14
votes
Businesspeople of Tildes, what is your business?
That includes self-employed people and ex-businesspeople.
What do/did you do?
How do/did you make money? (Optional question: is/was it good money?)
Do/did you enjoy it?
I run a bookkeeping and contract CFO firm with my wife, focusing on wealthy individuals, investors, and tech startups. (It's the Bay Area, those are the only groups not treading water.) We maintain the financial records for said people and organizations, and provide expertise in running and maintaining the financial and operational aspects of running a corporation.
We sell our expertise and time to maintain said systems, so that the founders and CEO's can focus on the parts they're best at. It's decent money because of the high cost of living in the Bay Area; it'd be fantastic basically anywhere else other than LA or NYC.
I enjoy it sometimes. When I'm doing the same basic thing that I've done for the past 10 years it's not interesting or fun, and it's so important to get it right that I can't do it on auto-pilot either. On the other hand, when I get a new client with a complex system or unique challenges I'm just over the moon. I recently got a client who controls or manages a dozen corporations in a web of real estate deals, and I found that the prior bookkeeper was not up to the task of making sure that the transfers, loans and ownership percentages were appropriately tracked across the books for all of them. That's been a delightful puzzle/Gordian knot.