Danielle Hayden - Confessions of a Free Spender: Overcoming Your Financial Blind Spots

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast designed to help you become the best version of you.

Let's be honest, most entrepreneurs start a business out of a deep passion for a craft, not a love for spreadsheets.

But as your business scales, relying on gut instinct or simply checking your bank balance to see if you're successful becomes a dangerous game.

If you're only looking at your numbers once a year at tax time, you aren't driving your business business, you're just reacting to it.

Our guest today is here to take the fear out of finance.

Danielle Hayden went from working behind the salon chair to earning her CPA and stepping into the corporate boardroom as a cfo.

Today she is the founder of Kickstart Accounting, Inc. Where her team of nearly 50 professionals has helped thousands of small business owners transition from emotional guessing to data driven confidence.

So whether you're trying to price your services for true profit, looking to make your next big hire, or ready to step into your true power as a CEO, today's conversation is an essential roadmap for turning financial clarity into a massive competitive advantage.

Please join me for my conversation with Danielle Hayden.

Well, hi, Danielle.

Welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you.

Thank you so much for having me here.

Now, where are we speaking to you from?

Where's home?

Cleveland, Ohio.

Cleveland.

Oh, Rock and Roll hall of Fame.

I've been to it.

Yes.

Yeah.

You know, people usually say rock and roll hall of Fame.

I've been like, but I'll go downtown because I like the water and I'm a foodie, so.

Well.

And you've got a great theater district as well.

We do.

One of the best.

People don't realize that about Cleveland.

And I always, you know, I'm always chuckling with Cleveland because you've got the east side and the west side and Rockefeller was from there.

There's a lot of famous people there.

We've got the Rockefeller hall of Fame.

But no, it's a great city and it's a great state in the union.

So lots of good things going on there.

So I always encourage people to go visit Cleveland.

Well, thanks for doing this.

I'm excited about our topic.

We have a lot of entrepreneurs, business professionals, and we're going to be talking about financial issues, empowering entrepreneurs, and you've developed some systems and some processes on it.

But what I think is really interesting is how you got here.

So let's go back to high school.

So you're in high school.

Did you grow up in the Cleveland area?

I Did originally from California, but predominantly grew up here in Ohio, So.

And, okay, you're in school, and you're deciding what you want to be when you grow up.

Let's go back there.

And what's going on in your head.

Yeah, so I actually did cosmetology school in high school.

I left high school with no interest in math or numbers or accounting.

I left to do.

To do hair.

I was behind the chair.

And if you would have asked me then what I would be doing in 10 years, it would always be that I wanted to open up my own hair salon.

I loved what I did.

Yeah, it's an interesting transition, because you don't typically see that.

You'll see school, teachers, and everything, but you chose that.

We were talking before we started showing, and we have a daughter that does that and loves doing that and now specializes in weddings, everything.

So it's a great stepping stone because you're dealing with people.

At the end of the day, you're almost like a therapist, too, aren't you?

So you're dealing with people, you're learning sales, and you're learning numbers.

So that's the part when people say, like, how did you get from A to B in this trajectory?

I was using the numbers to hit my goals.

I use numbers as a tool to be able to understand what was happening in my business, because it really is a business for yourself.

I used the numbers to understand what was happening in my business and how to hit my goals financially.

And then this interesting moment happened where I realized that I actually understood it, and I really.

I was good at understanding it.

And so I started teaching the other girls in the salon how to do the same thing.

And in most salons, at least here at that time, had, like, a commission structure.

And so if you hit these certain numbers, you got more money from your employer.

And so I was teaching all of the girls how to do this.

Looking back, they were probably like, get this girl out of here.

But we did really well together as a salon.

We had a ton of goals.

But I realized in that moment that we can use numbers as a tool in our toolbox.

They don't have to be something that's scary or confusing or that we need to put our head in the sand around.

We can use them to feel empowered and confident.

Well, it's just kind of like one of your razors or clippers or thinning shears or they're just tools in your drawer to learn it.

