Customers  /  GrowthLab

Since adopting Ignition, GrowthLab Financial has streamlined client engagements, billing, and collections, freeing up both cash and time to focus on higher-value services, leading to substantial business growth.

ACCOUNTING 4 mins 25 Jul 2024
100%
increase in service offerings by expanding more advisory
6 hrs
saved per engagement letter by standardizing agreements
95%
reduction in accounts receivable by automating payments

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

Dan Gertrudes, CEO, GrowthLab Financial

The challenge: Inefficient processes and more hold back firm growth

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. 

Inefficient processes

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. 

Late payments

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.

Limited service offerings

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.

“What we were trying to solve for then was identifying off-the-shelf platforms that could reduce waste, increase speed, and ultimately have an ROI increased margin,” he says.

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.

The solution: Transform pricing, client agreements, and payment collection with Ignition

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

Sending engagement letters in minutes, not hours

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.

"Before Ignition, our team worked 80-hour weeks during tax season,” says Dan Gertrudes. “After Ignition, they're doing 40-hour weeks."

Slashing AR by 95%

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.

Diversifying service offerings to scale revenue

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

"Since signing up with Ignition in 2017, we have increased our service offerings by 100%, so two-fold," says Dan.

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.

“Ignition has also enabled us to increase our annual tax compliance revenue by 20 to 25%, because now we use the platform to give customers the choice between on-time filings and on-extension filing, which tends to be a lower discount.”

Clearly communicating firm value

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.”

GrowthLab's 8-step growth playbook

Discover how to run the smartest business.

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.

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