Let me tell you a story.

I started working with a client (we’ll call her June) who has a degreed accountant doing the bookkeeping and an outside tax person handling tax accounting. We started doing some cleanup work reconfiguring the balance sheet accounts and income statement accounts so they more readily measured June’s business.

One of the things that needed to happen was reclassifying owner expenses. From the operating perspective, those expenses didn’t belong in the operating costs of the business so we appropriately classified them as such.

But her bookkeeper (we’ll call him Sam) insisted, “that’s going to trigger a tax audit.”

He got worked up about it, fed that back to June, and got her all spun up about it.

She understood what was happening after we explained that we were presenting the numbers properly in accordance with good accounting principles and trying to get financial statements to reflect the company’s operating position and results, rather than her personal piggybank.

But she told us: “Sam’s been with me for a while and I trust him.”

That comment triggered me to look into what creates trust and what trust truly is.

Click here to discover the three types of trust in organizational relationships and how to build trust within your business.