EP420: Lora Lonesberry - Future Thinking: Building A Business Beyond AI

Ad Read: As we go forward, especially as AI is hitting the ground, is that, you know, if you want to stay viable in your bookkeeping business, you're going to have to make that shift and make your customers understand that they do need you and value you and your thought process that AI can't, can't do for them. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with With your host Michael Palmer, listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fantastic one. Our guest is the owner of Positive Statements. She is a pure bookkeeping licensee, a race car driver, and a former pastry chef. Laura Lonesbury, welcome back to the podcast. Well, thank you for having me. It's great to have you. And as we were talking a little bit in the, in the conversation before the show, which was, what have you been doing? We, you were on almost like 18 months ago, July of 2022. And it seemed like months ago when I saw your name come up to be on the show again, and I thought, oh, we didn't talk that long ago, but it's been 18 months. Lots happens in 18 months. So what's going on with you? A lot does happen. We restructured the business a little bit, hired some more staff, and during COVID the largest impact from our business was the clients that we had in retail that was in Vancouver. So that caused us to close our Vancouver location. So this year we are opening it back up again and restructuring ourselves to service clients both on Vancouver Island, BC, and Vancouver City Central.

Wow. Wow. And so that, that would have been quite something when you have to close offices and and then restart? What's— are you doing things differently? I'd love to know, you know, it's kind of almost like having that retake, right? Not that you'd want to retake like that, but you have a retake of to, okay, we're going to reestablish. Are you, what are you doing? And what are you thinking that's different? Well, we, um, I know you've heard of the A2A program with, uh, Lisa. Um, so we, we implemented that. And, and restructured and we took on the Pure Workflow systems to help organize the business and track the staff better. Um, or like track what they,