Today we’d like to introduce you to Shawn Kontrec.
Hi Shawn, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My story started while I was in college. As a kid, I had watched my father, back home in France, thrive with his small business and thought it would be so fulfilling to work for myself too one day. My desire to start a business came alive as an upperclassmen at Minnesota State University Moorhead. Unfortunately for someone with no start-up capital like myself, I needed to get to a place where I could justify taking time and money to work on building something of my own.
Fast-forward a few years, I was working in commercial banking as a small-business loan underwriter. It was during that time that I had direct exposure to local entrepreneurs and their small business financial statements and witnessed the very real need for proper and organized bookkeeping. Throughout my time as a commercial loan underwriter, I made the decision that the imposter syndrome I had experienced up until then was overshadowed by a desire to help small business owners (people I had always admired and aspired to be).
By taking over their financial books and ultimately giving them “la belle vie” (in French, “the good life”) they sought when they started their business, I am able to fulfill my professional mission and goal of having my own business by using the skills I have.
Many entrepreneurs can’t afford to take a night off due to books that were unfortunately deprioritized when business started to grow. This is a great problem to have, I might add, but it doesn’t make it easy for a business owner to comfortably sit down and relax when their neglected books are waiting for them on Monday morning.
At Belle Vie Books, we serve service-based small businesses to allow their owners to be able to take a break from work and truly let go, knowing the menial admin tasks such as bookkeeping are taken care of well and in an auditable fashion. At the core of our values, we believe the American dream of small business ownership and being able to pass it on to our children one day is still very real. We want to help that dream materialize as it is ours as well.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There have definitely been challenging decisions I have had to make and I have had to learn many lessons, requiring much humility on my part.
A lesson I have learned that comes to mind includes figuring out what client was NOT a desirable or appropriate client for my firm. A handful of interested clients reached out and some even signed my engagement letter, but I realized at some point that they were going to result in a problematic level of involvement from me or unrealistic expectations from the owner. Often, those clients may look like business revenue growth, but I have found those accounts to actually create a much higher cost to my firm (in time cost, labor cost, the opportunity cost of not focusing on steady, monthly current accounts etc.) than an increase in monthly revenue.
Another learning curve for me as a business owner calling my own shots has been navigating and filtering through countless marketing offers – some legitimate ones and some resulting in very little, if any, increase in leads or closed-won accounts – in exchange for high costs. It’s easy to fall for a very logical-sounding business advertising method thinking I can generate a different caliber client; there are many of these out there. In reality, focusing on word-of-mouth marketing, website traffic through free marketing (Facebook posts, etc.) and especially client referrals are going to be incredibly more valuable.
We’ve been impressed with Belle Vie Books, LLC, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
My business is named after a French concept called La Belle Vie (in English – “The happy (or good) life”). As a dual French and American citizen, I have both my cultures scream opposing views on what the Good Life is (or should be).
The US commonly-accepted view of achieving La Belle Vie is prosperity from hard work, innovation and productivity, unfortunately at the expense of a healthy work-life balance, a family-first-and-work-second mentality and a genuine ability to “check out” at 5pm and while on vacation.
The view the French most-often adopt on living out La Belle Vie is the one described in the movie A Good Year starring Russell Crowe and Marion Cotillard in which a high-powered banker in a very high-paced lifestyle inherits a vineyard in the South of France wine region of Provence. To put things very simply, he discovers the joy of slowing down with a glass of wine and appreciating life’s simplicities. Obviously, Crowe’s character inherits a vineyard so he doesn’t work towards that lifestyle freedom, but the concept of La Belle Vie is captured well here. He learns to balance a high stress job with metaphorically clocking out at 5pm, making himself unavailable outside of business hours and enjoying the fruits of his labor without feeling like he needs to perpetually keep going.
Both cultural views of what La Belle Vie means are blended into what I want my clients to experience from my firm, Belle Vie Books, LLC. My ultimate goal is to cover all bookkeeping admin tasks so the business owners who hire us can mentally “clock out” after they are done practicing whatever craft they excel at. I want to fully take on the often-bothersome burden of managing a client’s QuickBooks file and any other related bookkeeping project so they can feel supported enough to live out their inner Russell Crowe in their metaphorical French vineyard.
Examples of how we do that include the complete takeover of a client’s QuickBooks file, which includes account reconciliations, expense and income tracking and categorization, production of clean and auditable financial statements, ad-hoc project options (as-needed), payroll-related work and many more. Visit www.belleviebooks.com to find out more about our story and what we do!
How do you define success?
I will define success not so much by how success is achieved, but rather what success looks like in practice. To put it in rougher terms, what are the “symptoms” of success. How does a successful person live their life.
Success in my book is measured by how many systems a person has in place to run his/her life (I mean this in every possible way – socially, professionally, medically, financially, spiritually, physically, emotionally etc.).
I define a system here as something that is often automated or that is put in place with the intention of mitigating risk, making something work more-efficiently, removing a nuisance from a process, removing ambiguity, or adding clarity or guidance.
Most-importantly, I think a system put in place by a successful person or business is most-often done in the form of another person. By that, I mean the delegation of ownership and management of a task, a segment of business, a team or a whole organization. I have often heard people paraphrase Andrew Carnegie and Steve Jobs who famously discussed hiring people smarter than them to get a job done with the best outcome possible.
In a very small scale example of something we did at Belle Vie Books that resulted in success was the addition of a contract bookkeeper to my team. She brought a high level of knowledge and expertise and contributed to a significant reduction in my feelings of inadequacy and work overcapacity.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.belleviebooks.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/belleviebooks_bookkeeping/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100086350786084
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/belleviebooks-llc/
