Today, we’d like to introduce you to Aileen Martinez . Aileen was introduced to us by the brilliant and talented GiGi Diaz.
Aileen, thank you so much for joining us today. We’d love for you to bring our readers up to speed – can you introduce yourself and share your story?
Bookkeeping found me. I’ve always been good at math, and I began a pursuit of a degree in pre-med. But as a college student, even on a full ride scholarship, you still need money for books and food so I started looking for a job and the easiest option was working for my now mother-in-law helping her out with her accounting firm. Within weeks, I realized I had found my calling. I immediately became obsessed with helping businesses maximize their profits, increase their savings, and be in full control of their finances to expedite their growth. Eventually, I realized that medicine was not going to be it for me, and I opened my own bookkeeping company, Rise Up Bookkeeping. Within a year and a few months, the company broke 6 figures and I was able to positively impact the lives of dozens of entrepreneurs. We’re about to celebrate our 3rd anniversary, and I couldn’t be happier to have walked away from medicine and into the world of numbers and bookkeeping.
Please tell us more about your practice.
Rise Up Bookkeeping is a boutique bookkeeping firm dedicated to giving business owners full control of their money without the stress of managing their financials themselves. We offer month-to-month bookkeeping, cleanup bookkeeping, and for those business owners who love numbers and want to do it themselves, we offer training on how to do their own bookkeeping accurately while staying in compliance. Because we are a boutique firm, we take pride in giving each of our clients customized care and high attention to detail. We treat every business owner like a multi-million dollar company regardless of their size.
GiGi Diaz and Seizing Happy® have been great to us and I know you’ve got a great relationship with them as well. Maybe you can tell our audience a bit about GiGi Diaz and Seizing Happy® and your experience with them.
There’s an interesting story behind my coaching with GiGi. In a way, she has been my coach since I was a child because I was a student at GiGi’s Dance Academy, her dance studio and first business, when I was five years old until my teenage years. Fast forward to 2023, I came across Move, Breathe, Grow, a retreat-style event hosted by GiGi’s coaching company, Seizing Happy®, and I immediately wanted to participate as a speaker to bring value and knowledge to the women entrepreneurs in attendance about the importance of bookkeeping in their business growth. I booked a phone call with GiGi to talk about the sponsorship, and I swore she already knew who I was, but it wasn’t until after our call that she looked me up and realized I was the little girl in the blue flamenco dress from so many years ago.
After the event, I started following her podcast, Chats with GiGi, and came across an episode called “When to and When Not to Hire a Coach.” I immediately knew that if I wanted to scale my business past my wildest dreams, I needed the support of a coach and that coach had to be GiGi. In just a few months of coaching, I have been able to increase my clientele effortlessly, I have restructured the foundation of my business so I can make more and work less, and one of my favorite results of having GiGi as my coach has been my increased confidence both as an individual and as an entrepreneur. One small but powerful example is my son’s 1st birthday. The old me would have wanted to micromanage everything and do everything herself. The new me was able to create a blueprint of what I needed and delegate to family and friends so, on the day of the party, I was actually able to fully enjoy my son. As a mom, this is priceless to me. What I value most about having GiGi as my coach is that the new tools I’m given and skills that I develop help me expand both in business and in my personal life.
Website: www.riseupbookkeeping.com
Instagram: @riseupbookkeepingllc
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/rise-up-bookkeeping-llc
Image Credits
M Suarez Photography (@msp_branding)
