Good Neighbor Podcast: Tri-Cities
Bringing together local businesses and neighbor of Tri-Cities. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Skip Mauney helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around Tri-Cities, Tennessee.
Is your business serving the residents of Tri-Cities? Then, we need to talk! Visit gnpTri-Cities.com to schedule your free interview.
Good Neighbor Podcast: Tri-Cities
EP# 22: Unlocking Financial Success with GIP Financials' Sonja Jones
What makes Sonja Jones with GIP Financials a good neighbor?
Curious about how to transform your financial struggles into financial successes? Sonja Jones from GIP Financials joins us to unlock the secrets behind effective bookkeeping and financial planning. Discover her remarkable journey from a music teacher to a financial expert running a remote bookkeeping firm in Memphis, Tennessee. Sonja's firm, Get In Position (GIP) Financials, offers critical services like bookkeeping, tax preparation, funding assistance, and financial coaching, all designed to help entrepreneurs grasp their numbers and steer their businesses toward profitability.
Ever wondered if your tax preparer should also handle your bookkeeping? Sonja sheds light on this widespread misconception and clarifies the distinct roles of bookkeepers, tax preparers, tax planners, and CPAs. Through her insights, you'll learn the importance of having specialized professionals for specific financial tasks, ensuring you avoid common pitfalls and tax issues. This episode is a goldmine for anyone aiming to enhance their financial literacy and streamline their business operations. Don’t miss out on Sonja’s invaluable advice and the wealth of knowledge she shares!
To learn more about GIP Financials go to:
GIP Financials LLC
901) 451-9649
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Skip Monning.
Speaker 2:Well, hello everyone and welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. Are you in need of financial assistance, financial help advice? If so, you're in luck today, because I have the pleasure of introducing your neighbor, ms Sonia Jones, with GIP Financials. Sonia, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Skip, for having me how are you? All is well over here. How about you?
Speaker 2:I'm just fine, I'm great. I'm really excited, as I'm sure our listeners are as well. I'm really excited, as I'm sure our listeners are as well, to learn all about you and GIP Financial. So, if you don't mind, just tell us a little bit about what you do.
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. Gip Financial is a remote bookkeeping firm headquartered in Memphis, tennessee. Gip is an acronym for Get In Position and what we do. We empower entrepreneurs to know their numbers and position their businesses for profit. So our primary services are bookkeeping, tax preparation, what we call funding assistance whether you need assistance with your loan application or your grant application and then just general financial coaching. If you just need a thought buddy or have a money question, we can help you with that.
Speaker 2:Very good, very good. I think I need help with all of that personally. So tell me, how did you get into this? You said remote bookkeeping service. How did you get into this business?
Speaker 3:Yes, so I'm an educator by trade. I've been in education for over 20 years. So I'm an educator by trade. I've been in education for over 20 years. The first 12 years I was a music teacher and in the last 10, I was founding director of finance and operations for a local charter school here in Memphis, and so I had to learn that position basically from the ground up. So my principal my former principal thought that I had the skills to be an ops, but I also had two prior businesses before.
Speaker 3:Well, while I was working as a music teacher, so I had a piano studio and I also invested in real estate with my parents. So, with that being said, me being the operations manager and being over everything non-instructional, I was also over vendor management and vendor relationships. So a lot of the vendors that were doing business with our school didn't have the proper financial acumen. So they would ask us a lot about can you pay us through PayPal, friends and family, or when we let them know that we can't pay you unless you complete a W-9. Then we would get a lot of you know conversations around it, and that's when I noticed that a lot of the vendors that we worked with, we were also helping them like create invoices and things like that. So we saw an opportunity to teach entrepreneurs just about the bookkeeping basics.
Speaker 3:So that's how eFinancials was started.
Speaker 2:And apparently you did have that skill set. So because it seemed, you know where you're at today, are there in the financial, remote financial? I find that really interesting because you can basically do that anywhere, right, you're not geographically required to be in a certain area. Are there any myths or misconceptions about what you do that you can think of?
Speaker 3:I think the biggest one is that we run across. A lot of our clients come to us after some type of tax ordeal, right, where they're owing taxes, and they assume that the tax preparer also should be responsible for their bookkeeping. And that is not the case, right. So we talk about the four financial roles, which are the bookkeeper, the tax preparer, the tax planner and the CPA, and so we inform a lot of our clients that every bookkeeper is not a tax preparer and every tax preparer is not a bookkeeper. In fact, if the tax preparer is doing what they're supposed to do as far as a tax preparation, they should be charging you extra for bookkeeping or recommend you to a bookkeeper to help you get your financials organized. So all they will have to do is take the P&L, take the balance sheet and transfer those numbers onto the tax form. I think that's the biggest myth that we want to cross Is there like a conflict of interest?
Speaker 2:I guess is what I'm trying to think about. If you have somebody who's doing your bookkeeping and doing your taxes and doing this, I mean I guess it's better I'm guessing it's better to have checks and balances in place, having different people in those different roles.
Speaker 3:I would definitely say that in the nonprofit space, for sure, In the small business not so much only, because it would be better if whoever's managing or organizing your financials also, since they're already aware for tax filing purposes, because a lot of times, when they do have separate people doing it, the tax preparer is asking questions that the entrepreneur probably can't even explain. Right, unless they have those financials and, depending on who did the financials, that's also going to let them know yeah if they did it right.