But I think it's something every entrepreneur can learn.

And now, Danielle, your journey is very fascinating.

You went from working behind the cilantro to earning a cpa, a master's in accounting, and then stepping into corporate as a cfo.

So what did you notice about how everyday business owners view numbers during your time in the salon?

And why do so many entrepreneurs develop a fear of their own financials?

You know, I keep on using the word tool in our toolbox, and I do that very intentionally.

What I find is that most people and business owners put their head in their sand around financials.

It feels like something, ooh, I've never been good at math.

Or that time that I went into a whole bunch of debt and I don't know how to get out of it, or I just don't understand.

This just doesn't come natural to me.

I'm a creative, and therefore this is difficult.

And so there's just a lot of confusion.

And when it doesn't feel empowering, when we don't feel confident, we tend to shy away from it or put our head in the sand altogether and completely ignore it.

And it was interesting because I saw it in the salon.

Like I said, I was really working hard to help educate the girls around me, but I saw it with the people who I worked for and then with the people who I worked with, and I went into corporate, and it was a very different.

Like 180 people use numbers to make business decisions.

It wasn't emotional.

It was data driven.

It was factual.

I worked with the private equity firms, the investors, the management team, to say, okay, here's what is factually happening in the business, here's why it happened, and then here's what we're going to do about it as a company in order to achieve our future goals.

Here's where we're going.

And I learned that the structure that this framework and how we use the framework to get the numbers to where we want to go was something that most business owners didn't have.

And so my kind of second mission in life was to do the same thing again.

I'm going to take everything that I learned from corporate.

I wasn't one of those people who ran away from corporate because I hated it.

I actually really appreciated what I learned there.

And I said, I'm going to take what I learned and I'm going to build the framework so that every single business owner has access to this framework that works so that they never have to feel lost or confused or afraid again.

Yeah.

Because there's a lot of shame and anxiety, I think, with some people because they started they're successful, and they just don't realize, hey, it's not that tough, and it's learning.

So it's not just about understanding the jargon.

They stick their head in the sand because they don't want to learn it, and then they miss out on things, and businesses go bankrupt.

We know a lot of them don't succeed, which leads me to a lot of them.

I think you call it tax time only accounting.

So a massive trap for small business owners is only looking at their financial data once a year when they hand a shoebox of receipts to their accountant in the spring.

So why is running a business this way a recipe for stagnation?

And how should an entrepreneur actually be interacting with their data?

So I make my way into the entrepreneurship world, and I start having conversations with business owners.

And, you know, I was a cfo, so I wanted to come in and create budgets and talk strategy.

And I would meet with these business owners.

I'm like, all right, let's build the budget.

I'm like, show me your quickbook.

Show me your bookkeeping.

We'll use that as a map for where we're going.

And they're like, what budget?

Yeah, well, Danielle, I don't have any bookkeeping.

I don't have any number.

I don't have QuickBooks.

I don't have any numbers.

Okay, I paused right there.

I mean, I'm like, six months into this business, I'm like, we can't do this.

I cannot build a strategy or a budget without knowing where we've been.

And so I completely pivoted the business to start with bookkeeping first.

I don't come from the industry of tax, so I look at it differently.

Numbers are here for us to use them to make business decisions first.

That is the goal, is to use our numbers to make business decisions.

And then bonus is that we get to use them for tax as well.

Every single business owner I would talk to was using their numbers for tax.

I want to pay as little in taxes as possible.

I'm not looking at it until tax time.

I mean, I.

For the first, I don't know, six, seven years of my business just banging my head against the wall trying to get people to listen to me say there's a better way, and there really is.

So my mission is that every single business owner looks at their numbers every single month, that you have accurate financials delivered to you in a reporting format that actually makes sense.

So all of our clients receive what we call the snapshot CEO dashboard, and that you are then Able to use those numbers to pay yourself to hire, to sign up for the conference, the subscription, the coaching.

You are using those numbers to make real, actual decisions.

And then when we get to tax season, it feels like a non event.

It's just another Tuesday because we've been using those numbers all year long.

