“Love what you do, share it, and bring value” 

Key Takeaways

• How Steve started a business two weeks after the birth of his first child and why that has driven his career.
• Put your values at the centre of what it is that you do.
• Doing work that you love will not feel like work. 
• How Steve started out working from the nursery and learned quickly that you need to get your pricing right

 “Put your family first and everything else will fall into place.”

• How Steve ran a business with 40 staff and a £5-6 million turnover while still working from home
• How understanding your key values is central to your business.

 On finding your passion

• How Steve’s decision to put his family first led him to build his accountancy business
• Discovering that the kind of accountancy Steve wanted to do meant he had to retrain and relearn.
• Working in a profession does not necessarily mean you have the skills to run a business
• Focus on the sales and marketing
• Steve tracked down the experts in the field where he needed to re-skill. He absorbed their knowledge and befriended them.

 100 Ways to maximise your profits

• Steve’s first book started out as a way for him to share what he was learning
• Accountants aren’t trained to help clients grow and that was something Steve needed to relearn. 
• Steve put his own spin on what he was learning from others.
• The original book was good PR as he gave it away as a guide. 
• A publisher commissioned him to write 101  Ways To Maximise Your Profits
• This published book promoted his business around the world. 

“Learning continuously, recognising as a new small business I didn’t know anywhere near enough despite the fact I had two degrees and was a fully qualified accountant, I knew was no where near enough knowledge.”

Giving things away for free:

• Steve’s experience that giving away things for free has been a key driver in his success. 
• His business only sold to accountants to help them serve their clients better and make more money. 
• 500 firms were paying a monthly subscription. 
• Get on stage and talk for free so you can attract an audience by sharing value and telling the story of your business. 

Retiring at 50

• How Steve built his business on systems, with a clear vision of where it is going so that his team is inspired, enabled and liberated to make stuff happen.
• How his business enabled Steve to do what he enjoys. 
• Steve took a 3-month sabbatical to try not working. 
• Steve resigned as Director and is now Founder and Head of Research, working only 80 days a year. 
• Steve spent 8 years being paid to share his knowledge and now does it for free. 
• Steve is now giving away his time and intellectual property for free to enable other businesses to be a force for good in the world. 
• B1G1 and how it enables businesses to be a force for good. 

Tips for putting yourself out there:

1. Writing and public speaking will make you a key person of influence

2. Self-confidence comes when you are aware you know more than the audience

3. It gets easier every time you do it.

Tackle what you think you can’t do and put yourself in the public sphere.

Being the World’s Most Trusted Accountant

• People value recommendations on LinkedIn
• Your LinkedIn profile will either support or undermine people’s perception of you.
•  Use LinkedIn as due diligence.

 Mentioned Links and References:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevepipe/

Website: https://www.stevepipe.com/

Check out Steve’s book for free here:

 https://stevepipe.kartra.com/page/FreeStuffForBusiness

Listen to part two of this interview here: