A Team that Built Itself

Laraine Hutcherson didn’t start her firm with visions of growing to 15 employees and 100 clients. She just needed a job that was compatible with her season of life—but she ended up building the kind of work environment a lot of other people had been looking for, too.

Laraine Hutcherson’s firm has 15 employees. She has never once posted a job ad.

Instead, she has a bulging folder of resumes from people who heard—from a family member, a friend, or even a friend-of-a-friend—that there was a place where your kid’s 10 a.m. therapy appointment wouldn’t cost you your career.

Strength in Numbers Co.—a bookkeeping and accounting firm Hutcherson runs with two co-owners out of Antelope, California—was built on a simple, yet surprisingly rare premise: that smart, hardworking people whose lives don’t fit the traditional nine-to-five mold shouldn’t have to choose between being present for their families and doing excellent work.

We don’t need you to be at your desk for a consistent eight hours every day,” Hutcherson says. “We need you to be good at your job, friendly, supportive, have the integrity that we need, and be a team player.”

It might sound like a modern workplace platitude, but at Strength In Numbers, it is the foundation of what makes the firm successful—because it is the reason the firm was built.

Watch all the episodes

The Call That Changed it All

It was a random day in December when the phone rang. Hutcherson could have never imagined the news she would receive when she picked up: a distant family member was calling with a desperate plea for help. Three children were about to be placed into foster care, and the family was searching for a relative who was willing to take them in so they wouldn’t be forced to live with strangers. Hutcherson couldn’t say no—and her entire world changed overnight.

Suddenly, Hutcherson and her husband were raising four kids under the age of five, including a five-day-old baby. Eventually, they would officially adopt their foster children—and welcome one more of their own.

“Our lives changed quite a bit,” Hutcherson says. “And I went from, ‘I’m going to live in the corporate world and I’m going to go do all these things,” to, ‘How are we going to do any of this?’”

Two of Hutcherson’s adopted children are on the autism spectrum and navigate a range of disabilities, including significant mental health needs. That meant a calendar full of therapy, psychiatry, individualized education plans (IEPs), 504 plans, and school phone calls that couldn’t wait until five o’clock.

You really can’t have a nine to five job when the school calls you because your kid’s having a meltdown and you’ve got to go pick them up,” she says.

So she started working for herself—offering bookkeeping and financial consulting services to people she knew, at hours that bent around her life. Somewhere along the way, something unexpected happened: the work became the calmest part of her day.

“This was like my fun time,” she says, laughing. “Doing accounting was my fun time. It gave me a break from being a mom in a busy world.”

That reversal—work as reprieve—became the seed of a firm.

Strength in Numbers, Literally

As her client base grew, Hutcherson pulled in one of her best friends to help, then another person. Eventually, the three of them realized they should stop running parallel solo practices, combine their powers, and build one business together. Both of her co-owners also have children with disabilities. Like Hutcherson, they couldn’t hold down a traditional job—but they were incredible at what they did.

And that’s how Strength In Numbers was born. The firm name has a double-meaning—referencing both the numbers on a balance sheet and the way Hutcherson and her co-owners came together to provide their clients an even higher level of service. Because when you handle the finances of other businesses, you can’t exactly tell a client, “I’m going on vacation, just hold all your payroll questions.” You need coverage. You need teammates. You need strength in numbers.

“It literally came from, ‘We’re gaining the strength of multiple people so that we could support each other,’” she explains.

Today, their team has grown to 15 people serving somewhere between 80 and 100 clients. It’s remote-first, and it’s been assembled almost entirely by hand. Many team members are parents, some of whom also have kids with disabilities. All of them, Hutcherson will tell you, are smart, reliable, and perfectly capable—they just couldn’t clock in at nine and out at five with nothing in between.

In order to be successful in business, we had to create our own business world,” Hutcherson says. “And it has made for an incredible work environment. That is the one thing that we can control, right? We can control the work environment that we’re in and hire people who are amazing humans and also good at their jobs.”

Getting the Systems Out of Her Head

The road to creating that world wasn’t a straight line, though. The hardest part, Hutcherson says, wasn’t finding clients or staff. It was letting go of certain tasks as the firm grew—and learning to be okay with delegating.

“As owners, I think that is our biggest growth challenge,” she says. “We are all, ‘This is how it needs to be done. We want it to be done like this.’”

The breakthrough was a kind of subtle self-discovery that a lot of small-firm owners will recognize: realizing she had systems she didn’t know she had—and that by documenting those systems, she could empower others to follow them exactly the way she wanted them to.