Yeah, going along.

A lot of people don't realize too they, they click the but.

And I've been guilty of this in my past because it works on a personal level as well.

So whether you're an entrepreneur and you have a business, I think personally we also fall short of this.

We keep the receipts, we pile it up in at the last minute and we're doing the same thing and not knowing our financials.

And I think what a lot of people don't realize is the use of a good CPA or a bookkeeping firm usually has an ROI to it.

It pays for itself.

There's I think 68,000 lines of code, tax code.

And you're aware of the deductions, the write offs, the things not too aggressive, but where people are maybe missing the boat and there's opportunity can more than pay for their fees on their bookkeeping fees and some of their accounting fees as well.

So a good CPA for that.

Do you find that there's a, a commonality with businesses you've worked with literally, you know, hundreds of them, do you see the same kind of, let's call them, bad habits across the board?

Yes, of course.

And I'll say we, we added on personal bookkeeping several years ago, so we do personal bookkeeping as well.

Because a lot of the bad habits that we have in business, they're probably because we have bad habits personally.

And so if we are overspending or not looking at our financials in our business, we're probably doing the same behavior personally.

And I want you to know both your business financials as well as your personal financials.

So when we work with our clients as part of our CFO services, we're looking at where do we want to be.

And I want to be clear, one of the bad habits that I see is not knowing where we want to go.

We're just existing in this life.

And I would imagine that if you're listening to a podcast like this, you probably want a little bit more than, than just an average.

Like you're, you're here listening and learning because you, you want to grow as a person so understanding where you want to be.

And so with our CFO services, what we're doing is we're looking at 10 years.

What is our North Star, both for personal and our business?

Where are we trying to go in 10 years?

Really feeling that moment in 10 years and then coming back.

All right, what's the three year plan?

If we're going to get there in 10 years, we have to know where we're going to go in three others.

Otherwise we're completely missed.

The North Star.

So building that three year plan and we got to come back and do the one year budget, which is great.

And most people do a budget and then they just, you know, throw it in the.

And don't look at it.

Yeah, yeah.

In the box.

And that's where accountability comes in.

I want every single person to have four key performance indicators that you're looking at every single month, you're reforecasting every quarter so that you're looking at the budget and you have true accountability.

And I would love for every single person who's listening to have a human being who can call you on your BS and help hold you accountable to your goals.

Right,.

Financial coach.

Hold you accountable.

Exactly.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so that's the mistake that we're making.

We're not creating that 10 year North Star.

We don't have a three year plan, we don't have a budget.

Putting our head in the sand and hoping that we get there.

Yeah, I've kind of been guilty of that one on occasion myself.

Well, and what's interesting, and you've said it, is tax accounting is kind of historical.

It looks backward, as we've already did, and it's there really to satisfy the government.

But driving your business using only tax returns is kind of like driving a car but looking in the rearview mirror.

So to scale safely, you need managerial accounting.

So you need to look at your numbers, as you say, monthly, if not weekly, to make these real time decisions about hiring, pricing, inventory and spending before it's too late to even pivot.

Right.

Yeah.

You nailed it.

I love that summary right there.

Thank you.

Oh, you betcha.

Well, let's talk about building the financial foundation.

So moving from that chaotic gut feeling finances to a clean systematic structure.

We want to move past what you, I think you call it bank balance accounting.

So let's talk about bank balance accounting.

So many entrepreneurs log into their phone, they see a healthy checking account balance and think, hey, I got some money, we're doing great, let's spend some money.

And I'm guilty of this one myself.

So I'll see something and I look at it and I go, oh, without maybe Looking at all the potential obligations that are.

And I get the bigger picture depending on the number of transactions.

So why is this gut instinct approach so dangerous?

And what metric should they be looking at instead?

All right, so I have a confession that I am guilty as well.

Okay.

I am what I call a free spender.

And so when I get, I'm like, you're true.

I feel better about myself already.

Just, good.

