CASE STUDY
How Pierce & Company Reduced Operating Costs by 50% Using Standard Operating Procedures & Virtual Assistance Provided by Well Aware
Pierce & Company is an accounting firm that provides bookkeeping & tax strategy for 7-figure businesses that are distinctly looking for Profit-First based accounting advice and support.
Pierce & Company has sustained an inbound approach to their marketing via word-of-mouth referrals from partners, including introductions made by Profit First headquarters (Mike Michalowicz) which receives a seasonally-based steady stream of warm prospect companies in need of help. In turn, Pierce & Company is faced with focusing primarily on its sales and service delivery operations, with the owner Mary Pierce acting as the principal accountant.
THE CHALLENGE
When Well Aware first engaged with Pierce & Company, it was via introduction from another one of our clients, Core Growth Strategies (one of Pierce & Co.’s partners). Namely, Well Aware was referred to Pierce & Co. as a possible solution to Mary Pierce’s desire to operate more efficiently.
When Well Aware first engaged with Pierce & Company, it was via introduction from another one of our clients, Core Growth Strategies (one of Pierce & Co.’s partners). Namely, Well Aware was referred to Pierce & Co. as a possible solution to Mary Pierce’s desire to operate more efficiently.
Amidst all of these responsibilities, Mary as well as the rest of the Pierce & Co. team has had to undergo a number of infrastructural changes to how they operated. Part of this was due to unsuccessfully trialing a relationship with Dark Horse CPA, a move that was meant to help remove much of the burden behind running an accounting firm on top of providing accounting services to clients. On top of that, many trials with various software platforms dedicated to helping CPA firms operate more efficiently produced a natural administrative / learning cost toward trying to make such platforms work, while also keeping to the responsibilities of existing client work.
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This proved to be a ton of work for Mary, who is sitting at the top of this company and facing all these responsibilities to strategize, operate, communicate, architect, and thus manage. Mary ultimately wanted to look ahead at how she can not only streamline Pierce & Co.’s operations, but also be prepared to eventually sell her business and retire. Hence, the pressure appeared indefinitely on to break out of the cycle of in-the-business work, on-the-business design, and off-the-business freedom.
OUR APPROACH
DISCOVERY CALL
Well Aware’s CEO & principal consultant Conrad Ruiz began by requesting a discovery process for all of Pierce & Co. and its staff. During this time, Conrad first met the team individually to better understand each of their roles and responsibilities, and how they managed everything from their core work, to how they communicated across other team members, all the way to how performance was documented.
Then, on his 1st call with the team as a whole, Conrad came to better understand the ways in which Pierce & Co. needed to communicate as a team amidst all of the infrastructural changes they had undergone - here, Conrad introduced Well Aware’s daily reporting operation workflow.
SEO AND EOD REPORTS
With leadership help from Mary Pierce, all Pierce & Co. personnel (along with Conrad Ruiz) began to accustom towards providing a daily Start-of-Day and End-of-Day report. Each team member would submit a message under the allocated Microsoft Teams space as a report that highlighted what they’ve recently accomplished, what they planned to accomplish, and what their blockers were - this was the Start-of-Day or SOD reporting structure. The End-of-Day or EOD report similarly highlighted what was ultimately accomplished, what is planned for tomorrow, and what blockers were fixed vs. what remained or were new.
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By the nature of this reporting process alone, check-in meetings between Mary and staff became far less about updates and far more about resolving problems that were already communicated and thus known in advance. This task eased stress by providing an up-to-date overview of the state in which each team member is operating.
At the same time, Conrad was meeting with Mary 1-on-1 in order to further dissect individual tasks and responsibilities she held directly. With the awareness provided by both Mary and staff surrounding their daily tasks, Conrad & Mary were able to begin identifying responsibilities that could be delegated to free up precious time. A number of these tasks ended up being reasonable for bringing on a bookkeeping assistant.
VIRTUAL ASSISTANCE
It was at this point that Conrad introduced Cherrie Egnisaban from the Well Aware team - Cherrie is a bookkeeping-trained Filipino virtual assistant who's already been working with Well Aware extensively, both internally and for other clients. At $15 per hour, with no minimum hours requirement, Mary was now able to outsource tasks that would otherwise have fallen on her or her team. To date, Cherrie has saved the company a total average of 7 hours per week. Cherrie didn’t have to stop at bookkeeping assistance either.
By the end of the first quarter of our working together, it had become clear to both Conrad & Mary that a change was needed with Pierce & Co.’s sales operations. For one, there was a lot of difficulty for Mary surrounding the communications about prospects that she was having with her sales representative. Due to various platform challenges across her sales and service delivery operations, Mary had to rely on communication with her sales representative on how prospects were progressing. This process was identified as slow, inconsistent, and lacking formal documentation.
STREAMLINE OPERATIONS
Conrad committed to streamlining all operations within Mary’s sales pipeline, such that Cherrie, whose cost-effectiveness was now well understood, could also operate as a sales ops assistant. Within 2 months, Conrad not only provided a complete start-to-finish sales pipeline standard operating procedure - he also updated all sales email copy, including several disqualification steps to allow a better filtering of prospects.
Mary ultimately decided to let go of her existing sales representative. Conrad supported Pierce & Co. through this transition by operating as an as-needed sales representative, at $150 per hour. This further incentivized Mary to want as much of her sales pipeline streamlined toward actions that could be taken up by a sales assistant. Later, Mary was able to use the documented sales pipeline as a reference for selecting a suitable operations platform, which allowed for automation across much of the sales pipeline.
THE RESULTS
Using the $2,000 monthly draw that went to the former sales representative as a benchmark.
Well Aware was able to keep Pierce & Co.’s cost of performing its sales operations to
less than
$1,000
per month
than the average.
Effectively, Well Aware reduced Pierce & Co.’s sales operations cost to
below
50%
conservatively
(hiring a market rate accounting firm sales rep would undoubtedly cost below $150 per hour).
Well Aware was able to generate more time and operational clarity for Mary Pierce and Pierce & Co. at large. On an ongoing, as needed basis, Well Aware continues to support Pierce & Co. with virtual assistance that continues to save time for Mary and her team.
Well Aware thanks Pierce & Co. for their willingness to adopt our communications operations, welcome our additional team members, and trust us to flesh out their sales pipeline operations to run as effectively as possible.
FINAL THOUGHTS
This case study mainly highlights Well Aware’s support of Pierce & Co. and principally Mary Pierce with executive operations. It then goes on to talk about Pierce & Co.’s sales pipeline ops. Still, our greatest concern remains - Mary still feels busier than she’d like to be, and that showed greatly throughout our efforts together. Be that as it may, our support for Mary and her company continues. Well Aware explored an introduction between Chris Edney of Sigma Squared and Mary Pierce - Chris has decades of experience with finance automation, and we were curious to see how Chris might be able to acutely understand Mary’s workflow responsibilities as an accountant, such that she can further automate her service delivery operations. We invite you to stay tuned on said referral partnership introduction and what it ends up potentially bringing to Pierce & Co’s needs for time.
If you have needs for time toward a project identical or similar to this case study, please feel free to contact Conrad Ruiz via cruiz@wellaware.me. Thank you for reading! As always, take your time, be well, and aware.
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