Michael Ly of Reconciled
An exclusive Tech Tribune Q&A with Michael Ly (founder and CEO) of Reconciled, which was honored in our:
Tell us the origin story of Reconciled – what problem were you trying to solve and why?
Before starting Reconciled, I was serving small business owners and startups as a contract CFO or Controller, helping them through accounting and finance responsibilities. Most of the time, a “trusted but not trained” resource would be handling the bookkeeping – think spouse, the owner, their assistant, or an office manager. The books were always a mess. In order to get my work done, I needed solid accounting records and I would always need to spend time cleaning the books up first before I could do the actual consulting work. This was not valuable use of my time, so I formed Reconciled initially to help serve my customer better with their bookkeeping needs and allow me to focus on the higher level consulting work. What I did not expect was that the demand for basic bookkeeping would grow significantly and the opportunity to serve thousands of the millions of small businesses in the USA with an accessible service was a huge opportunity.
What was the biggest hurdle you encountered in your journey?
Figuring out a predictable sales process that could scale was the first major challenge, especially since I wanted Reconciled to eventually only service customers remotely, allowing me to serve customers all over the USA and hire talent from anywhere. Our second challenge was finding leaders I could trust to handle core management responsibilities as Reconciled grew.
What does the future hold for Reconciled?
Reconciled will continue to pursue our vision of serving 10,000 small businesses on a monthly basis and impacting 100,000 jobs in the communities they are in. We plan to do this by continuing to acquire new customers and also buying smaller accounting firms.
What are your thoughts on the local tech startup scene in Burlington?
Burlington’s tech startup scene has grown and transformed over the past 10 years. There are more entrepreneurs and capital providers than there were before 10 years ago and more entrepreneurs trying to build very large companies.
What’s your best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Get started by talking to as many potential customers about the problem you are trying to solve and how you plan to solve it. Also, don’t worry about perfect in anything – speed to execution and learning from your mistakes are more important