And I hope anybody listening feels better too, because I am a true visionary and I have 1 million 5 ideas all the time and I want to implement them all right now.

And what's really important is that my team knows how to ring that back in.

And they'll say, okay, Danielle, this is our ten year North Star, this is our three year plan, and this is the one year budget.

And so how does that new idea, that investment and that strategy, how does that actually come into play with this plan that we set?

And is it going to derail the plan?

And that's okay, we can say, yes, it's going to derail the plan and we're okay with that.

But having a team of people having that, that money coach, money team, to be able to say, hold on, let's think about this and let's make this decision together to me has been one of the most important things that I've ever had as an entrepreneur.

Bookkeeping.

And the act of pausing at the end of each month allows you to answer these three questions.

What just happened?

Why did it happen?

And what am I going to do about it?

When you look at your bank balance, you can't answer any of those questions.

You don't know if there's an invoice that's coming up, if there's somebody that needs to be paid.

Payroll just hasn't hit yet.

You don't know what you have in your business, your estimated tax payments.

You don't know what else is going on in your business.

And so I do get a fancy little text message from my bank every morning.

And I know that is just one little itty bitty piece of my picture.

It allows me to make sure, okay, we're going to hit payroll, or we have enough cash to sustain the business this week.

But that's a weekly tactical metric we're looking at.

The whole month allows us to say, okay, here's what's happened, and then what am I as a CEO going to do about it?

No, that makes sense.

Well, I think what you're saying is it's really an illusion because it doesn't account for timing and that healthy balance might not show the credit card bill that's due next week.

I'll, I'm guilty of that one.

Throw it on the American Express payroll.

It clears in a couple of days.

Or the deferred revenue for a project we haven't even delivered yet.

So instead of looking at, you know, at the bank account, we need to look at their net profit margin, their accounts receivable aging.

Do you find a lot of clients don't pay attention to those things and they start getting 30, 60, 90 days, the money is there.

And now they're spending their time so generating revenue, they're paying collection.

So now they've stopped the revenue process coming in again, they're not paying attention to those details.

Look, when you don't have a methodology for tuning in, this just feels like one of the million.

Like there's so much for us to do in 2026.

Right?

We have a million different tasks and if this just feels like a task that you have to do, it's easy to put it off and never actually like a chore.

Yes, yes.

Not everybody gets as excited as I do.

I.

And if you're not, if you're not taking care of eats you right?

Like when you don't know if you have enough money, if you don't know if you have enough in savings to pay your taxes or enough operating expenses in your rainy day fund, or if your spouse is like, hey, like are you gonna help pay some bills around here or are we gonna be able to afford that vacation this year?

Like, those are all things that we need to understand to have a big full life.

I want every single business owner to have enough cash to pay yourself and to pay yourself regular commingling business and personal.

Just because it's a tax strategy or you're writing off your vacation, I want you to build a valuable business that creates real wealth.

And having that time to say, okay, I'm going to allow myself to not be really great at this.

I maybe don't understand every line item on this income statement, but I'm going to do it anyway.

And then I'm going to make the steps forward so that I can have this big full life.

I think is where like the real CEO work starts.

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And now back to my conversation with Daniel Hayden.

Now it's interesting how and where and where you're spending the money.

Like I was in springtime.

I always go through every single expense just everything and go do I need this and was the last time I used it and I call it cleaning house and it always surprises me how much money is wasted on subscriptions on different it's painful now curious I'm curious in our world of AI and things changing so I'm curious how that can help augment things.

Now we have an account and we have Bookkeeper so we do that where we send in everything on a monthly basis and they do that reconciling and all the stuff I definitely don't want to do.

But I used an AI tool over the last couple of months and all I did was download my bank statements in a closed system so it wasn't a freebie and I just called it and I just where am I spending the money?

Where's the money going?

What's going categorize it for me and get it in the Excel spreadsheet so I can send it to my bookkeeper which makes life easy for her because she can import it into the accounting software and spend time more on strategic initiatives on where we're spending, how we're spending and what's going on.

