Clay Clark Client Testimonials | “My Name Is Amy Baltimore & I’m a CPA In Tennessee. Right Away I Started to See Results! It’s Been a Great Help to My Business!”+ See Thousands of Clay Clark Testimonials At ThrivetimeShow.com

Audio Transcription

My name is Amy Baltimore and I am a CPA in Covington, Tennessee. I’ve been working with the Thrive team now for about a year. One of the first things that they did was to update my website and my search engine optimization. I prior had a website but I was not being found on Google and all of my new business was coming through referrals from friends, family, etc. And right away I started to see results.

People were calling and coming in saying that they found me on Google. They just Googled CPA near me and there I was at the top of the page. And so it’s been a great help to my business and Thrive 15 has been a great help to my business.

All right, Thrive Nation. On today’s show, I’m going to introduce you to a wonderful CPA who we’ve had the opportunity to work with over these past few years. I really do want you to hear her success story because she’s been a great client to work with and she’s a great woman. Amy Baltimore, welcome onto the Thrive Time Show.

How are you?

I’m good, thank you. How are you?

I’m fired up to interview you today. So I want to ask you, having worked with you from 2017 to now, how is your life different now, 2023 versus 2027?

Well, in 2017, I was not paying myself anything and I was having to borrow money to make ends meet. trying to cover payroll and get the work done and train all these employees because we were so unorganized and inefficient. It was, it’s just looking back on it now, it was a miserable experience. And I just looked at year over year from last year, I am down last year, from this time last year, I’m down 12 employees because we have become more efficient.

My net income is up January, February of last year to this year, it’s up $38,000. My take-home pay is up $30,000, and our equity in the company is up over $120,000.

Amen.

That’s great.

I know.

So Amy, I guess for anybody out there that’s thinking about hiring you, who’s a good fit

for you there, ma’am?

So I work with small businesses, partnerships, self-proprietors, S-ports, things like that. We’re kind of becoming more niched into the contractors area, home builders, subcontractors, flippers, roofers, things like that. And we are, we’re working with them about getting their finances under control, their daily work schedules under control,

and making sure that they have the money that’s coming out of the business to support their lifestyle.

And who do you think is a good fit for us? Somebody out there looking for business coaching, who do you think is a good fit?

Uh, well, I think I was a good fit. Yeah. For one. But you know, you have to, it’s a lot of work. You have to be able to put in the work and the time and listen to the coaches and listen to

what they’re recommending and actually follow through and do it. Amy, it’s been an honor serving you over these past six years. I’m so glad you’re in a great spot, and it’s just wonderful to hear that, and that’s why we do it. So people out there can prove that you’re not a hologram. What is your website people can go to if they’re looking for you?

It’s amybaltimorecpa.com. amybaltimorecpa.com.

And how long have you been a CPA?

Oh, probably about 30 years, I guess, by now.

Really?

Yeah. What made you want to become a CPA?

You know, I grew up on a farm in Kansas, and so my dad had me helping him with his accounting work, and I just kind of moved on into that through college.

And where is Amy Baltimore at CPA.com located? Where’s your business located?

We are in Covington, Tennessee, which is just about an hour north of Memphis.

And I know it’s been many years, but how did you first originally hear about us?

From another one of your clients, actually. Really?

And what were you kind of needing the most help with at the time that you first met us there?

My business was just kind of out of control. We were growing faster than I could keep up. I couldn’t get my, I couldn’t get employees, I couldn’t get them trained, we were unorganized. It was chaos.

And how long ago was that?

Do you remember how long ago that was? I don’t want to say it was maybe 2017.

Okay, yeah.

And so you have grown and a lot of great things are happening and you’re going to be taking your business into a completely new level, a new direction here very soon. You’re offering some new services. Can you kind of talk about some of the growth that you’ve experienced since 2017 to now?

Yeah, yeah.

So when I first came on, I was just your typical CPA. We were doing tons of tax returns and a lot of work, low profit margins, a lot of stress. And then we went through COVID and the IRS shut down and the chaos with that. And my clients kind of started struggling and I started realizing that there was more

that I could be offering to help my clients and to help myself actually. And I was working with Derek at the time. And so we started kind of re-organizing the business and I became more of a valuable asset to my clients and to myself actually. And I started hiring better, more qualified people, and it’s just all of a sudden it started to come together and I was more organized and more efficient. And so, you know, things are going great right now.

