Learning Doesn’t Stop When You Graduate

As school buses start to travel our streets it shows that Knoxville is back to school. Which reminds me that I need to take the next steps in my education plan. One of the things we believe at Two Roads is that the more we know, the better decisions we can make.

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Which helps build our business and give our partners the best bookkeeping services possible.

Every quarter I like to do the following:

• Call or meet with another bookkeeping business owner. We share thoughts and analysis on the industry, client questions and discuss what’s working for us and what isn’t.

• Long lunch or breakfast with a business mentor. I’m fortunate to have a few relationships with successful business owners that I can lay out our largest challenges to and get great advice on what they see and how they’d approach it. I always leave these meetings with new ideas.

• Strategic review retreat. I’ll take my business partner Chad and our top staff up to the mountains for a day and spend it discussing the next 6 months, 1 year and 5 years of our business. This not only helps us plan for our hiring or software needs, but also helps us get excited about the next couple months in the business.

• Read a book a month. I try to read a book written by a business owner, a book about startups or growing companies and a book that helps me understand a new industry. These topics all help me see our business from a different perspective.

I never try to implement everything I learn in a quarter, but I do test out ideas that I learn for a couple weeks or a couple months. A lot of the testing fails to work for us. No business is exactly the same, but I do want to learn and adapt as I can and so should you.

Some of the best ideas we’ve implemented have changed the way we do business for the better. What’s on your education plan this quarter?