How are you seeing and we've always had AI functionality in the accounting programs since we've had accounting software.

So it's kind of there it's just focus there are is it are there some quick steps that we can do to help prepare ourselves or AI tools to help us that at least get us to that first base so that we can hand it to you so it isn't such a bother but is helpful to our bookkeepers and help our accountants.

That's an interesting question.

I would say no.

And let me explain why often times we have clients who are really well intentioned and I, I do love them for it.

And so I'd be curious to hear if your bookkeeper use that document because usually what happens is that clients will spend a ton of time on some Google sheet that they're tracking something and we spend a lot of time trying to tie back to their numbers and they're usually not correct.

So what we use is a very, it's a proven framework.

Accounting has been around for a very long time and so we use the proven methods and framework where we take every single transaction from your bank feed.

So what we really need from you is the download from your bank feed, from your point of sale system, from your payroll reports so that we might use an AI tool within QuickBooks but we are then using that to make sure everything is reconciled and accurate.

From there, if you want to use some AI tools to better understand your financial statements, you can use your accurate financial statements to go then play in Claude or ChatGPT paid version to help you as a business owner understand them, ask more questions.

You don't have to either though.

I think that I want to be clear, I'm a daily user of AI, so this isn't coming from somebody who's like scared of AI or I'm daily user and I want, I want AI.

However, I think we are relying on AI before we're ready, meaning that the bookkeeping has to be correct first.

So in QuickBooks and I don't know why QuickBooks doesn't do this, but there's nothing in QuickBooks, right?

There's not glaring red noises or big alarm bells that says what you just did was wrong.

Your books don't reconcile.

And so I want everyone just to hear, in summary, make sure that your bookkeeping is accurate first and then go play in AI with those accurate financial statements instead of doing it the other direction.

Yeah, no, I agree with, for me, when I think of it now, it wasn't on the corporate because there's too many, you know, we have our invoicing systems or POS systems and everything that goes into it I did on a personal level with one bank account and it gave me a good clear picture.

So to your point that it does make a good point.

And so I think the key is interact with it, exchange, get ideas.

What are some strategies?

Let's talk about the.

And I think this is important and again, this is something that we could also benefit from, we have different revenue streams and some of those revenue streams are really profitable and very little time to maintain that profitability.

But then we have other revenue streams, let's call them products or SKUs, that take a lot of support, a lot of manpower, a lot of effort and support resources and are only a small fraction of what we do.

And I'm assuming you probably see that, like which ones are profitable?

Should we be dumping those lines and just going, hey, yeah, we can make money with it, but it's not our core, it's not where we focus.

Should we be focused more on our core?

If we allocated that time, would it make a difference?

And I'm assuming you probably see that with other business clients as well.

Of course, we see that all the time.

And what I'll say my answer is is that it depends on your strategy of your business.

So I want to go back to what I said earlier.

Where do you want your business to be in 10 years, 3 years and 1 year?

Do not go dump a product line just because it's not profitable.

It could be a product line that actually has a ton volume and it's, it's your loss leader.

So it's bringing in the volume and from that product you're cherry picking the clients or the product for your higher tier service.

So don't go terminate anything until you understand your bigger strategy and the role that each product line plays within that strategy.

I'll tell you what I see more often than not.

I shared earlier.

Visionary, right?

I am a visionary and I have all these ideas and I get really bored, okay?

So like I want to mess things up just, just to rile things up because I'm sure the object.

Let's go.

Hey, this looks like it'd be fun.

Yeah, Let me just like tinker with this and blow everybody's world up.

Because I'm bored today, okay?

And this is what I see entrepreneurs doing with their business every day.

They are bored, they don't want to do that anymore and they call it burned out and they go and they explode their whole business just so that they can go do a new revenue stream.

And they'll call it and they'll say, well, it's not profitable anymore.

Or I was really spending a ton of time on that.

I just want to, I just want to call it what it is.

Let's just question it first to say, hey, am I bored?

And then who can I talk to about it?

Maybe I should talk to my CFO team to say, hey, where's this product line?

