Amanda Mungal started It’s Your Time Business Services in 2010.SUPPLIED
Well before fractional work became a trend, Amanda Mungal realized that the model, where you’re employed part-time by several companies instead of full-time at just one, could solve a number of her business challenges.
Mungal has a background in office administration. Early in her career, she often found herself in a cycle where she’d land a role with a growing small business, whip it into operational shape and then move on within a year or two. But by 2010, she found she was tired of working that way. At that time, she was employed full-time by a business who needed her services during some periods throughout the year and almost no support during others.
“I had a hunch that there might be more people like [this], who needed my level of support, but not full-time,” she says. “So, as a placeholder until I figured out what I wanted to do next, I came up with the idea of starting a business where I would provide admin and bookkeeping services to other small businesses, as much as they needed and when they needed them. And it turned out that my hunch was correct.”
Growing a small business (that helps other small businesses)
The result is It’s Your Time Business Services, a company that provides office manager services – bookkeeping, managing contractors, reception duties, et cetera – on an as-needed basis. Over the past 14 years, Mungal has expanded the company substantially. It has grown an average of 10 to 20 per cent each year and now employs 25 people across two Canadian offices – in Vancouver and Edmonton – as well as an offshore location in Nigeria.
This type of job creation is typical for small businesses. According to a recent Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Index report: “Small businesses in Canada are currently outpacing overall employment growth.” In Q4 of 2023, small businesses created an additional 42,000 jobs compared to Q3; overall employment growth was mostly stagnant during that same period, according to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey.
It’s Your Time provides office manager services on an as-needed basis.SUPPLIED
Mungal wants to make sure her business is growing in ethical ways. For example, her office manager is Nigerian and suggested opening an office there as a way to help alleviate unemployment in the country. Hiring offshore workers is a common practice among businesses as a way to save money, but It’s Your Time counts creating sustainable jobs as one of its core values, so the typical model of outsourcing labour for a low price didn’t appeal to Mungal; she committed to paying all employees a living wage.
Doing business differently
This values-first approach to operating a business extends beyond hiring practices for Mungal.
“When you’re growing a company, usually the purpose is to grow profits, right?” she says. “At this point, we’re still barely making profit, but we’re making all the steps to be in a place where we’re going to be doing really well. And I love building the business, so I do want to [generate] lots of profit. But I began asking myself, how much profit does Amanda Mungal need?”
“That’s when we started looking at what we could do with profits. What could our mission be if we were to think outside of the box? So, we’ve committed to donating 50 per cent of our net profits back into our communities.”
These are ambitious goals, which is why Mungal counts on QuickBooks for support.
“The biggest pain point for the company is that I’m wearing too many hats,” Mungal says. “But using QuickBooks Online means payroll can be done pretty easily because everything’s tracked within that system. Anything that makes it so I don’t have to go poking in six different places is fantastic. You can also set up automated invoices and reminders and that kind of thing, so we’re increasingly embracing the tools… to make it a little bit less ‘Amanda has to do it.’”
It’s Your Time has also set up clients on QuickBooks Online Advanced, which makes the actual work of providing bookkeeping support much easier. “It’s able to interface with many of our client’s apps that they use to run their business, [which helps] us provide even greater business insight to our clients,” Mungal says. “Clients can see their financials much more easily and quickly.”
Helping her clients – and her community – is what Mungal does best. “We’re just very people-focused,” she says. Not only does she run networking and learning opportunities for her clients, she hosts a shoreline clean-up every year, too. “That’s why we want to take our profits and give back to our local communities or our offices or our countries – wherever we see fit.”
Are you a Canadian business fuelled by passion and purpose? Share your business’s ‘big why’ on Instagram and TikTok using the #SmallBizBigWhy for a chance to be featured by Intuit QuickBooks.
Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with QuickBooks. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.