Speaker 3:you know it's. Yes, it's best practice that you know they would do that. I would rather them pay extra to the taxpayer if they did offer bookkeeping than for them to try to wing it on their own without any knowledge, and they're subject to tax liability and paying taxes that they shouldn't have to pay.
Speaker 2:Which none of us want to do. Great, that's great.
Speaker 3:Outside of work. Sonia, what do you like to do for?
Speaker 2:fun. Well, I'm a full-time entrepreneur.
Speaker 3:So right now I'm a farmer but I love we have an amazing park. We have several parks in Memphis, but I love Shelby Farms. It's about 10, 15 minutes from my house and I love walking around the park where the lake is. It's about 10-15 minutes from my house. I love walking around the park where the lake is. It's always therapeutic for me. Also, outside of that, I just love road trips. My church is in Fayetteville, arkansas. We go there once a month. That's a good four and a half five-hour trip. Then one of my sons stays in Atlanta. So I just like taking that drive with no music on, maybe a podcast here and there, just to clear my mind and kind of reset.
Speaker 2:So travel and outside being outside. Yes, are you originally from Memphis? Yes, originally from Memphis, shelby County, right.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:I'm in East Tennessee, but again, your business being virtual is not an issue, not an issue at all. So let's change gears. Can you describe personally a hardship or a life challenge that you rose above and can now say because of it you're better and possibly stronger?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Making the decision to become a full-time entrepreneur after being in education for 20 years was definitely a challenge, because I was basically leaving comfort To take a risk, right? So, having to prepare for that. I let my you know boss and our board know, like a year in advance, that I was, you know, preparing to transition out and just having to go through that transition as we got closer to, you know, the end of the school year. That, closer to you know, the end of the school year, had an unexpected situation that happened to where I had to make a decision to leave before my tenure ended, because, you know, school's in June 30th, right? So, having a month, you know, where you thought you were going to have some income, you did not, that was one thing.
Speaker 3:And then on June 25th we had a real bad storm and we had a big old oak tree in our backyard and two of the branches of the tree fell on our house to where it severed where the chimney was. We had a big gaping hole in our living room. The insurance wouldn't pay to have the tree cut down. So all the money that had saved for the purpose of getting us back while I was, you know, working. You know, in the business, most of that was taken up because we had to get that tree cut down. So you have to do some pivoting. I had to, you know, take on some part time work just to kind of build ourselves back up. My husband was working at the time as well. So you just have to, you know, every day, just expect, you know, expect events to happen. But as entrepreneurs you're resilient. You just have to learn how to pivot and get things done.
Speaker 2:So and keep moving Got to keep moving.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm quite familiar with the whole tree situation. I was selling my house in North Carolina when I was moving to Tennessee and about a week before we put the house on the market we're planning to put the house on the market. We had a massive oak tree fall and take out four other massive oak trees in my front yard and none of it touched the house. But because it didn't hit any of the like a fence or the house, my insurance wouldn't wouldn't cover it either. And trees are not cheap to cut up. They're not cheap. So I feel you I get it.
Speaker 3:Right, especially during peak times. Yeah, they're not cheap.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, oh yeah. No, no, they're never cheap. Well, what's one thing? I know your time is precious, I don't want to take up too much more time, but could you tell our listeners one thing they should remember about GIP financials? Could?
Speaker 3:you tell our listeners one thing they should remember about GIP financials, one thing that I would love to let the listeners know what separates GIP from any other bookkeeping firm is that we believe in fundamental business finance education.
Speaker 3:70 percent of entrepreneurs don't have a bookkeeper or accountant what I call a trusted financial expert and of the 70%, 64% of entrepreneurs say I do my own bookkeeping, but I don't know what in the world I'm doing.
Speaker 3:So what we have discovered with our client interactions, we got to get back to the basics, and so we have a podcast called From Chaos to Clarity to where we talk about, um, the basics of bookkeeping, as well as we bring on entrepreneurs that have experienced transformation by having a bookkeeper, you know, on their team. And then also, starting in October, we're going to start an online community called GIP Academy to where we're going to be teaching fundamentals monthly, live teaching, quarterly one-to-one coaching, and we're also going to have an online library where all of our previous webinars and teachings will be in one space. And we're also going to have an online library where all of our previous webinars and teachings will be in one space and they're going to be in order so you can learn the stuff in a proper way. We're going to have a little rogue in the academy there, you go, there, you go.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's pretty exciting. So how can our listeners learn more about GIP Financials?
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. We definitely have a YouTube channel with tons of content, so just search for GIP Financials, just as it is on the virtual background up here. Second, we have a website, wwwgipfinancialscom, and also the GIP Academy. Information is on the website as well as social media. We're on Instagram GIP underscore financials, facebook GIP underscore financials, tiktok the money lady D-A money lady, and I'm also on LinkedIn under Sonja Jones.
Speaker 2:MoneyLady, d-a MoneyLady, and I'm also on LinkedIn under Sonja Jones, freshman CFO. Very good, Very good. Well, sonja, you don't know how much I appreciate you being on the show and your time. I'm sure our listeners are going to know more from listening to you about bookkeeping than they ever thought they didn't know. So I really do appreciate you being on the show and wish you and GIP financials all the best moving forward.
Speaker 3:Thank you Likewise. Thank you for having me on the show.
Speaker 2:Yes, ma'am, we'll have you back.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the good neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNP trycitiescom. That's gnptry-citiescom, or call 423-719-5873. Music.