Episode 65: Helping Entrepreneurs Face The Monster Under The Bed W/Melissa Broughton

My guest on today’s podcast is Melissa Broughton. Melissa is the founder of Busy Bee Advisors, a bookkeeping, accounting, and tax advisory firm for busy entrepreneurs and small businesses. What I love about Melissa is her own story of entrepreneurship. In this episode she shares about how she knew from a young age that she wanted to be an accountant and as an adult had a great career in accounting, but how eventually the long weeks and the requirement to ask for time off grew to be too much, so one day, while on vacation, she decided to quit her current job. She then shares a wild story, that I won’t ruin now, about how she was forced to take time to really dream about and build out what she wanted next and that was to launch her own business. Melissa and her husband now run a team of bookkeepers, accountants, and tax advisors and have found ways to save on average 30-40% in taxes for their clients. This episode is filled with great nuggets of wisdom for all entrepreneurs as well as practical bookkeeping tips. So with that introduction I hope you enjoy this episode of the Self-Employment Success Podcast with Melissa Broughton.

Transcript:

Leland Gross (00:01)

All right, welcome Melissa to the Self -Employment Success Podcast. Thank you so much for giving us your time and being here today.

Melissa, Busy Bee Advisors (00:08)

Thanks, Leland. It's good to be here.

Leland Gross (00:11)

I'm really excited about today's conversation. Obviously, before we hit record, I got to hear a lot about your story and I just think there's so many themes to this. just, you are such an epitome of an entrepreneur as well as you serve entrepreneurs and businesses. And so I just think you have a lot of great value to share to our listeners. So to get started, tell us about yourself personally as well as your business and where it stands today.

Melissa, Busy Bee Advisors (00:39)

Well, the personal side is my favorite side, right? So I've been married to my husband, that's a funny statement, but who is also my business partner for, we're just about to hit our 25th anniversary. It's been actually a pretty easy relationship. We get that question a lot of how do you guys make it work with work and.

Leland Gross (00:42)

You

Wow, congratulations.

Melissa, Busy Bee Advisors (01:06)

married and raising kids and I just got lucky and found a really good partner. married we have two boys, one is 23 and he is off living his best adult life in the Marine Corps in South Carolina and our youngest is 16 and still in high school. So we've got one at home and I personally am not looking forward to being an empty nester, but we know that it's.

Leland Gross (01:10)

Mmm.

Thank

Melissa, Busy Bee Advisors (01:32)

coming. So we are deep in the college tours and football season and all of that stuff. So yeah, our lives are pretty busy. And on top of that, we run a really busy tax and accounting firm based in Northern California, Busy Bee Advisors.

Leland Gross (01:52)

I love that it's a busy accounting firm and it's called Busy B. It's amazing. Great. So tell us a little bit about that business. So you provide bookkeeping and accounting services. Is there any specific type of business you like to work with? You know, what is that kind of looked like? How long has it been in business?

Melissa, Busy Bee Advisors (01:55)

Right, right.

So we started in, I started the firm in 2017 and we can kind of jump back to that in a second and how I got started. But we primarily work with small business owners. And if I were to look at our full portfolio of clients, we really touch on just about every industry that's out there. We have some service industry clients, we have some consultant clients, we work with a lot of therapists and mental health professionals.