Today we’d like to introduce you to Leela Ottombrino.
Leela, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
About 4 years ago, I was newly unemployed, had finished with college, and faced with adulthood, struggling to decide what I really wanted to do. With a degree in Linguistics, that felt irrelevant to real life and my primary working experience was as a professional hula hoop performer, there was no way I could have guessed where I would end up in the years to follow. I applied to countless positions in a variety of fields, had a few failed attempts at jobs that weren’t a good fit for me, and one day, found a Craigslist job posting for a brand new company called R.G. Alliance Group.
After getting through a phone interview, I was asked to come in and do the in-person interview. The instructions were for me to meet in the back office of a trucking company for the interview, and the vision I was told was that R.G. Alliance was about to open their first office location in a historic, Queen Anne style Victorian house in Banker’s Hill. The company was starting out offering financial consulting, and accounting services to small businesses in San Diego. My role would be an Office Administrator for the new office, and I would be tasked with the work of purchasing the furniture, assembling all the supplies we needed for a running office, handling mail, deposits, ordering lunch, and really just being a support to their team of 3 partners. I was so excited at the potential for this position, and the chance to be starting at the ground level and getting to work in a beautiful location, and I think my excitement for the opportunity really showed through in my interview because I ultimately got the job. My boss Ryan often refers to the amount of trust I must have had to jump into this knowing we had no infrastructure yet, but from where I was in life and the positions I had tried, I was ready for something that I could pour my heart into and be a part of. It was perfect.
Now, flash forward almost 4 years later, and my current title is General Manager. What does that mean? Honestly, it would take a while to explain the breadth of the work I’m doing right now, as a quickly growing small business, it’s often all hands on deck to keep our momentum moving. Over the past 4 years, I have learned bookkeeping, accounting, creating financial reports, presenting financials to CEOs, being an outsourced CFO, and more. All with the help of the partners and a lot of self-study. We are a company of over 20 individuals and have grown into Los Angeles, as well as the Bay Area. You can often find me running around to a variety of clients each day, On-boarding new clients, training our team on process and efficiency, and keeping my fingers on the pulse of the financials for my ongoing clients. I am proud of what I do and happy to be working in a job that keeps me challenged every day.
Has it been a smooth road?
I’d be lying if I said it was completely smooth sailing. There were a lot of growing pains for me entering the professional world, it was a huge adjustment from the entertainment industry, and the 2 years I worked in manufacturing. Sometimes, the hours I work are long, and I’m really hard on myself to do the best work I can, sometimes, too hard. Also, coming into this role without a background in finance, it’s been a lot of work learning while on the job, and there are mistakes that are inevitable while you’re learning. Honestly, we all make mistakes sometimes, and the best thing you can learn is how to recover from them with grace, and to learn how to own your mistakes. Nobody expects perfection, they mostly just want to see that you are learning from them.
On the positive, most of the CEOs/COOs that I work directly with right now are women, which has been a huge blessing. They are great role models and have paved the road for future women to be empowered leaders in the workplace. I am exposed to a lot more women power in this role than I ever expected. Every now and again, you feel the prejudice when someone won’t listen to important information you are providing them, and then you bring in a male co-worker to share the same information, and suddenly they are all ears, but honestly those moments just push me to keep learning and become more of an expert in my field.
My biggest advice for women starting any career is to not lose yourself in the process. Make time for yourself and your family. Keep exercising, eating well, don’t fall into the traps of working so much that you can’t enjoy the fruits of your labor. In a salaried role where you are solely responsible for disconnecting, remember that you need to do that for yourself, nobody else is going to.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with R.G. Alliance Group – tell our readers more, for example, what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
My work is an interesting cross between tedious/methodical tasks as well as being very intellectually challenging. Since we do the full range of services starting with data entry, bookkeeping, accounting, and all the way to being an outsourced CFO, we are often switching between many hats in a single day. The thing I love most about my work is the variety and the fact that I get to see into many organizations interworkings. I can see what is working for them, what is not working, and it’s a ton of great information that I’m stashing away with hopes of starting my own business someday. It’s like getting a crash course in business school while getting paid. Right now, I’m transitioning to specialize in on-boarding new clients. This is exciting because there is often a lot of cleans up work that happens and you get to dive in and learn about the business, and then set up the process for other team members to maintain and uphold. I put a lot of energy into assessing the process, so it is efficient and sometimes implementing software to reduce the tedious work. To me, that is very rewarding when you can take a process that normally takes 5 hours and turn it into 1 hour.
As a brand, we stand out for several reasons. Firstly, our pricing is fixed fee base. This is a huge benefit for our clients because they never have to worry about giving us a call if they have a question. We are not billing you for each hour you see us. This also enables us to add resources/cross train without affecting the client’s bill. Business owners love this pricing model because they know exactly what they will be charged each month and it’s very easy to budget for.
Second, we are outsourced accountants, but we prefer to work onsite with your team. Our hopes are that our clients view us as a part of their organization, and not just some person behind a computer that they never see. This is huge because the transfer of information from an officer of a company to an accountant can really hold up the monthly close process, but if we show up in person, it helps our clients create a designated time to focus on their accounting, which is really important to get our data correct.
And there are a lot of things that set us apart, but the biggest one is that in the past two years, we have added a lot of service offerings beyond the Financial Consulting that we started with. We now offer HR support, IT support (and inter-system integrations), Operational Consulting, and even Sales Consulting. We are really gearing up right now to be able to support businesses in a more wholesome approach. Honestly, finances are amazingly important and give great insight, but without the Operations person to create/improve a process or the IT person to set up technology systems or HR to protect a business and it’s staff, then the financial information is just that, information. So, it’s very cool to see us developing a team that can also help organizations execute the change that is needed for them to grow.
Are there any apps, books, podcasts or other resources that you’ve benefited from using?
Lately, I’ve been listening to several audiobooks that I found that are slanted towards women empowerment in the workplace.
1. Secrets of Six-Figure Women: Surprising Strategies to Up your Earnings and Change your Life by Barbara Stanny
2. Boss Bitch by Nicole Pain
I think so much of being successful is having the right mindset and believing in yourself, mixed with a whole lot of hard work. There’s no secret recipe and everyone is different, but the more that I talk with other successful women and hear their stories or listen to their stories on podcasts, it just helps you get in the mindset that anything is possible.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.rgalliance.com
- Phone: 619-701-1028
- Email: [email protected]
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RGAlliance
Image Credit:
Steve Edmund, Kiwi Craig Brayton, Ariodite Films
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