Articles • Wanderwell Consulting & Bookkeeping

The {gnarly, beautiful} questions I’m asking right now.

The poet David Whyte talks about seeking the beautiful question: a question that resonates, begs to be unspooled, and, ultimately, leads the questioner towards a more engaged, heart-centered, aligned way of being. My questions are not always beautiful, but they are at the heart of guiding my work and ways of showing up in the world. By nature, they are questions without answers, designed to provoke and create a sense of wobble just by asking. Here’s a collection of some of the beautiful, gnarly, confounding questions I’m currently asking: What would each of us build if the goal was to […]

The most essential feedback loop in your business.

Running a bookkeeping service is like having VIP backstage access to what really works and what doesn’t in business; you want to know who has the best champagne back there? Ask the bookkeepers. Now take a cross section of 50-odd different businesses – products, services, micro, million-dollar, whatever: want to know the what most often separates the folks that do well and make it from the ones that slide backwards or stagnate? The leaders that engage with their financials regularly are the folks that thrive. The people that avoid or ignore them, are the ones that don’t. Throw a multi-year […]

Are you having cash flow problems, or are you just not profitable?

Cash flow and profit are not the same, and mistaking a profit problem for a cash flow problem can be deadly to your small business.

On Giving & Redistribution, Part 2: Defining a Strategy for Giving

To read Part 1, how to think about redistribution and giving within your business, click here. In the Part 1 I wrote about the opportunity in stewarding business resources to create more resilient ecosystems. Since businesses are set up to generate more resources than individuals, we can also use them to channel those resources into community care. In this second part I’m going to get into the actual how-to: the how much, how often of giving and redistribution strategies. How to Calculate? In my first post, I wrote about two “buckets” of giving: giving as marketing expense and giving to […]

On Giving & Redistribution Strategies: Part 1

A client recently asked for advice on how to think about a consistent giving strategy — they work with many non-profit clients, who of course fundraise, have galas, and all the other modes of raising money. Since the summer of 2020, I’ve been seeing more businesses with regular giving lines in their budgets, but just as many with ad hoc giving and redistribution. We’ve seen spikes in publicly announced giving, but ultimately riding a public wave and embedding redistribution as an operational policy are different things. The query prompted my to write out my thoughts around giving within a small […]

The counter intuitive reason to distribute profit to employees in your small business.

There’s a whole mess of reasons why all businesses should distribute profits to their employees: -Redistributing money = redistributing power -You didn’t build your business to only benefit yourself -Your employees should benefit from the value they create Those are just three of many, but you get the idea! I’m not talking about the folks who believe it’s their divine right as Capitalists to amass capital for themselves. For anyone that takes a people-centered approach to business, how can the resources my business creates benefit the people within the business and my greater community, should be a guiding question. So […]

Maybe don’t offer a sliding scale.

As more leaders are considering issues of justice and equity in their businesses the go-to, especially in the online and services business community, has been to offer lower priced spots and sliding scales. While it’s great to create access and ensure that you’re not boxing out people who, for structural reasons, don’t have access to money or resources, accessible pricing isn’t the best place for many folks to start making changes. Equity isn’t just about making things cheaper. The folks at Crust Vegan Bakery took to Instagram recently to respond to a review complaining about the high prices at their […]

Our work is all three parts.

I was reminded in two separate meetings this week that the actual work of making our visions and values real & concrete in the world (ie, running an anti-capitalist business under capitalism) is always imperfect. In the first, I was speaking about my discomfort with where I feel like I’m falling short in my own work and leadership of Wanderwell — with the ways in which I wish I could support the team, and the resources that we don’t have to do so, as a very small business. And the reality is, of course, my own tiny business is not […]

The key to running a business that supports social change

I’ve written about money being the essential feedback loop in any business. There’s a second, just-as-important piece to having a finger on the pulse of the financials: for anyone interested in justice or equity in their business, understanding the financials is the key to modeling social change in your business. If you’re interested in experimenting with post-capitalist or alternative models to the status quo of extractive, exploitative, and exhausting business models– ie, your goal is something more than just trying to make a lot of money for yourself– financial knowledge provides the tools for channeling resources in alignment with values. […]

On not rushing it

One of the routines I’ve taken up in the past months has been taking Josie, my dog, to the river for early morning walks. This was born of her declaring herself over the sidewalk circles in our neighborhood… and as she’s somewhere in the vicinity of 80 lbs, if she wants to stand on the stoop and stare at me obstinate and immovable, there’s not much to do. So… we go to the park and walk along the Delaware every morning; it turned out she was just after some trees and grass*. We’ve done this daily for enough months now […]