A while back I said I’d tell the story of how I decided not to work for straight guys anymore as a bookkeeper, & now I’m finally getting around to it.
A couple of years ago when I started doing freelance bookkeeping, I put an ad up on Craigs List, like you do, & so I got a bunch of emails from people who needed my help. Some offered to trade me for clothes or salon treatments or massages (tempting): you never know, with Craig’s List. But one guy I met with had started a small business doing interior remodeling after having worked on Wall St. a while. During the first phonecall I make clear upfront that I don’t work a.m. hours (because I write until 5am, though frankly most people don’t ask why), and we talk about what he needs & how far behind he is, etc. It seems like a do-able job so we meet for lunch and that goes well, too. He wants to hire me, but forgot his organizer, he’ll call. When he calls, he asks me to come in at 10am. I tell him again I don’t work in the am. He says okay, and we agree on a day & time. He calls me to cancel a day before that meeting, & we reschedule when he calls to cancel. He asks if I can come in at 10am. I explain again I don’t work morning hours, and ask him outright if he’s going to want to work on the books regularly in the morning. He says no, and we reschedule. So I go to our first meeting, look at his QB (QuickBooks, for the uninitiated) and then we discuss a regular time to come in.
& Yes, you guessed the end of the story: he suggested 10am.What a huge waste of my time.
That, of course, was after nearly 10 years working for Mr. Famous Author Man, who was f***ing his publicist and actually thought I didn’t know. He also decided at some point that I should work full-time for him without a 401k and health insurance (when the reason I worked for him freelance was so I could set my own hours and take time off to travel, which he was well aware of). But I can’t go into the rest of that story too deeply or my head will implode.
Then there was the guy who decided since the company wasn’t making any money the first person he’d get rid of was the admin/bookkeeper. When I first got that job, they were two years behind in billing clients – two years – which is a pretty solid explanation for why there was no money coming in, eh? So I got him up to date, and then I get laid off. I heard from clients of his that as soon as I was gone they’d stopped billing clients regularly again. Smart move there.
So, that’s why. Too many arrogant lunkheads. I thought before I hurt someone I’d try to make a point of specializing in minority clients, instead – specifically women and LGBT folks – and see if that was any better. And you know what? It has been. Way better. Like millions of times better. I don’t rule out straight guys; but I will ask now if they’re comfortable listening to/taking advice from a woman, if they’ve ever had a female boss, etc. Why? Because as a bookkeeper you have to tell people what to do sometimes, and there’s no point in being someone’s bookkeeper if they don’t listen to you. Now when I don’t think it will be a good fit, I often mention upfront that I don’t work morning hours because I write until the wee hours, which always gets them to ask the question: what do you write about? (or, anything I might have read? etc.) Replying, “a book about transvestites” is pretty much a shoo-in that the rest of the conversation will be awkward and they won’t want to hire me, and I can walk away without having to say, “I don’t think you’re ready for a female bookkeeper, so go pay your male accountant way too much to tell you the same things I would have.”