Welcome to a slightly different episode of the podcast. I’m Paul Rosenblum. One of the requests that I’ve gotten from listeners is to record an episode on how I got started in bookkeeping/teaching/and podcasting. Since people tell me that it’s an interesting story, I decided to share it with all of you.
I tell you this story not to simply give you my resume, but I’ll try and tell you more from a personal level and the luck that came along the way. I tell this story (the shorter version) on some of the webinars that I do because it falls into the category of a 1994 movie with Nicholas Cage called “It Could Happen to You”.
For many years from 1975 to 1985, I was in the retail business. I worked at a catalog store for a while, then moved on to a small local electronics store, and eventually became the manager of a new store that they opened, and I felt that I knew what I was doing and wanted to do more. I then joined the Radio Shack management program. I was promoted a few months later to manager working at a small Radio Shack store in Connecticut. My favorite part of running a store and being in the retail business in general, wasn’t the awards that I won selling the most VCR’s and giant screen TV’s (yes, it was the 70’s and 80’s), and wasn’t the actual selling (although I was more educating my customers at the same time – I had a soft selling style), --- my favorite part of retail was the handling of money and making change from the cash register. There was always a ‘familiar’ feeling that I had at the end of every sale.
In 1986, I felt that I needed a big change in my life and that’s when I moved to NYC. I was able to get some part time jobs in retail, but I knew I was burned out in that industry and needed to change career. I was able to find a 3-week temporary job at a general contractor construction company who needed people to input all the checks that were handwritten-- into a computer software program. He hired 3 people for this project, and since this was in the late 1980’s, there was no QuickBooks or any real computerized accounting program available (pre-Windows 95), so the owner used D-Base III to input the information. I was there 8 hours a day just doing data entry for the information on handwritten checks. I really loved it. I had learned how to type in 6th grade (the only elective class that my mother insisted that I take), and since I played classical violin for 10 years, I was able to learn to type fast and accurately very quickly. (it’s almost like reading music) After 3 weeks, I was called into the owner’s office and told that I was able to input more information than the other people every day with the fewest mistakes, and he would like to hire me full time to be an administrative assistant with some very light data entry and light bookkeeping. Even though I wasn’t a bookkeeper, I immediately accepted. There were contracts to type, but my first break that was literally handed to me on silver platter was a few weeks later when the owner told me he was going on vacation and asked me if I minded if he showed me how he did union and non-union payroll. Again, this was before computerized payroll, so everything was done by hand. I sat down in his office, and he showed me about 30 steps to process the payroll for his subcontractors, and his employees in his office. He showed me once. He then asked me if I felt that I could do it. And I said sure -- and I proceeded. Much to my own surprise, it was the only thing in my life that I learned that fast. I did the 30 or so steps perfectly the very first time. And I knew that I had some aptitude for bookkeeping. I had no idea.
About 2 years later, I was ready to move on (I don’t think I ever had a full time job for more than 2 years, that was my limit before I got bored). I left that job with no other job to go to (my M.O.) – and a few weeks later, I was able to get a real bookkeeping job without ever doing real bookkeeping. I talked my way into that job almost like it was a fever. I knew, for the first time, that this was really what I wanted. I had no idea why or where it came from, but somehow, I just knew. I started doing bookkeeping and teaching myself on the spot how the software worked without anyone knowing that I really didn’t know what I was doing. I survived on instinct alone. In 1995, I asked the company if they would pay for an NYU night course on bookkeeping for me. They agreed. It started in late September of 1995, and it was Bookkeeping 1 and 2 combined. Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6-9. I will never forget it. The best teacher that I have ever had, and in the final exam (which did not allow calculators of any kind), I got 96%. In my life, I had never gotten more than 70% on any test that I ever took in any subject except my driving test, which I aced. And the reason why I didn’t get 100% was a careless math subtraction that was incorrect. For me, being a bookkeeper first and then taking a really good class put names and theories into everything that I was doing by instinct at work. I was able to learn something on a Tuesday night and apply it to my work on Wednesday morning. Not the recommended way of doing it, but it worked for me.
After a little bit more than 2 years (again, my M.O.) I was ready to leave that job. I did it right (I thought) this time. I had a job to go to before I left this one. The only problem was that within 2 weeks, I hated this job -- it really wasn’t small business bookkeeping the way I was used to --- and I left within about 90 days right before they were probably about to fire me.
Shortly after that incident, I met someone at a small party, who was an administrative assistant and we got to talking. I told her that I was out of work but really was looking for a job as a bookkeeper. She insisted on doing a Tarot card reading on me and a few days later, we met at a little café. Now, I really didn’t believe in Tarot cards, but I thought that I’d go along with it. On the very first card that she turned over after I shuffled, she looked at me, smiled and said .. “Paul, you have to go freelance. You MUST go freelance. Working a full-time job is not for you!” I am indebted to Viviana for this. So, if you are listening to this, get in touch with me so that I can properly thank you and kiss your feet!
