Picture being six months pregnant, climbing a ladder—not stairs, a ladder—in slingback heels to reach your desk in a famous New York fashion stylist’s loft. For most people, this would be a wake-up call about workplace safety. For Justine Lackey, it became the spark that pioneered virtual bookkeeping in the early 1990s, using FedEx, zip drives, and messengers to revolutionize an entire industry before online banking even existed.
In this episode of She Counts, hosts Nancy McClelland and Questian Telka welcome Lackey, a true trailblazer who built and sold a successful bookkeeping firm while challenging every assumption about what business success should look like. As McClelland shares in her introduction, Lackey is “a devoted mother to three and mentor and coach in her incubator program for bookkeepers and accountants growing their firms.”
When Your Body Knows What Your Mind Won’t Admit
“I’m an accidental entrepreneur,” Lackey explains early in the conversation. She landed in bookkeeping through a roommate’s invitation and never planned to build what she calls “the H&R Block of bookkeeping firms.” Without a college degree (she didn’t finish until 2009, well after she established her firm, Good Cents Management) or corporate experience, she lacked the traditional frameworks most firm owners bring to their businesses.
This lack of traditional structure had consequences. “Everybody says, ‘I wanna be successful,’ but that’s ambiguous,” Lackey says. “You have to get into the details of it. I wanna make $250,000 a year, or $500,000 a year. I wanna work 20 hours. I wanna have a team of five.” Without this clarity, she found herself swept along by what she identifies as cultural pressure to constantly expand.
The breaking point came during an Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) planning session with her team. Together, they mapped out a roadmap to $3 million in revenue. The math was clear: seven to nine bookkeeping teams with redundancy meant 14 to 18 bookkeepers. Add client service managers and a true integrator or COO, and they’d need approximately 28 employees.
“The energy in the room was like, yeah, woo!” Lackey recalls. “Like when you’re at conference world and you’re walking on hot coals.” Everyone left excited, including Lackey—until the next morning.
“I woke up and I literally could not move my right shoulder,” she shares. The pain was so severe her massage therapist couldn’t even work through the tension. “What is this weight on your shoulders?” the therapist asked. As Lackey recounted the previous day’s planning, the connection became clear. This wasn’t an injury; it was her body rejecting a path that violated her values.
The Hard Conversation Nobody Wants to Have
Recognizing she didn’t want to build a 28-person company meant facing her excited team with a complete reversal. “That’s ethical leadership in action,” Lackey explains. “That’s hard conversations.”
Lackey returned to her team with honesty, “It was really exciting and I believe this can be done. But at the end of the day, this is my life. I don’t wanna do that.”
“It’s terrifying to put your tail between your legs,” she admits. But as Telka points out, “Admitting that you have taken a wrong turn builds a lot of respect.”
This moment revealed a deeper truth about integrity. “We often talk about integrity in relation to other people,” Lackey notes, “but we don’t talk about integrity in relation to ourselves. When we’re out of alignment with integrity, that causes inner conflict and stress.”
Why Growing Sideways Beats Growing Up
The conversation then turns to a concept that challenges everything the industry teaches about success: lateral growth versus vertical growth.
“Whenever people on LinkedIn talk about having a successful firm, they always talk about revenue,” McClelland observes. “They almost never, ever, ever talk about profit or net income margins.”
Telka adds her favorite quote, “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity.”
Lackey explains the difference. “Vertical growth is the most common type of growth people discuss—raising your revenue number and client acquisition. Those are really sexy numbers.” But lateral growth—the systems, processes, technology, and team development—”requires patience. It is very detailed, hard work.”
The challenge is that small firms can’t do both simultaneously. “There are very few people, particularly in smaller firms, who can do this all at once,” Lackey emphasizes. “So you need to make a choice.”
Her choice involved intentional constraints that seemed counterintuitive. She worked exclusively with QuickBooks Online, turning away Xero users even when they begged. She refused wholesale clients with inventory because she “hated counting bits and bobs and COGS.” These weren’t limitations; they were strategic decisions to build deep expertise.
Even technology decisions followed this principle. When Good Cents invested months implementing a new practice management system that the team hated, they made a shocking choice: abandon it entirely and return to Google Sheets. “Sometimes lo-fi is hi-fi,” Lackey explains. “Technology platforms are like people, and not all people are your people.”
The Blindfold Moment That Changed Everything
Perhaps the most powerful part of the conversation comes when Lackey shares how she discovered her business was actually a sellable asset. “When you live in a scarcity-based poverty mentality,” she explains, “it is hard for you to see a different reality for yourself.”
During one particularly frustrating period, she vented to a designer friend, “I’m so frustrated. I just wanna quit.”
“But you could just sell it,” the designer replied casually.
“Sell what?” Lackey asked, genuinely confused.
“It’s like I was blindfolded and somebody snatched the blindfold off,” she recalls. The designer pointed out the obvious: recurring revenue, strong operations, great clients. “You’re a great business. You could sell it.”
This revelation sent Lackey on a research journey. She devoured “Built to Sell” by John Warrillow in a single day and discovered firms were selling for about one times annual revenue. Her firm was worth more than her 960-square-foot cottage.
“I couldn’t even see what was possible for myself,” she admits.
When she eventually sold Good Cents in 2023, 28 potential buyers courted her. The relationships she’d built—including one client who’d been with her 22 years and had hosted her baby shower— created incredible value. “Relationships are assets,” Lackey emphasizes, “even if we can’t line item them on a balance sheet.”
The Secret Every Firm Owner Needs to Hear
Near the end of the conversation, Lackey shares what she calls “a secret that nobody talks about.” Every firm owner wants help.
This insight applies whether you run your own firm or work in someone else’s. “When you can come into a conversation and say, ‘I really like working here and I really like the work I’m doing, but these are the recurring problems and this is the solution I propose’—that takes courage,” she explains.
McClelland adds her own experience, “My best mentor ever taught me that important lesson. She said, ‘Come to me with solutions, not problems.’”
Your Next Step Toward Intentional Growth
Lackey now channels these lessons through her Modern Firm Challenge, a free five-day program running one hour per day. “My personal mission statement is that I help the world by helping people,” she shares. The challenge focuses on the biggest pain points: onboarding, monthly close, pricing, and increasingly, technology and AI.
“You’re not gonna fix all the things,” she tells participants. “You’re gonna look at the lessons and say, this is what I’m gonna focus on right now.”
McClelland predicts some firm owners might initially resist. “You’re telling me I need to slow down to speed up? I don’t have five days to take off to do this.”
But Lackey’s response is practical: “The classes are only an hour a day. We run them from one to two.” Plus, they record everything for those who can’t attend live.
The results speak for themselves. As Lackey notes, “I’m not here to tell you you can build a million dollar firm overnight. I’m here to tell you you can do whatever you wanna do, but it’s going to take time.”
Permission to Choose Your Own Path
The conversation closes with McClelland sharing a powerful quote from author Laurie Perez: “I reserve the right to evolve. What I think and feel today is subject to revision tomorrow.”
This perfectly captures what Lackey has given listeners: permission to have clarity about what they want and to change their minds when their goals no longer serve them.
Ready to build the business you actually want? Sign up to get on the VIP list for Lackey’s next Modern Firm Challenge at justinelackey.com/register. You can also find her on LinkedIn or join her free Facebook group, The Incubator, with about 4,000 members building community together.
As this episode of She Counts proves, building with intention rather than endless expansion might just be the key to creating the valuable, sustainable business you’ve always dreamed of, even if you didn’t know it was possible.