"I am Blaine Steffan with Steffan’s Accounting Service."
"And I’m Florence Steffan with Steffan’s Accounting."

We have been in business now for six years. We celebrated our 6th Anniversary November 1 of 1997. We just began operating out of our home and recently moved to this retail location in a strip mall about two weeks ago.


[Decision To Enter This Occupation:]

I guess that [accounting] has always been my area of things I wanted to do. I took the training several years ago. So accounting has always been my expertise or what I wanted to do, and I just sort of brought Florence in with me along the road.

"I just took a book keeping course last fall to help with the book keeping here in the office. So I am more involved in the book keeping part of it and Blaine does the accounting, year ends and that sort of thing," said Florence.

We had fairly good jobs prior to opening up here, but we found that we had job dissatisfaction. We were just going no place fast and it wasn’t where we wanted to be. So we started looking at alternatives. The job market is not that good for finding other employment, so this looked like a viable alternative.

[Hours Of Work:]

"You have to know that you have to work long hours. It is not just a nine-to-five job and you’re finished on Friday. Lots of times we will be working on weekends, especially during income tax time. It gets pretty harry around here and we have a lot of people coming and going. And the work has to be done and kept up." said Florence.

[Attitude & Positive Behaviour:]

You have to learn how to deal with people too. There are good days and bad days. You still have put on that smile and try to be at your best. And you are dealing with a wide variety of people.

[Change & Adaptability:]

I think that with operating any business you have to be willing and ready to change at any point in time. In operating this business, I guess one of the biggest changes was just very recently; moving out of our home operation, into a strip mall location and some of the things that go with that. It’s a big change from working out of your home.

We are fairly independent. I do my bit and of course Florence has her things to do and that’s how we go until the phone rings and we get off on another tangent. We put one away and bring out another one. You just have to be able to adapt to what has to get done quickly and spot fires that appear.

[Education & Training:]

I think experience is very important. Real life situations are much different than textbook training. Those two are quite (very) important.

[Typical Work Day:]

There is very seldom a typical day that you can really pinpoint to. As I mentioned, the phone can ring and you’re off on a totally separate tangent. And that happens very frequently. But of course, you have your mental plan of what you want to do today, what you want to start on, get at, and hopefully complete. Things like that. And that is what you zero in on when you get here first thing in the morning.

Let's say, today I plan on finishing this one monthly account that I'm working on and I get that out of the way. Hopefully I don’t run into any snags that's put it on hold or something. And from there I had a call yesterday saying that I need some certain reports as quickly as possible. So I will be going on to that as soon as I am done the one that is spread out on my desk right now. That might even entail, or is going to entail, working after supper tonight to get it done and then try and fax it to them.

"We might have someone drop in. That happens once in a while to ask questions about their situations." said Florence.

[Most Challenging Aspects:]

Satisfying the clients and keeping your workload up quite high so that you can pay the bills. That is an every day challenge.

[Most Satisfying Aspects:]

"A lot of our business has come through word of mouth. We haven't had to do too much advertising. We did a bit in the beginning through the newspaper, but most of our business has come through word of mouth. So that is quite satisfying too because that shows we are doing a good job. I guess people are happy with our work. That's a really good part of it." said Florence.

[Advice For Someone Entering This Field Of Work:]

The best thing (I would say) is pick something that you really enjoy doing, because you are going to be doing a lot of it. And the hours get long and you do get tired. And on the twelfth hour of the sixth day it is easier to keep working when you enjoy what you are doing rather than something that you are