She took me to a large stationary store in 1996 (in Jan. or Feb.) and got the paperwork to fill out for a sole proprietorship. I had no idea what I was doing, but somehow knew that I needed to take her lead. I found a name for the entity by looking in a thesaurus and found one of the Latin terms for numbers – and ‘Numerex’ became the name of the Sole Proprietorship. I then remembered that the second to last job that I had, I had been sent snail mail addressed to me from someone who ran a small bookkeeping agency, and she needed people to place in multiple companies’ doing part time bookkeeping. I found that mail and responded to her. Within 2 weeks, I was working at two different companies doing bookkeeping. I loved it. And I loved the hourly pay. It was double what I was making per hour working full time. I did that for a few months and was prepared to do more. Then one day the phone rang, and the owner of this agency called me and told me that she was sick at home in bed but had just got a phone call from a computer school in Manhattan who was looking for a trainer for QuickBooks. At that point I was using One Write Plus for MSDOS, and really didn’t know QuickBooks. She said that it wasn’t a problem --- I should call these people. She gave me their phone number and I called. The only problem was that I called a gas station.
My M.O. for most of my life up to this point was to give up in a situation like this. Ok. Wrong number. It wasn’t meant to be. But a force inside of me said “You have to find these people”. So, I grabbed the yellow pages (for those of you who don’t know, in the 1990’s we had a big book with just yellow page business listings put out by the phone company every year called the NYC Yellow Pages, and I turned to the pages of the listings on computer schools. There were about 80 listings in NYC. I started with the big display ads. I called around 10 different computer schools, until I finally found the one that was looking for a QuickBooks trainer. They asked me if I could come in the next day. I came in at around 10am and sat down with one of the owners. She asked me about my bookkeeping experience and said – I have a 2-hour training session with QuickBooks coming up and we need a trainer. I asked what day this training session was. She looked down at her watch and said – “In about 3 hours”. She gave me a QuickBooks training book, and said … ‘You’ll be fine. These are real beginners with QuickBooks.”.
I don’t know how I did it, but I got through the two-hour training session, owning the smallest step ahead of the client. I was talking to the clients and looking at menus on the software at the same time. They had no idea that I was vamping. After the training session, they filled out an evaluation, and the owner called me about 2 hours later when I got home and said that the client loved me. They rated me a 10 out of 10. I was then immediately asked if I wanted to teach a public class. A couple of days later, I was handed a little handmade booklet for the class ‘Introduction to Computers’. This was made up of the explanations between monitors, keyboards and CPUs, as well as mice and how they work. A real beginning computer class. Since I had been into computers since the early 1980’s, the content was easy. I had known the whole curriculum for the last 10 years. I accepted, and they scheduled a class.
I walked into the classroom and the computers were all facing the wall. I was to stand in the middle of the room. Many of the students were already there, and they had their chairs turned toward me. There were 18 people in that class by the time I started, and so I had 36 eyes on me. I almost froze. I finally started the class, stuttering like I did when I was a kid. That lasted all of 5 minutes. And in an instant, I told myself that I’m talking about stuff I knew like the back of my hand. Just talk and have fun. And within a few minutes, I knew I had found my thing and I felt more comfortable in that room than in any other situation in my life.
This very quickly led to a 35-hour week teaching Microsoft products such as Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Word, as well as the accounting software QuickBooks, which was very popular since Windows 95 came out. Again, I was there for a little bit over 2 years and got bored with doing the same thing every day in the same environment with the same schedule. I also missed bookkeeping. So, to follow my M.O., I left. In the next few years, I went through 3 or 4 other schools, mostly teaching QuickBooks and Peachtree Accounting software until one night, right after my future wife moved in with me, in 2004, I saw an ad on Craig’s list. It was short and sweet. It said, “Tell us why you deserve to be on the best staff of computer trainers in NYC”. I was in one of my ‘moods’ that night and proceeded to write a 3-page email to them telling them all the problems about the public education system in the United States that I felt existed and what my teaching style was based on my grade school learning disabilities. They wrote back to me 45 minutes later, and asked when the owner could meet me. Two days later, at 5pm (after he taught a class all day), I met him. After a short ‘test class’, he hired me on the spot. However, this school was different from the rest. The majority of the students were small business owners, and not people who just wanted to take a QuickBooks or accounting class. At the end of every class, people asked for my business card asking me if I were taking on clients. I didn’t have business cards with me during the first class, but I did at every class after that. I worked for them from around 2005 to around 2018, when they were purchased and then merged with another school (which happened to be the very first one that I worked for, and they were still at the same location with many of the same classrooms). My first class there was in the same room where I taught almost 20 years before. I had several small consulting clients and two bookkeeping clients from that school in the first year alone.