Where's the service line as part of my strategy?

And if I make a pivot right now, what is going to be the impact on my revenue, my payroll, on my profit before I make a strategy switch?

Yeah, no, it makes sense.

Let's talk about identifying the unprofitable success.

So you've helped thousands of business owners.

Have you ever encountered a business that looked incredibly successful from the outside?

Massive revenue, tons of clients, but when you looked under the hood, they were actually in serious trouble.

And what is usually the root cause of that disconnect?

Yes, we've seen this quite often, and it's actually really hard to.

It's hard to see.

You know, you really feel for these business owners because they'll come in and they'll say, I'm doing all the right things.

Like, I'm so busy.

My team is so busy.

I've got a million clients, a million things to do.

Where is all of my freaking cash?

Like, where did my cash go in my business?

And I think the first step that anybody who's in this position can take is to understand it.

What happened?

Why did it happen?

And then what's one thing you can do about not a million things?

Because we can't fix everything all at one time, but we can fix one thing.

So we have to understand where we went first.

Looking at your.

Your income statement by month for the last 12 to 18 months, and really understand where the money is going.

And, like, why did you make the choices that you made?

And then we can decide together strategically in our budget process, what's the one to two things that we could just adjust?

We're just adjusting the volume.

We're turning it down just a bit to see how we can slowly adjust the profits.

We don't change everything at one time.

We need to understand where we went, why it happened, and then where we're going and you're not alone, I guess, is, like, most important.

It makes sense.

No, I feel like you're speaking to me.

Let's talk about strategic growth and CFO leadership because it's.

It's transitioning.

And let's talk about, first of all, pricing for profit, not competitor approval.

So pricing is one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to nail down.

They often look at what the competitors are charging and price themselves just a little lower to win the client.

How do you teach business owners to price their products or services based on raw data rather than emotion or market fear?

Yeah, when we first started our businesses, I think most of us don't know you know, we don't know how long it's going to take us.

There's usually a lot of self.

Self evaluation that we need to do.

Am I worthy of these Pricing syndrome for corporate.

Yeah.

So we start low and, and there's a piece of that that's okay, right?

Because we're testing our systems, we're testing our processes, we're building our frameworks.

I will always thank my clients who trusted me those first few years.

Like, thank you for going through that time with me because we were building our processes, we, our frameworks.

And the value that we give clients 11 years later today is not the value I gave in those first few years.

And so it's okay.

It's okay, I guess is what I'm saying.

What you're doing is a fine place to start.

But having a money team that can help you understand how much time is actually going into each service delivery or product.

What is your cost of goods sold, how much of your product is going into that?

Where does your facility cost come in?

Like how much of your operating expenses go into each client that is being served so that you can price yourself correctly.

Now, if you are mismanaging your finances like we were talking about before, if you're overspending because you have 25 different subscriptions and you haven't evaluated them in two years.

Right.

We can't charge our clients more money.

We can't go, you know, two times what our competitors are charging just to fix your spending problem.

So it's a both and conversation.

We need to understand what we're spending and why and then use that same data to properly price ourselves and we don't have to.

Also, you know, there's like in the coaching world, charge, charge what you're worth as much as I want you to charge what you're worth.

What I really want you to do is form the confidence.

This is how much it costs me to deliver this product and service.

And so it allows you to charge what you're worth because you understand data behind that.

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

So as entrepreneurs are building their businesses, they say they get their bookkeeping straight.

And you've discovered this by, instead of starting off as a cfo, even though you had your cpa, you started bringing in the bookkeeping because that was foundational to successful being a successful CFO or creating good financials which impacts the value of a business.

You're going to get more multiples if you have strong financials.

And if you might get a 1 times, 2 times, but now you might get 8 or 10 times.

So if you follow the same standards that bigger companies are doing or public companies are doing, the compliance is there, but also there's a value in there, there's investment.

So when is the time to move from bookkeeper to say CFO or fractional cfo?

Now that's a new, new role in our economy, which is good.