And what are all the services that you provide at amybaltimorecpa.com?

So we’ve moved away from just the individual tax returns and kind of like the retail side of the practice, and we are more into what we call CFOs for small businesses. And so we don’t, the larger companies that can hire a CFO and handle their finances and things, but we work with the smaller businesses that can’t really hire a CFO, but they can share one.

And are you working with clients in all 50 states or are there certain states you’re focusing in on?

No, we work across the country. So we have less clients now with larger profit margins and so we don’t work in as many states as we did with the tax returns, but we’ve got clients in Utah and Idaho and Florida and Georgia, so yeah.

So if people want to hire you or learn more about what you do, how do they get a hold of you? What does that process look like?

Well, so they can get on my website and see my phone number. And there’s also a little link there where they can contact me, and we will give you a call back.

OK, so.

One of the perks with this new business model that we have now is they have more access to me. And so once they sign on, I have three different packages, if they sign on with the middle or the larger package, I get my direct phone number and I will pick up the phone when they call.

Got it. And so you’ve grown the business quite a bit. If you go back and kind of go back to 2017, we first met you. What kind of changes did we help you to implement or what kind of changes did you make in the business?

Well, we got more organized for one thing and probably the biggest asset that we came upon was the morning huddle. My employees love the morning huddle. We get together, we talk about our burning fires and we train. We find things that people have questions on and we drop what we’re doing right there

and we train on it. And so the clients, their employees, I mean, they’re more involved in the business. They are more hands-on now and they’ve started training each other, which is pretty awesome to see. It’s not all falling on me now.

Amen. Now, what kind of, for people out there who are listening, who are thinking about becoming clients of ours, I know we’ve helped you a lot with the websites. Can you kind of talk to the listeners out there about maybe some of the work we’ve done with you on the website or marketing materials?

So, when I first came on in 2017, I had created my own website through one of those canned programs where you just go on and change your name and boom, you have a website. So you guys helped make it a little more professional, more customized to what I was doing. And then over the last year, we’ve actually customized it even more. And then you’ve also helped me with the search engine optimization, which has been huge.

Are you getting more leads now? Or how many more leads are you getting now as far as leads that you used to be getting before we started working with you guys?

I used to not get any leads from my website. Now all my leads come through the website. We’re to the point now where we’re turning people down. They Google me and I’m at the top of the search, and so they call me and I have to turn them away.

We’re maxed out.

You know, and our whole thing, much like yours, is we only work with 160 clients, and so it’s kind of a thing where I don’t want to waste anyone’s time who’s not a good fit, but I also want to help people that are a good fit. How would you describe how the business coaching has helped you since 2017 to grow your business?

Oh, it tells me how and who exactly I want for clients, and who’s a better fit for me. And so we’ve done our immutable laws where we can determine what kind of clients we want. And we were able to weed out the ones that just were not a good fit for us. And now we have hovered into the type of clients

that we want to work with now. Our maximum that we’re gonna take on now is 25. And because we do a lot of work with the clients that we have, but we do, we want, we want small business owners who are serious about, you know, making a successful business and not just the business, but their own lifestyle, but their families and their own personal time. And then we also help with their financials, their investments, and retirement planning, succession planning, things like that.

My name is Ron Curtis, and I own Curtis Music Academy in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So we are in the top of SEO in the keywords piano lessons Tulsa, Tulsa piano lessons, piano lessons in Tulsa, piano lessons, and we are currently working on getting in the top of Google with guitar lessons and those keywords. Yeah, the biggest impact this has made on our business is that when people are searching on Google, they’ll come straight to our website and fill out a form to sign up for their first $1 lesson.

And so actually, although we continue to advertise and reach students that way, it’s really awesome that we can passively receive these students through the hard work that we’ve had over the past few months and receive those students to just come in and knock on our doors and we didn’t even pay for it.

So it’s good.

So it took about, for piano lessons, it took about six months to start seeing the effects of it starting to top out on Google. of it starting to top out on Google. But now we’re number one, so it’s great.