Shortly after I started working for them, I had a scheduled two-hour private training session with 3 partners of a startup event management company who had taken a QuickBooks class with me. I went into their office at 10am, thinking that I’d be out at 12 noon. Not only did we have lunch together, but dinner as well. It was a 9 ½ hour training session designing the accounting system for a very complicated company that dealt with budgets and up-front money received before the job ever began. I left at around 8pm that night. 2 weeks later, they called me, told me that they were getting busy and wanted to offer me a permanent bookkeeping gig as a subcontractor. I was reluctant to make that kind of a commitment. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that kind of bookkeeping, which was complicated and tedious. I told them that I needed time to think about it. 2 days later, Karen called me again, and asked me if I had thought about it. I told her that I needed a few days. She called me back two days later, and two days after that, and two days after that. I finally reluctantly accepted their offer on a one-month trial basis. We would re-evaluate in 30 days. This was sometime in 2006. I am still doing their bookkeeping today in 2023.
One of the clients who took a class with me, a small clothing manufacturer, hired me to do their books. I would go to their home/office once every six weeks and put their books together. At the beginning of the year, we emailed the QuickBooks file to their tax professional. 10 minutes later, he called my client back. He asked to speak to me. The first words out of my mouth were “Hello, this is Paul. What did I do wrong?” He laughed and the first words out of his mouth were “We are going to be friends for a long time. These are really good books”. He took me under his wing for about 3 years and taught me everything that I needed to know about what he did with the books that I created and what the numbers look like on a tax return. I referred clients to him; he referred clients to me. This was in 2009, and we are still sharing clients together and speaking on the phone or on zoom at least every other day. He was right. We have been friends for a very long time. He is also a brilliant, dedicated and talented EA (IRS enrolled agent, which I have spoken about in another episode. We get along just fine.
Once I met the above Larry Kessler, the bookkeeping practice started to grow in leaps and bounds. My living room became overwhelmed with piles of paperwork from all the clients, and in 2011, I moved into my very first office, which was frightening. It was an extra expense, with no guarantee that I would keep these clients. Today, I have just under 200 clients and a couple of subcontractors working for me. Even before the pandemic, I was cutting down on teaching in a classroom environment because it would get me out of the office for full days at a time, including during tax season. Once the pandemic hit, everything changed to online webinars, which suited me just fine.
The podcast idea came to me through a friend about a year before the pandemic, and her idea was to have a podcast with the two of us talking about small businesses. She was the CEO of a startup manufacturing company, and her agenda was to talk about her company, and my agenda was to teach about bookkeeping and accounting. There was no chemistry. It never happened. Then the pandemic came, and I was busy with helping people with the PPP and the EIDL loans and other things. In 2022, the podcast started to come into my mind again. I decided to stick my toe into the waters of podcasting. If you look at the first 8 episodes, they were all done in 2022. And after about a year, my editor sent me an email telling me that he didn’t have the bandwidth for me anymore. I searched on the internet for companies that would edit and upload episodes of a podcast to a hosting system. I scheduled an appointment and after 10 minutes of talking, realized that I was too small for them. I asked them if they could refer me to someone who handled smaller projects. They suggested my current person, Stephanie Fuccio, and the podcast is now another outlet available for me to teach people on the internet along with the webinars that I do on a regular basis. With plans for a You-Tube channel this summer, I feel that all the luck stumbling into bookkeeping and stumbling into teaching, that my career path is now complete by stumbling into Stephanie (without knocking her down). So, thank you for being there and for all that you do for me, Steph.
After my father passed away in 1995, I asked my mother what my dad’s mother had done for a living. I never knew. She told me that she was a bookkeeper for the same company for almost 50 years. I had no idea. My mother taught speech pathology for a college and had a private practice of her own for many years. My father owned his own company doing film editing. My sister is a self employed therapist for the past 40+ years.
When I started doing bookkeeping for a film company, the client asked me if I was related to Ralph Rosenblum, the editor, since he recognized my last name. I said yes, I am. He said, “No surprise that you are a bookkeeper. You are telling a story with the books and editing all the time just like your father did with film”. I never put the two together until that moment.
Again, ‘It Could Happen to you’. The moral of this story is, don’t give up on your dreams. Don’t be so quick to turn down career opportunities that come to you without asking. They could be the most important decisions of your career or that you ever can make in your lifetime.
How did you figure out that you wanted to start your own business? What was it that pushed you there? Share your stories by emailing me at Bookkeepermensch@gmail or by going to our Facebook group page “Small Business Bookkeeping and Accounting”.
As always, thanks for listening. I’m Paul Rosenblum (waiting for something else to stumble onto)
