Mentoring
Today marks the day that my 2nd high school senior employee has left Gundersons Bookkeeping and is heading off to college. I hired my first high schooler at the beginning of 2015. A good friend of mine asked me as a favor to interview the girl. I didn’t think that I needed any help, but I immediately liked the girl and hired her on the spot. I looked forward to my high schooler coming in each day. I enjoyed our talks and conversations. She always had intelligent questions about life, business, and why I do things the way I do. My first high schooler was named Dani, a student at Texas A&M, who has just finished her first year of college, while working. When she left a year ago, I cried. I never realized how much I enjoyed mentoring her. About six months ago I received a text message from her telling me about her first accounting class at college and how she felt prepared for it because of everything I taught her while she worked for me. I hope that after she gets her CPA, that maybe, just maybe, she will come back to Gundersons Bookkeeping and manage the office for me.
I realized I missed mentoring, and sought out the high school counselor and asked her to “find me another Dani.” Within a few weeks, she recommended a sweet girl by the name of Kennedy. Today was Kennedy’s last day with us. Kennedy says she learned a lot from her time with us and I pray that she is right. During Kennedy’s time with us, we were in a constant state of change. It’s called growing pains. A constant struggle with the blessing of getting new clients, taking on more work load, switching over to the cloud and going paperless. Then training & convincing your existing clients on how to use the new technology to make both of our lives easier. It was a lot of trial and error on how to better our company within for that we can better serve our clients to be able to handle the growth. During this time not only were we switching over to the Cloud and other new technology, my first employee and Office Manager, Stephanie had to relocate to LA. While Stephanie still works for us, we had to learn how to better communicate and refigure the workflow process within the office and come up with a web-based solution for projects outstanding. Kennedy truly had to go with the flow during all of these changes and she adapted well along with the rest of us on improving our systems within the company. I will admit, this last year has been a difficult one, but I really think the majority of the kinks are work out and as long as everyone is using the tools within the company, everything works smoothly. I wish Kennedy the best of luck at Texas A&M and I pray she survives her first year as an engineer major. Yes, Kennedy, I will miss you.
Kennedy took on the task of finding me my 3rd high schooler to replace herself. Brianna has been with us for 2 weeks now and she also seems like a sweet girl. I haven’t gotten to spend too much time with her yet, but I hope that this will be another good mentoring opportunity for the both of us.
I highly recommend that any and all business owners should take the time to find a student that wants to have a job, maybe wants to go into business, or your given career, and pour into them. If anything, you are teaching these young adults to have responsibility, a purpose, life skills, and maybe just to have another adult to look up to or to talk to other than their parents. Not only does it help out the student, but it also changes and improves yourself.
This is myself, Kennedy, and Olivia – taking Kennedy out for dinner on her last day of work.