Books with a Bigger Purpose with Mark Tuggle

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. Hi, I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with my co-host, Tullio Siragusa, and our special guest today. So many small business owners sometimes think of bookkeeping as something they have to do after the other work of business is done.
You focus on the customers, the operations, your sales, your employees, vendors, all aspects of growth, and then the books become something to probably clean up later at that point after not focusing on it for a while. But numbers reveal priorities, pressure points, risks, habits, opportunities, and whether the business is truly supporting the purpose it might have been created to serve. And so today, we are diving into purpose-driven bookkeeping, and what that means in terms of stewardship, financial clarity, and how bookkeeping can become a system for leading with greater intentions. So I'm really looking forward to this, looking through the lens of this. And Tullio, introduce our special guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:23)
My pleasure. Our guest today is Mark Tuggle, PhD. Dr. Mark Tuggle is the CEO of Telos Bookkeeping. Telos is a purpose-driven bookkeeping firm helping growing businesses gain clarity, precision, and strategic insight through financial record-keeping, reconciliation, payroll support, reporting, and of course, tax preparation support. Their approach is grounded in the idea that bookkeeping should do more than document past transactions. It should help business owners understand their numbers, make smarter decision, and stay in line with their long-term purpose.
Mark, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast. I've always believed that the numbers, know your numbers, know your business. Don't know your numbers, don't know your business.

**Mark Tuggle** (2:12)
Thanks so much. I'm thrilled to be here.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:14)
Mark, so Telos uses the phrase bookkeeping with your purpose in mind. What is that purpose-driven bookkeeping mean to you?

**Mark Tuggle** (2:25)
Sure.
I feel safe to say all business owners, none of them went into business because they wanted to do bookkeeping. They had some kind of purpose for starting whatever business or practice or firm, whatever the entrepreneurial endeavor is. There's purpose behind that. Either it's a lifestyle purpose or some vision, someone they want to help, something they want to accomplish, something they want to bring to market. The idea behind bookkeeping with your purpose in mind is, how do we use the bookkeeping system and the bookkeeping processes to support that purpose?
It's a means to contribute to that ultimate purpose you have for your business and ultimately for your life as a business owner, as an individual, as a human, contributing to the good in our society and our world. That's what I mean by purpose-driven bookkeeping. What's your ultimate purpose? Telos in Greek means ultimate purpose. And we want to align your bookkeeping efforts and accounting efforts with that ultimate purpose.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:39)
Now, there are many business owners, Mark, who feel stressed and possibly even shame around their books. So how do you help those owners build healthy relationship with their financials?

**Mark Tuggle** (3:52)
Well, I think there are a few phases to that. The first one is to let them know it's not an uncommon feeling emotionally for people to look at their books, to put off working on their books, to admit out loud they don't know what they don't know about their financials. And that's a big part of what I do is let the business owner know, whatever, how far over behind you are, or how messy they are, or if you don't even have books, it's recoverable. This is something that we can work together on and get you to a place of current accurate health when it comes to financials, bookkeeping, record keeping, and being starting to shift to use those accounting, that accounting information proactive.
They're waiting for you to tackle, and you're coming up with every excuse not to tackle it.

**Stephen Sakach** (5:01)
You know, so I think for a lot of businesses, I know for us when we're doing our marketing, we're really trying to think about the purpose of that business, trying to drill into that higher purpose. And a lot of businesses, they've never really even kind of gone there.
Do you have to, is that part of your process, is trying to really kind of have that dialogue with them and figure that out first or obviously, you're probably auditing the business and cleaning up all the mess that has been kind of neglected. But once you get into it, is that really part of your approach?