opportunities and innovations in how you do your client delivery. And that is where these systems that we have come to teach in workflows for tax pros over these last five years really have a massive impact. And so what I want for you is I want for you to have that life first business.

Two, and I want for you to think about what that is in your world. So what is it in my world? Well, in my world, a life first business means that I can take vacation when I wanna take vacation with my family. We have busy seasons here at workflows for tax pros. They kind of align with your lower busy season, right when you’re trying to get all those systems built in.

But I don’t want that because it’s typically the end of the year to ever impact my life. At Christmas with my family, with my young children, and so I have built a business around that. I make sure that every year our team is off Between Christmas and Thanksgiving, I make sure that our community and our clients are always aware that this is coming and we make sure that we communicate it well, but we also give them the structure and the the, um, the support necessary to when we’re out.

That’s not a big deal to them. And so you can do that too if there are key things that happen during busy season. Imagine being able to say, it’s spring break. I’m gonna be taking the week off. Here is my due date and cutoff date for you giving me your documents because I’m gonna be out of office and never feeling guilty about that.

Because you have designed a business that is life first, and when you communicate it properly and when you stand up as the the pillar in your professional role for your clients, they’re going to start doing that for themselves too. I always imagine that when I’m thinking about the impact we’re having in our workflows for Tax Pros world is that, you know, we are helping you as the small practice owner to implement automations, but when you are happier.

Your family is happier, and when you are happier, your team may be happier. And when you have the systems to support your team’s roles, then they’re happier and then their families are happier. And so we just start seeing, it’s kind of like when you throw a, a rock into a pond and all of a sudden it just ripples out.

It’s we’re the ripple effect and we’re the ripple effect of bringing freedom and joy and up. A life that you love. That is what we are trying to do here at Workflows for Tax Pros. And so I want you to think about this and live by this core belief, or maybe even adopt it from me, because sometimes having these beliefs, we have to get them from somewhere.

So maybe you can adopt it from me, but you deserve a business that supports your life vision. And it doesn’t consume it. So think about that today. When you leave this podcast, give yourself five minutes, just sit down, take a few deep breaths and think about what would it look like if I actually had a life first business I.

Would I still be working with the clients I’m working with? Or as many of the clients that I’m working with? Would I provide the services that I’m currently providing, or would I take them to the next level or augment them somehow so that they’re more valuable to my clients, therefore more valuable in the amount of money I can ask for those services.

Maybe it’s, I wouldn’t work Fridays, or I’m never working a weekend or an evening. Again, there are so many things that you can build into your life. First business that will transform the way you feel when you wake up in the morning. It will make you excited again about the work that you’re doing. It will make you excited again about the prospects of how you can innovate and how you can do this better and you will stop feeling the.

The burden and the overwhelm and the burnout that you’re feeling today. Because on the other side of making this decision and adopting the belief that you deserve, a business that supports your life vision, not consumes it, is that you are going to, have to do some work, but that work feels so good when you know that it’s going to be an investment into your future.

And so I hope that if you are a tax pro or an accountant and you are ready to stop sacrificing your life for business, I would love to invite you to check out the video in the description below, because. We have put together a 15 minute training that walks you through our framework of how we can get you a life first business.

And I think it’s a really smart 15 minutes for you to spend this year. And I wanna invite you to check that out. And we would love to support you in your.

Next iteration of your business as you build that life first business for yourself. Thank you for letting me share my journey with you today, and until we chat again, I hope you have a beautiful day.