So your business, you've offer everything from basic bookkeeping to high level CFO services through Envision cfo.

So for an entrepreneur listening right now, how do they distinguish between what a bookkeeper does versus what a CFO does and how do they know they're ready to graduate to CFO level guidance?

You nailed it.

Bookkeeping is looking backwards and CFO is looking forward.

I don't care how long you've been in business, I don't care how long you've had bookkeeping, I don't really care what your revenue is.

The one metric that we use to decide when somebody's ready to go to into our CFO services is are you ready to step into your visionary seat?

So if you're ready to be the CEO of your business and set the vision for your business.

So you are spending your time not just looking backwards at what just happened, but planning the future.

Talked about it a few times today.

The 10 year North Star, the three year plan, the one year budget, quarterly key performance indicators, understanding the strategy behind every single business decision that you make, that's when you're ready.

It's not like, oh, I've been in business for five years and I've hit $500,000 in revenue.

I don't care about any of that.

You're ready to be a visionary.

You're ready to set the future of your business.

That makes sense.

And so from an expense perspective, they usually pay for themselves or an roi.

When you're looking at that strategic part and how does this a fractional CFO work and how does that role differ from say a full time cfo?

Yeah, I think that every financial person you have and on your team pays for themselves.

The bookkeeper is strategically organizing every single transaction in your business so that you can look at an accurate picture.

Your CFO team, they're holding you accountable and calling you on your bs.

And we need that level of accountability and support and strategy in this.

I'm going to call it day and age, but it make it, I think that makes me sound kind of old.

And so we, we need that level of strategy.

And so the ROI is that if you're ready for Someone to hold you accountable at the deepest levels, then that role pays for itself because you're going to do what you said you were going to do.

You're going to paint the vision for your team.

You're going to hold the energy for your clients and your team, and you're going to be able to do that as the CEO and with that level of support.

Makes sense.

Well, Danielle, to wrap things up, what does true financial clarity and freedom mean to you personally now that you've been at it for a while?

And what is your ultimate wish for every entrepreneur who listens to the show today thing?

Yeah.

I used to think that because I came from a world where we built businesses to.

To sell them, it there's a certain level of adrenaline that that comes from that.

There is a certain level of, like, wow, I just built something that's so valuable that people want to come and pay for this business that we created.

And at my heart, like, that's what I'm doing at Kickstart.

I'm helping business owners understand their numbers, to make stronger business decisions so that they can build something that's so valuable and so meaningful.

And then in part of that is that they feel so confident, like, we are transforming people's lives by helping them feel empowered and confident.

And I wake up so excited to do that every day.

And so I used to think financial freedom meant, like, not having to spend all my time in these four walls.

And now I get really excited to come to work every day and.

And, you know, I want to keep doing this.

Living the dream.

Hey, Danielle.

This was awesome.

The website is kickstartacounting inc.com from there, you can get over to the envision cfo.org so everything is linked and you can find out more information.

I'm assuming if they want to call and contact you and we'll have all of your data and information in the show notes, they can call you for an executive briefing, see if that's the right service for them and explore that.

Great insights.

I think there are things that we could all sharpen up on.

I know I could hear my bell ringing there a few times.

Okay, good.

So, yeah, me too.

And it's kind of like, you know, that, you know these things.

I've always attacked it from, hey, just go get more revenue, because it fixes everything.

If I get more revenue, I can fix my bad habits.

But I can see where the financial structure comes into play here, and we could all be mindful of that.

So to take our businesses to the next level become preferred in our markets.

I think this is good advice.

We'll have all of that data in there.

Danielle, thanks for being our guest today.

Oh, thank you for having me.

This was great.

As you're listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that has caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

And who is one person who you can share that with, either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening?

Perhaps it is that a healthy checking account balance is often an illusion that fails to account for upcoming obligations.

Or maybe it is that you should never abandon a product line or pivot your revenue stream out of boredom without first consulting data to understand its strategic impact.

Thank you for listening, for learning, and for investing in yourself so that you can become the best version of you.

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Goodbye.