Member Since 2017
Optima Office, Inc
San Diego Area
Jennifer is the CEO & Founder of Optima Office, Inc, her second successful venture. She was able to grow her first company to over $6 million in revenue and 90 employees in just 6 years. Jennifer has a degree from the University of Arizona with a BA in Finance, Accounting and Marketing. She has an MBA from SDSU and completed the Becker CPA Courses. Career wise, Jennifer spent a dozen years as a consultant in the role as Controller or Director of Accounting for numerous companies and non-profits throughout San Diego. She was named in the top 40 under 40 business leaders in San Diego in 2018, was named 2017 Young Entrepreneur by San Diego's Chamber of Commerce and also listed as the most Influential Leader in 2016 by the Connected Women of Influence. Jennifer is a tenacious, kind and authentic business executive. Work life balance is very important to her, so she is adamant about her team having a flexible, friendly, and awesome place to work. Jennifer is married, has 7 nieces and nephews, loves spending time with friends & family and enjoys running on the beach and snowboarding.
Right now, most businesses have less of a cash buffer.
Invest in strengthening your HR team to get through these hard times.
Having the right clients can make all the difference in your business’s success. Of course, finding those ideal clients isn’t always easy. You don’t want to be too selective and turn down a good business opportunity, but you also don’t want to overextend yourself for a client who won’t stick around in the long run.
Small-business owners realize almost immediately how different their businesses are to run than large corporations. For success, a small business needs to adopt its own strategies that work with limited available resources. Entrepreneurs in this position need to make critical decisions about what approaches they'll take to elements of business growth and development.
It’s easy to have an “always-on” mentality when you’re an entrepreneur. You own a business that depends on you to survive, so you never really get a day off – right?
As a manager, you likely have a long list of responsibilities and many demands on your time. This may leave you with little time for unplanned meetings or additional questions from your team members, let alone time to complete your own work.
For many growing teams, in-person leadership conferences have been the go-to method for training and developing the organization's future leaders. In today's world, though, there's a lot of uncertainty around when these types of conferences might return.
Consider which roles can be outsourced, and clearly outline who is responsible for every task in your organization to be certain that you are optimizing your team during these difficult times.
Business advisers have the potential to be instrumental to a company's success. Unfortunately, not all business advisers make a positive impact, and it's up to the entrepreneur to decide which adviser they want to work with.
Within an organization, some skills are far more valuable than others. If your business is looking at hiring new employees, then these skills should be a primary focus for your interviews. Knowing what skills are crucial for an enterprise to grow and thrive helps you figure out if an employee may be worth hiring, even if they don't fit the ideal. Sometimes the company needs more than just the right qualifications for their employees.
Lean on your accounting team to assess business continuity and profitability
Customer complaints are a necessary part of a business, but it can be discouraging to deal with them. A good leader knows how to look at customer complaints and extract the positives out of those disparaging comments. A skilled leader can take these complaints and turn them into a power to motivate and direct the business's positive growth.
Winning a business or industry award can be a great honor for your business, as well as a highly effective PR opportunity. However, to be considered, you'll first need to submit an application to be reviewed by the award committee. To help you with this process, we asked the members of Young Entrepreneur Council the following question:
Businesses have seen a period of massive growth, especially those that deal solely with online sales and services. While this development is promising, it also opens up a business to another problem -- that of having their growth outscale their ability to communicate.
The right accounting team can help leaders avoid fear-based decisions by adding transparency and facts to the equation.
When you spend time in the business leadership world, you start to hear a lot of cliché phrases and vague terms that other managers frequently use. Sometimes they use them sound smart; other times they're not sure of a better alternative. Either way, these overused words begin to sound like jargon over time, and may lose their meaning when you're communicating with your staff.
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At times it can be difficult to turn off our emotions -- especially when it comes to separating personal feelings and work. While it’s perfectly normal to have negative feelings in the face of difficult work situations, wallowing in these emotions for too long can affect your job performance as well as your overall well-being.
Having the right people do the right tasks at their respective levels can free up much-needed cash.
Moving into the second quarter of the year, entrepreneurs should be well aware by now that the only way to ensure that their company gets more efficient is to examine its performance in the previous quarter and see where it can improve. Performance evaluation is much more than just assessments that focus on a small core of metrics.
Every business owner hopes to succeed in their venture. Access to the right resources plays a huge role in that success -- but barriers do still exist, especially for female entrepreneurs.
Women in the business world often talk about the importance and benefits of supporting each other. That's why we asked the women of Young Entrepreneur Council how they tap into the right resources and lift up other female leaders in the process. Here's how they've achieved their own success, and helped their fellow female entrepreneurs do the same.
Running a business is no easy feat, and with each new challenge that arises, an entrepreneur risks becoming buried under the weight of the responsibility. There's no way that an individual can stop the flood of responsibilities, so the only option that a new business owner has is to find an effective and efficient process for managing the situation.
For a nonprofit to survive long-term, it is imperative that it makes some of the same financial decisions as a for-profit company, and that includes managing its budgets effectively.
Like many business owners, you’re probably busy double-checking the difference between 1099 and W2 employees, considering how the new rulings will affect you and how best to make a seamless transition to W2 employees where necessary.
The experience of the CFO has to be based on the company's future goals and not simply what happened historically.
Remember, succession planning applies to unexpected emergencies in addition to retirement, so it's important to get started now.
An economic downturn may be your opportunity to thrive, but you still need to be strategic about your decision-making.
Take the time to strengthen your balance sheet to ensure you have the ability to get financial assistance from investors.
Remember, preparedness and prevention are the best medicine.
How can you prevent late payments from putting your business at risk?
Outsourcing has many benefits to help you weather a looming recession or streamline the production within your company.
Being "busy" doesn’t always necessarily mean productive.
You don’t want to be caught by surprise when the next recession happens.
Implementing internal controls lowers the risk of fraud, errors and inefficiency in your accounting department and company as a whole.
Believe in the product or service you are selling and its capacity to help others.
Finding ways to cut costs is important, though going with the cheapest option isn’t always the answer.
We are a team of accounting specialists who bring varying degrees of experience in every single industry, with most accounting softwares and to businesses of all sizes, from start-ups to $50+ million in revenues. We also specialize in servicing non-profits.
Accounting