GrowthLab Financial, a premiere Finance-as-a-Service (FaaS) firm based in Providence, Rhode Island, was struggling with several pain points that were hindering its growth and revenue potential. 

Among these bottlenecks were inefficient processes, late payments, and a limited service offering. 

The manual process of creating and managing engagement agreements was both time-consuming and tedious. Every client agreement involved multiple steps. “To put together an engagement agreement back in the day, you had to whip up a Word document, PDF it, Docusign it, send it to the customer to Docusign it – back and forth – then send out the authorization payment via Docusign – more back and forth,” says Dan Gertrudes, GrowthLab’s CEO. 

What’s more, the firm faced cash flow issues. “Back then [before Ignition], I had about 60 days’ worth of accounts receivable [AR],” says Dan Gertrudes. “We weren't as big, but still, it was always floating around $125,000 to $150,000 in AR. The manual invoicing and collection processes were not only cumbersome but also delayed payments, affecting GrowthLab’s overall financial health.

Finally, resource constraints limited GrowthLab’s ability to move beyond its traditional focus on bookkeeping and CFO services – to scale and diversify. 

These inefficiencies led Dan Gertrudes and his team to look at where the company was investing internally.

He and his team identified three areas for the business to invest in: the front-end customer-relationship management (CRM) system, a platform to handle everything from pricing and engagement agreements to collections – that’s where Ignition came in – and more customer-facing workflows and transparency, for which GrowthLab looked to both Karbon and Ignition. 

Ultimately, the GrowthLab team identified a need for a more integrated, automated solution as the firm aimed to modernize operations and scale efficiently.

To tackle these challenges head-on, GrowthLab made Ignition a must-have tool within its business tech stack in 2017. 

First up, Ignition helped streamline some of the firm’s inefficient practices. The process of creating and managing engagement letter agreements is now automated and standardized. This automation significantly reduced the time spent on client agreements from roughly six hours apiece to mere minutes.

The time savings with Ignition has dramatically improved GrowthLab team efficiency during the busy tax season.

Ignition also helped GrowthLab free up cash. The platform enabled GrowthLab to automate its invoicing and payment processes, significantly reducing the time and effort required for chasing late payments. Clients could now receive, review, and approve proposals quickly and enter their payment details upfront – without all the back and forth – leading to faster payments and reduced AR for Dan Gertrudes and his team.

“Today, our AR is no more than twenty-thousand bucks, which is less than 5% of our revenue,” says Dan.

With the time savings and cash flow improvements Ignition enabled, GrowthLab could focus on expanding its service offering.

The firm moved beyond bookkeeping and CFO services to include tax, financial planning and analysis (FP&A), HR, and more, providing more value to their clients and diversifying their revenue streams.

To do this, GrowthLab has gone a step further in leveraging Ignition’s service library. “We're not just creating one line item for a service,” says Dan. “If we're providing you with monthly recurring accounting services, you'll see the monthly recurring accounting and under each, you'll have sections listing everything we're actually doing. So when we whip up a new engagement agreement, it gives us the kitchen sink. And we remove what we don't want using the sections, which is much more efficient, and then that ties back to our pricing calculator.” 

Dan has taken advantage of Ignition’s fixed-fee pricing packages feature to boost revenue as well.

What’s more, GrowthLab takes advantage of Ignition’s video and brochure features to create a more personalized and engaging client experience. This helps the team clearly communicate the value proposition of GrowthLab’s services.

“When you can bring your value proposition right in front of your customers, and they're about to sign an engagement agreement, it creates a relationship,” says Dan. 

“We love the videos feature and the pamphlet feature. And because our videos are hosted on YouTube, we can tell when a potential prospect clicks on that video inside Ignition.” 

Dan also reminds us why personalizing features such as these are beneficial to businesses: “In this day and age, we're selling professional services – without ever meeting you in person,” he says. “That, historically, is totally crazy. You never would have thought that could happen 10 years ago.” 

As for pricing, says Dan, with greater transparency in the process, “you can spend less time building an engagement agreement and more time focusing on what you're actually going to do for the customer on a month-in-month-out basis.”

By automating critical processes and expanding service offerings with Ignition, GrowthLab has not only improved its financial health and increased revenue, but also positioned itself as a leader in the accounting industry.