How a Weekend Side Hustle Became a 10-Person Firm She Never Meant to Build

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Meet Heather.

"Believe it or not, not all of us went into business to be millionaires."

Heather runs an accounting firm in Moore County, North Carolina. 12 years into the profession, she had a comfortable corporate job and zero plans to leave it.

Then, about 4 years ago, she started freelancing on weekends.

One client wanted Power BI dashboards, and a food truck needed its books done. Nothing she couldn't knock out on a Sunday afternoon.

Then one person told two people. Who told two more. Who told two more.

Pretty soon the side job outgrew her weekends. So she hired her first employee, Trisha, a semi-retired pro who wanted a part-time remote gig. Trisha did the work, Heather took a small cut, and everybody was happy.

The day job stayed put.

Then 2 solo accountants in her county passed away right at the start of tax season. Hundreds of local clients suddenly had nowhere to go, in a place already short on accountants.

So Heather made a call: take a 3-month leave, do the returns, hire one more person, then head back to corporate.

That's not what happened. Those clients told 10 more people, who told 10 more. By the time the dust settled she had "a whole dang firm," and the math on going back stopped making sense.

Late last year she joined our Growth Boardroom to get help scaling operations.

Here's what happened next.

Heather sat down with her Boardroom coach, Carter, and laid out a goal she thought was ambitious: add about $100K in revenue this year, same as last year. Manageable. Reasonable.

Carter told her she was thinking way too small, by a factor of 5.

"I believe my exact words were, that sounds exhausting," she said.

So he made it his mission to change her mind. The firm is now tracking well past her original number, with the bigger targets in reach.

The lesson: growth rarely asks permission. When it shows up at your door, you still have to decide what to do with it.

In partnership with SoFi

And speaking of things showing up when you least expect it…

Let’s say you finally stumble upon the perfect deal:

The laundromat with the absentee owner, the HVAC company whose founder wants out, or the second location you need to grow your business to the next level.

But there’s a catch: you need more capital.

This is the moment you’ve been dreading.

Everything checks out on paper and you’re ready to pull the trigger… but you’re short on cash.

And traditional lenders wants 6 weeks of diligence, a stack of paperwork, and a piece of your soul before they'll even call you back.

This where a lot of good owners give up.

So here's something you should look into - SoFi Small Business Loans.

SoFi built their small business loans for the kind people who read this newsletter: solopreneurs and small operators, under 10 employees, under [$5M] in revenue.

What you're looking at:

Your business moves fast, so you need financing that keeps pace.

Check your eligibility, see your choices, and then decide.

SoFi keeps everything clear, so there’s no fine print you only find out about later.

See your options here: sofi.com/Codie

It only takes a few minutes to see your options, and it won't affect your credit score.

If the only thing standing between you and being an owner is capital, it’s worth looking into.

Heather has never run an ad. Not one.

And she's not one to talk herself up. So why do the referrals keep coming?

She takes the unglamorous work other firms shy away from: sales tax, business and personal property tax, and year-round advisory instead of once-a-year tax prep.

Heather also does something people desperately need and can't easily find. So when she knocks it out of the park, they can't help but spread the word.

"I don't really need to advertise at this rate," she said.

The lesson: word of mouth isn't luck. It's what happens when you're reliably useful in a way the competition isn't. Be the someone worth mentioning, and you'll earn more attention than your competition can buy.

When the flood of new business hit, Heather's instinct was to find one more person like Trisha and keep doing most of the admin herself.

The Boardroom pushed back.

Carter and Alex told her to hire bottom-level tasks first, and to write job descriptions that made the right people self-select before they ever applied.

She made her first non-accounting hire this year, an operations person, and built a real job description and a 30/60/90 plan around the role.

"I'd never had one of those in a job," she said.

And that's the point. What gets measured gets managed, progress included.

The lesson: don't hand off the work you're best at and cling to the busywork. Offload the bottom of your task list first. And write the posting so the wrong people rule themselves out.

Want help scaling the part of your business you're worst at?

On July 15th, I’m hosting a free workshop to go over the 5 growth levers you can pull to accelerate your growth.

Together, we’ll diagnose what's actually holding you back. So you can find your real constraint instead of guessing and fixing the wrong thing.

Click below to save your seat and get a reminder.

Accountants know money.

It's everything else that's the blind spot.

Heather can run a forensic P&L in her sleep, and plenty of owners would envy that kind of financial fluency.

Marketing and sales? Different story.

"They'll talk about your ideal customer avatar, and I still can't succinctly tell you what mine is. They'll talk about building your sales funnel. I couldn't really tell you what that is either."

Her word for where she's at: white belt.

And that's fine. You only get into trouble when you pretend to know more than you do.

The lesson: the skills that built your business usually aren't the ones that scale it. Naming what you don't know is step one.

There's nothing wrong with romanticizing ownership. It's pretty great.

But the grind is real.

Year one was a 20-hour week and golf on Tuesdays. This year she works 7 days a week, and she'll tell you straight: "Honestly, right now my life kind of sucks."

She caught the flu in the middle of tax season.

In bed, deadline looming, and the person who was supposed to join the tax team had to be let go for not pulling their weight, too late to replace.

So she borrowed her husband's special-operations phrase: "You just have to embrace the suck."

The lesson: the hard part isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's the toll booth. Most people quit at the booth, but real owners pay the price and keep driving.

Ask Heather what she's proudest of, and she doesn't reach for a number.

She hires the overlooked.

Career changers.

The semi-retired.

Military spouses like her, some still stationed overseas.

New moms who couldn't find their way back into the workforce.

People who just need a little flexibility to provide for their family.

She knows that wall personally, because early in her marriage she had job offers pulled once employers learned she was a military spouse.

So now she builds the thing she once needed. "Being able to offer jobs to people who really deserve them but were overlooked has been my greatest pleasure building this business."

The lesson: the money scoreboard isn't the only one worth watching. Ownership gives you the power to make an impact in ways a P&L can't measure. How you use it is up to you.

Heather still plans to play golf on Tuesdays, and she still misses the old corporate job now and then.

She's not trying to become a millionaire, and she'll say so out loud in a room full of people chasing exactly that.

She wants to pay her bills, own her work, take care of her people, and take the occasional trip.

Turns out that's its own kind of rich. Because you don't have to be a millionaire to be wealthy.

- Team Contrarian

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