Sometimes you don’t realize when something starts small and you’re the one doing all the work that you do actually have systems,” Hutcherson says. “As owners, we had to figure out how to get those systems on paper so that we could duplicate our work through another person who might not think just like we do.”

That work—dragging all the day-to-day legacy knowledge out of three owners’ heads and into documented, replicable processes—was tedious and time-consuming, but absolutely necessary. Once her team and client roster reached a certain size, it just wasn’t possible to hold everything in her head anymore. Passwords, deliverables, due dates—there came a point where the volume and compounding complexity of the information necessitated a system. Today, Hutcherson and the rest of her firm’s leadership team run a lot of their systems out of Financial Cents.

“We can track where everything is for every client and there are due dates for when they need to be done,” Hutcherson says. “It is an incredible tool. I can’t imagine not having it.”

Real Humans on the Other End of the Phone

Thanks in part to tight systems and butter-smooth operations, Strength In Numbers has grown steadily and comfortably over the years, largely through word-of-mouth referrals from CPAs.

They would get books from us and go, ‘Wow, they did a really great job,’” she says. “There’s a lot of people in business who really feel like, ‘I can’t afford to have someone help me,’ but that often leads to financials they have to spend a lot of money on getting fixed.”

CPAs started routing those clients to Strength in Numbers before the mess got any worse. Word traveled.

Once clients get started with Strength In Numbers, Hutcherson’s team does more than simply balance the books. They provide guidance and support, and they take the time to really understand and connect with clients on a human level.

At the end of the day, real people matter,” she says. “It’s nice to have someone on the other end of the phone. Everyone always says, ‘I have a stupid question.’ I’m like, ‘There’s no such thing. You went into business to do whatever you do. It had nothing to do with numbers. So, let me help you understand the numbers.’”

That instinct—to show up with empathy and help someone figure something out—is probably the most consistent thread in Hutcherson’s life. It runs through the firm. It runs through her client roster, which is heavy on nonprofits—an industry with notoriously complicated reporting requirements and one Hutcherson has a real passion for. And it runs, most personally, through the nonprofit she founded the same year she launched the firm.

Creating a Community

When Hutcherson was in the thick of raising young kids with complex needs, she went looking for other parents who understood what she was living through. When she struggled to find them, she formed the idea that would eventually become Reach, a nonprofit that runs regular support groups for families of kids with disabilities. Nine years later, the group is still meeting twice a month—and Hutcherson is usually there.

I sit at support groups now and I think, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s hope!’” she says. “You’ve got a parent of a five-year-old or a six-year-old and you’re like, ‘I was there. It is hard. But you’re going to make it.’”

Hutcherson is living proof of that hope. This year, in fact, she’ll see her son graduate high school with academic awards. But there were years when she wasn’t sure he’d make it through school at all.

“It’s like, my gosh—we had so many hard years, and here we are,” she says, beaming.

Her foray into launching Reach followed a similar trajectory to Strength In Numbers: notice that people are struggling with something complicated, sit down next to them, and help them find their footing. It was just inspired by a different kind of problem.

A big part of the spark behind Reach was the opportunity to help others, but Hutcherson says she needed the support just as much as anyone else who became involved with the group—especially in those early years.

All of that time was supported by all of those people who were also struggling,” she says. “We all met each other where we were at and just worked through it.”

The Path She Didn’t Plan

Looking at Hutcherson, you’d never guess that she has a fourth-degree black belt in karate. She still trains—sometimes alongside her 73-year-old mother and four of her kids, who also have black belts. She has also self-published three children’s books, and she and her husband recently decided to become foster parents again—this time on purpose, armed with 15 years of knowing exactly how hard it is. Their household currently includes one tween and five teens.

She did not plan any of this, exactly—but she’s proud of the way she’s navigated through it all.

Things did not go as planned,” Hutcherson says. “Out of a journey and a path that was unexpected, I was able to make something of that and create something out of that—and still do things that I wanted to do. They just looked a little bit different, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

The folder of resumes on her desk isn’t there because Strength in Numbers has a flashy employer brand. It’s there because people can tell, from the outside, when a business has been built around the idea that its people are people first—that complicated lives aren’t a liability, flexibility isn’t a perk, and a small firm designed with care can do things a bigger one can’t.

Hutcherson didn’t set out to build that kind of firm. She set out to build a life that worked for her. That she ended up building both, at the same time, still feels a bit surreal.

“It all just kind of happened,” she says. “I don’t think I could have possibly guessed that we would be where we are now. It is definitely one of those things that kind of had a life of its own, and I went along for the ride.”

Strength in Numbers Co. is based in Antelope, California. Learn more at sinc-team.com.

Be among the first to know