Ep. 59: Danetha Doe - Entrepreneurial Mindset with Accounting Skills

Contact Danetha:

•  https://www.linkedin.com/in/danethadoe/
•  hello@moneyandmimosas.com 

Money & Mimosas: https://www.moneyandmimosas.com/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch Roshong. In this episode we will hear from the creator of Money and Mimosas Danetha Doe. Danetha is also a freelance writer for financial institutions, a consultant and a former accountant who now strives to help clients elevate their self-worth and their net worth. Keep listening to hear how this entrepreneur has excelled by taking leaps and maintaining a business savvy mindset. 

Adam: (00:33)

Danetha, I know you have a very interesting and wide-ranging background and I know some of that background includes accounting. Can you just give us an overview? 

Danetha: (00:47)

Absolutely. Well, thanks so much, Adam, for having me on. I do have a varied background and I think that that's becoming more and more common in all industries and also in the accounting space. My accounting background, it started in undergrad. I studied economics with a concentration in accounting. We didn't have a formal degree in accounting, so I just took all the classes I could within accounting and made it my informal concentration. After I graduated from undergrad, I went on to work for a home health care company and I worked in the accounts receivables department. Their accounts receivables, this was prior to companies moving to the cloud, so our accounting systems were all desktop legacy system and we had a lot of paper, a lot of invoices that were mailed out, invoices of checks that were mailed in for payments. And so my job was a lot of data entry and a lot of um, keeping track of all the paper. We had files upon files of papers. After that position that was in Indiana, I moved to California where I got another job working in the accounting department for a ski resort. And I started off being a billing coordinator. My background, well my previous job was in accounts receivable. So the role was similar in that I was managing the invoices for the catering and conference services department. And from being a billing coordinator, I moved up to being more of a staff accountants, helping them with cashflow and forecasting and other things that went along with making sure that their accounts receivables processes were in place. When I got into the role, we were about 180 days in aging accounts receivables and my job was to reduce that and I got that down to 30 days and that was my entire focus. After that role, I moved from the ski resort to the San Francisco Bay area where I am now. And my first position here was as a controller slash CFO for a small creative agency. And it was a really small company. So I wore both hats of being a controller and CFO. And a lot of my role was very much focused on accounts receivables. We had a lot of business, which was great, but our processes were not streamlined. And so we had cashflow challenges that were related to, you're not invoicing accurately on time. And so that was really my focus was to help that agency get that under wraps so that the cash was, we were in a healthier cast position. From there I was bit by the entrepreneurial bug. I was bit by the entrepreneurial bug then, but I knew from a young age that I always wants to run a business. So after that role, I just I had to start my own business doing bookkeeping for other small businesses. I focus in the beauty and fashion space and, and that's where my careers as an entrepreneur started. 

Adam: (03:45)

So, you know, being an entrepreneur, obviously you need to have a wide variety of expertise and knowledge to run your own business. So how did your background in accounting and the things that you were doing help you get into that entrepreneurial space? 

Danetha: (04:00)

It helped me tremendously. A lot of business owners do not have an accounting background. Certainly if you start a business as an accountant or a bookkeeper, you have that background. But the people that we serve don't necessarily have that background. And so my expertise in that space really helped me be able to build a business because I had a service that business owners needed. My skillsets outside of understanding different systems, doing the actual accounting work. Some of the skills that I picked up along the way of being an accountant were things like organization keeping on top of financial transactions. The paper, thankfully we're now evolved to using less paper and more cloud-base, but there's still some paper that goes back and forth. So being able to have a system in place to be able to keep track of all that information helped myself as a business owner and also helped my clients organization. As I mentioned, project management's huge. Also having an understanding of how cashflow works. I think as accountants we take that for granted. That's, for a lot of us it comes naturally to think about things in terms of net 30 net, net 60, how to balance the expenses with the cash going out. Something that I would do immediately with all my clients was to get them on a single day payout. Meaning one day out of the month was the only day that we sent payments out. So if they had recurring bills every month we would choose a date where those bills were paid. Usually it was the 18th or the 15th because of how their income would float in. It made sense from a cash perspective to do it usually the latter half of the month. So something like that as a really simple implementation. But for a lot of business owners, it's not something that even their mind, and here they are wondering why they're struggling with their cash, when it's a simple a process that can be implemented, in this case, just a single payout date to help them manage their cash flow and overall business operations. And so my background in accounting has helped me tremendously. 

Adam: (06:20)

That's just great to hear. Now, outside of the accounting, what was it like going from being in the corporate world, you know, doing all these different things to taking that leap of faith to be an entrepreneur? I can imagine that would probably be scary. Just, you know, going from a regular paycheck to your being the one running everything. 

Danetha: (06:37)

There was definitely, it was a mixed bag. I always wants to be an entrepreneur. I asked my parents for business cards for my eighth birthday. At the time I wanted to be a nail artist and so I've always wanted to be a business owner, so that leap from me was more of a homecoming, if you will. It was coming back to my, my true nature of being a creative and being a risk taker and carving out my own journey. With that said though, I do have my accounting side, which is very methodical and pragmatic and to your point about receiving a paycheck on a consistent basis to now I'm figuring out how that paycheck is going to come in and oftentimes it's not consistent, so that was, that's definitely a big part of the challenge with being an entrepreneur is realizing, Oh my gosh, the buck really does stop with me. What helps me with that transition was applying some of the things that I've learned in accounting. One of the things that I learned, that we all learn in this space, is you have to know your numbers. You have to know how much it co...