Linda Artesani launches a 7-week Qubi Community mentorship program. Stephanie, with 40 years in accounting, is starting her own QuickBooks Online bookkeeping practice and does hand-stitched paper art. Linda, an accountant and yoga teacher, runs her own bookkeeping business and emphasizes the program's collaborative, peer-to-peer approach.
Chapters
Hey, Stephanie, thank you so much for coming. I'm Linda Artesani. I'm one of the admins for the Qubi Community Live group. And we just started a mentorship program in the community to help each other, right? We have a big motto, together we all succeed, and this is a great segue to that. I think we're the first ones doing the mentorship, so I am going to give We're going to go through the steps. So there's a 7-week program, 7 steps. We only know the first one, which is introducing ourselves and telling ourselves— telling each other a little bit about each other. And Stephanie has a cool and awesome story. So I'm going to hand it off to you, Stephanie, and you can tell us who you are, where you're from, and why you want to be in the mentorship program.
Sounds good. Thank you, Linda. I guess to start with, I have about 40 years experience in accounting, mostly accounts receivable and office management. I, for the last couple years, I have worked for The Right Return. It's a company locally here. I'm in Fairport, New York, which is outside Rochester, up in snowy upstate. And my nephew owns the company and he's going in a different direction. So he offered me to take over the company and I jumped at the chance because I love accounting and bookkeeping and I love the clients that we have and that kind of thing. So I'm actually officially tomorrow I'm out on my own.
Woo!
So I'm really excited. I've been using QuickBooks exclusively since working for The Right Return, so I'm pretty familiar with that. But I have a need. The reason I joined the mentorship program is because I'm looking for someone that— who I can ask questions that run a little bit deeper than the knowledge I have or that I can Google the answer. That's why I was happy to find the Facebook community. There's so much information out there. I'm so excited. The other thing is I want to build my business. I want to add clients. And I know that's a hot topic on the— in the group, so I'm looking forward to learning that. The other part of my story is I'm an artist. Besides doing all that office work for so many years, I've always sort of been an artist, and that's really what I've been focusing on for the last few years. I'm a paper artist, and my specialty is stitching, hand stitching designs on paper. Let's see, can you see my—
yeah, a little bit.
You can see that a little bit. You can see all the paper in the background behind me. My office and studio is the same thing. So I'm sort of pushing that to the side now, and I'm really excited about this new endeavor, and that's, that's where I am.
It really is an exciting endeavor when you think about it. You're leaving your regular full-time job, is that what you're doing?
Yeah, yep.
Oh, that's scary. I can remember back to that day. But you know what, it's fun, exciting, and you've got a great mindset over it. And it's really cool that you've got that left brain, right brain thing happening with the artistic side that most of us accountants are very square. We only have that, you know, analytical brain. I can tell you I'm one of those people. I'm not very artistic. But yeah, that's really cool because that's, it's kind of fun. And the thing about the mentoring group, I mean, I can tell you a little bit about myself. I've been an accountant for over 20 years and I've owned my business for 20 years in June. And I guess, I guess I shouldn't say I'm that square because I'm also a yoga teacher. So that's my fun, like, little side job that I do that to help others other than doing this kind of stuff. But I think with the mentorship program, maybe people by watching us, they'll be able to see, okay, this isn't as scary because some people might sit back and say, gee, I'm not a mentor. I don't know everything. And you don't have to know everything. We're going to learn from each other, which is the point of the whole program. And the fact that you've got obviously a beautiful talent to be able to make something that pretty. I think that even just working through, like we had talked off camera about going to niching out the business, and you clearly have a specialized knowledge of artists and working with artists and knowing their pain points. So I think that's definitely somewhere where you could kind of navigate your business to, as I'm doing with the law firms. And, you know, we'll grow and figure this all out together over this next 7 weeks. It'll probably be a lot longer that we'll be able to communicate, but I'm glad that For the first person, I got someone who already knows accounting for a lot of years. Have you used QuickBooks Online mostly or desktop?
Yes, online. Online.
So you're mostly— so you know online. Perfect. Because that's my— I only do online now. Yeah. Great program. There's so many apps. Hopefully maybe people will even jump in if they've got some ideas that can share it in this post would be helpful. But I am so happy to meet you. And I'm really excited for this next few, few weeks together and We'll just grow together and blossom.
I'm too— I think it's a good match and I'm really excited.
I do too. I don't know, I was just drawn to your face in the little picture and I'm like, I'm picking her. So there's other people on there right now that need— they're asking for mentorship. So if you're here and you're watching and you're thinking, oh, I don't know if I can do this, go for it. Just try it, right? If it works out perfectly and you can learn from each other, that's the point of the mentorship program. So I'm hoping that this will maybe encourage people to jump in and maybe be a mentor. Or if they're not going to be a mentor, if they want to learn and maybe they're just starting out in business, become— be— try to be mentored in the group and, and just watch us through the weeks and see how it goes. So thank you again, Stephanie, for being open to being on video. Thank you so much for being in the program.
