Stephanie Belcher: Yeah, it's rare for business managers in the music business for this to be a woman-owned company. This is a very male-dominated division of the music industry. As far as having the forward-facing person be a female, I can only think of one. There are women bookkeeping and managing the business is a lot of times kind of like a"female role.
Churko: Which is so terrible, that's my least favorite thing in the world right now. I deal with a label often that does that, and it drives me bananas because it's such a conflict of interest. And a lot of my clients now are victims of that situation where they realize someone was stealing or someone's over commissioning. But when everyone's in bed with each other, no one's paying attention, you don't have a third party person to look it over who's neutral.
Belcher: Yeah, same with me. I don't think I've ever specifically had a conversation with somebody about my gender in tax prep, but a lot of people tell me that it's really nice to talk to somebody about taxes who has a personality. Churko: It's the personality that brings it, 'cause people are so bland in the financial world. People don't want to be talked to like that anymore, they want to understand what's going on. So you have to be able to break it down on a kindergarten level and still make it fun, make the boring stuff fun.Belcher: It took me a long time to wrap my brain around the fact that I was gonna stay in tax.
Churko: And I feel like 70 percent of our job is psychology and like just talking people down when they're all worked up about taxes or their money or freaking out because they made too much. I get that call every year in like December."How much money did they make this year?""Well, you did about this much.""Oh my God. I've got to pay taxes on that." It's just like this constant panic of,"I'm just not gonna file.