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hi everyone um my name is john ottavio i'm the strategic partnerships manager here at amaca today i'm joined by jamie smith the co-founder and ceo of amplify advisors amplifyadvisors is a full service accounting practice and also a growth consulting firm based out of calgary canada jamie's team at amplify offers a holistic accounting and finance service ranging from outsourced cfo cpa recruitment and consulting for technology and business strategy they cater for small medium businesses who typically utilize xero and quickbooks as well as more enterprise-sized clients who leverage erp systems such as netsuite so jamie thanks for joining us today i appreciate the opportunity thank you right so look we'll move into i guess the five um fireside questions a lot of your clients you already have a understanding of okay if they're small medium businesses we're going to put them onto xero and other applications in your tech stack have you ever had clients that are resistant to implementing those types of technologies outside of the core accounting software what i mean by that is something that i guess we experience a bit of america is the unknowns a lot of customers will be resistant to adopting technology because it's an unknown it's a new thing it's a disruption to their current processes and something that we look to do is eliminate a lot of those unknowns by offering free guided setups for all of our activated activated integrations to take the users through an end-to-end setup of the integration with one of our specialized accounting experts so is that something that is also done across amplify when discussing the type of technology you're going to look to implement to your clients and does that help with overcoming any resistance yeah so a couple things there i mean the one thing that i always tell our cfos and and our team is that at the end of the day we are disruptive right and it's up to us to decide what end of the spectrum of disruption we are so obviously what's in the heads of the clients and what's stopping them from taking on a cfo to begin with actually as well as the technology is often picturing that disruption as being chaos and um you know having a negative impact on the employees having the employees feel bad about prior processes and prior habits and prior costs etc and they don't want that negative disruption and and pulling people out of what's actually making the business money right but you can also be disruptive in a positive way which is not to be cheesy but to amplify strategy and to amplify growth and so if you constantly tie everything back to the growth and strategy of the client i find the conversation is much easier so if you're talking about implementing a software because it's going to save money or save time or be less manual which i know we've talked about all that and as accountants we all get that that doesn't speak to business owners that doesn't what speaks to business owners is understanding how i'm going to grow faster i'm going to grow with more profit or i'm going to achieve the purpose and the strategy that i have set out to do that's what speaks to me as a business owner so using that language and turning the decision around directly tying it to the strategy that they've told you that's not about you that's about them that's going to get the conversation going much faster and it's going to let them visualize why it matters because if all you're talking about is transactional in the weed stuff they don't actually care how hard that is for you exactly you know what i mean they don't care that it takes you a long time they don't care that it's not fun for your team like i mean they care but they don't that's not inspiring that's not going to help them make the decision yeah and i feel like it's something that needs to be reasoned with the clients we all know the business owners are time poor and implementing these types of technology can in some degree make them time rich whereby they've got up-to-date accounting softwares they can make more informed business decisions through the use of this technology so i think as you were saying changing the angle of the conversation definitely helps minimize that that resistance totally and if you know they're time sensitive then you speak about how they can use that time to be more in touch with their team or more in touch with their clients or customers or driving more revenue by focusing on the new region and so you talk about the time in in the capacity that matters to them as opposed to the time in regards to things that aren't as uh relevant to them yeah that makes sense that makes complete sense you know has being a cloud cloud accounting first firm has that actually improved lead conversion when you are talking to you know customers that are exploring different options because as as all business owners do you know they look at they want to understand what's out there in the market how is your firm better than the other has has having that technology stack and understanding of how technology can you know enhance the customer's experience has that actually improved your lead generation and lead conversion it has and it's interesting because we don't have it all over our website in fact i don't even know if it's even on our website anymore which systems we use and and what and how we use technology to help us do our job that's um not even on our website in any prominent way might not even be on there at all um but yet it comes up in the conversations with our sales team for sure absolutely does and it also comes up actually when we do our net promoter score and our surveys with customers it comes up in the comments quite a bit and so where it matters to them is that you know all the technologies that we put into place are providing scale that will outlast their relationship with amplify right so inherently they've got that value and that setup which is there for the lifetime of their business regardless of how long they stay um needing our services right because with with um success they will all grow our services and have their own internal team that's taking care of things so that is like a tangible asset to them as opposed to a service which is not never tangible never left behind right and so they do absolutely see a lot of value in it and they also recognize you know that it is through technology that we have such great results in terms of timely reporting less errors um acting quickly on decision making analysis and and things that matter to them right because we have that information at our fingertips to actually get into strategic conversations as opposed to most of them come from uh experiences where by the time they got financial information it was really a compliance exercise because it was meaningless to management decisions it was far too outdated be it you know 30 days 45 days 60 days that's when they would get their financials so it was kind of just uh i'm supposed to get financials i better check no one's there's no fraud here and of course send it to tax or send it to the bank or what have you it was just it was just a check the box exercise and if you needed to do analysis you didn't have access to what you needed anyways yeah no definitely and we actually held some case studies on this same topic and we found that for the accounting firms that have actually incorporated practice enablement technology such as integrations or proposal automation software that's actually minimized the time that they're spending on the more time consuming data entry manual type tasks so it's freed up time that they can then spend on business development opportunities or increasing the allocation to sales budgets and areas of the business that will then grow the firm in tandem as well has there ever been an occasion where amplifier has you know been chosen by one of your end clients just by the use of your technology i don't know if it's ever been the vl end-all because it's not what we it's not the foot we put forward in our sales process but certainly i think you know there is a desire to be tech savvy and to work with tech savvy companies right so even you mentioned proposals and it was um it was a deal breaker for us actually to move to finally move to a proper proposal software where you have templates and everything set up and now you know we can do attempt we can do a proposal that's incredibly personal and customized within 10 minutes and that same one used to have to go back and forth even just to check for spelling mistakes at you know at least three or four times it's just a big big difference and then you know you send a proposal that doesn't have a spelling mistake and that makes a difference right it's those little things that can make a difference and i think though you know when it comes to clients and and how tech savvy they are though it is really important to actually recognize the audience like even today i had a conversation with one of our cfos who uses decisions within microsoft which is a project management communication tool but you know sometimes you have to remember that not everybody on the other side is tech savvy or wants to push a button and open a new software what the what in the world is this right and so you have to know your audience a bit and so you know with the proposals or with the decisions sometimes you still have to send an old-fashioned email right and maybe some of them even ask can you send it to me in pdf and you can't get too upset about that right you have to accept the feedback and bring them along for the journey yeah and that's part of the educational piece as well the the beauty about the type of technology that it sounds like amplifier is implementing is it's very customizable in nature there's never ever going to be a one-size-fits-all model and look that's something that we've even found across our business as well creating a customizable solution that does look to fit all different use cases has been one of the main reasons why we've found so much success across so many different accounting practices on a global scale so i can definitely definitely reason with you on that one