Business is personal.
So often in the business world we hear “It’s a business decision – it’s not personal!” After years of working alongside people, supporting them in formalizing financial goals and helping them overcome financial challenges, I can honestly say that business is a very personal experience. Everything about business involves people. When things are about people, they’re personal.
Over the past few months, I’ve been spending a lot of my time working directly with clients on understanding how their actions impact their financials and how their financials impact their actions. These business conversations are incredibly personal. The conversations involve emotion and require sensitivity, care, and concern. These conversations are incredibly personal.
Businesses are founded on values, which are uniquely personal to founders. The values that I founded my business on are:
- Integrity
- Respect
- Trust
- Passion
- Joy
These values were personal to me as a business leader and are the foundation for our company’s decision making and direction. These values and the outcomes of our decisions are personal for our team and for our clients.
At the heart of business are people. Business is all about building relationships and about solving good problems with and for people. These relationships and interactions are personal.
What we see in our accounting and tax firm is that numbers are personal. We know that accounting is as much about people and actions as it is about numbers. As we support business owners with their accounting and tax, we see that the impact of their actions have financial consequences. We know that their actions always tie back to personal reasons and that the financial outcomes of their decisions have personal impacts.
Behind the numbers are people who are making decisions and taking risks for very personal reasons with very personal feelings attached to these.
In business, feelings matter. In business, intuition is important.
In business, everything is personal… especially accounting and tax.