Business Spotlight: Counting Success

 A Queen City bookkeeping and accounting venture that began in its owner’s home garage is tracking toward its fifth straight year of revenue growth.

Coming off roughly $520,000 in revenue in 2023, the six-employee company is on pace for around $700,000 this year, said Springfield Bookkeeping LLC owner Michael Wilson.

“It’s a respectable growth year, not overwhelming,” he said of the projected 35% increase. “It’s all been word of mouth and referrals. The name being easy – you look for bookkeeping in Springfield – that’s our name. That was just, I guess, dumb luck.”

Of course, it’s more than a simple, easily remembered name that builds business at Springfield Bookkeeping, Wilson says. The company, which moved out of Wilson’s home in 2020 and is now located at 3021 E. Cherry St., Ste. 110, provides outsourced bookkeeping, accounting and tax preparation services for small-to-medium-sized businesses. Referring to the venture as a boutique firm, Wilson says providing high quality customer service is paramount.

“Our whole model is kind of predicated on getting long-term sustainable, recurring relationships with clients,” he says, noting approximately 85% of the company’s work involves monthly bookkeeping services. That includes managing the client’s QuickBooks file, payroll management and bill payment assistance.

Wilson estimated around 10% of Springfield Bookkeeping’s revenue stems from income tax and business tax preparation. The remainder is from what he refers to as renovation projects, which entail cleaning up a company’s book of business.

Solo start
The company’s origin traces back to the summer of 2019 when Wilson and his wife, Katelyn, received the news that their then-10-week-old daughter, Landry, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder. Called alternating hemiplegia of childhood, the neurodevelopmental disorder is characterized by repeated episodes of weakness or paralysis that may affect one side of the body or the other or both sides of the body at once, according to the National Association of Rare Disorders. AHC is estimated to occur in approximately one in 1 million births.

“At the time, that was kind of the impetus for me starting a business because we decided, given that diagnosis, that it would be best for my wife to stay home,” he says, noting Katelyn was working part time at Mercy as an outpatient pediatric physical therapist.

Wilson was then working full time as the operations director at Hill City Church. But he also was helping some of the small-business owners in the church with their bookkeeping, leading him to form an LLC and set up a desk to work out of his garage.

“I would say self-taught,” Wilson says of his accounting skills, adding he earned a bachelor’s in criminal justice administration from Columbia College. “I had a couple of accountants that were part of the church that helped me understand what was going on with the financials, but that was just kind of part of my job there. I wore a lot of hats.”

Recognizing his limitations in financial expertise, Wilson says he made his first hire toward the end of 2020 and built up a big enough book of business that allowed him to focus full time on Springfield Bookkeeping.

“We have a (certified public accountant) on staff now. We have somebody with 30 years of corporate accounting experience, somebody with almost 20 years of church accounting experience,” he says, adding he and the staff all maintain QuickBooks Pro Advisor and Xero certifications. “So now I’m doing very little accounting, even though I feel like I know enough. I’m just managing the business.”

Springfield Bookkeeping has nearly 40 clients, including Artistree Pottery LLC, Affordable Acres LLC, Throughline Architecture LLC, and restaurants The Wheelhouse LLC and Beaks Bar and Grill.

Brian Rapier is owner of Affordable Acres, a Springfield home-based land investment company. He’s been a client since 2019, adding the firm’s work for him includes creating his company’s profit and loss statements and balance sheets every month.

“Some of it is just going in and helping me understand profit and loss statements and balance sheets at a level I can make decision on,” Rapier says. “It’s one thing to see the numbers and it’s another to kind of understand how decisions on what you can potentially make with the business may or may not impact those numbers for the positive.”

The bookkeeping firm is very flexible, and Rapier says he was impressed by the staff’s desire to learn more about his business to better serve him.

“They’re very professional in the way they work with me. They are extremely responsive,” he says. “Bookkeeping is not really a minute by minute need to know answers, but whenever I have a question, they’re extremely responsive.”

On the rise
As Springfield Bookkeeping continues to expand its office footprint – the firm has been in its 1,500-square-foot Cherry Street space since August 2023 – Wilson says he’s being intentional in his growth strategy. He’s been slowly adding staff as his office sizes have grown, first moving his business out of the house to the Holland building downtown, then to Plaza Towers before his latest location.

Wilson also launched Rise Accounting & Consulting LLC in 2022, which offers services specifically designed for churches. He says its roughly dozen clients include Hill City Church, All Saints Anglican Church and Hope City Church in Joplin.

“Right now, we just share employees between the two companies, but the long-term vision is that they would be separate and independent of one another,” he says, adding that would include another office location. “We’re just trying to hit some revenue targets to try to make that sustainable.”

Professional goals aside, the father of four says he isn’t losing sight of what matters most to him.

“I know there’s a real possibility that I’ve left a lot of money on the table because I’m not really willing to sacrifice family time. I work 40 to 50 hours a week and I go home,” he says. “With four girls, I want to be there for them.”