S01 E21: How this firm owner built automation to achieve an increased client retention rate in his firm with Korey Cournoyer

Roman Villard
Awesome. Well today we have Korey Cournoyer here chatting with us about automation. Super excited about this conversation. Korey, how are you?

Korey Cournoyer
I’m hanging in there. Happy Monday.

Roman Villard
Happy Monday Indeed. We’d love to start just by you giving a brief introduction of yourself and of Growth Lab.

Korey Cournoyer
Sure! Korey Cournoyer from Growth Lab, we are kind of a unique mix of a firm. You know, at our core, we are really an accounting FPN a tax practice. And over the past few years, we’ve kind of focused a little bit more on a separate front on automation, particularly working with other accounting firms and kind of helping them develop their own processes.

Roman Villard
Nice and what size and staging companies do you work with? About how many companies have you helped out on the automation front?

Korey Cournoyer
On the automation front, we work kind of the targets, we’d like to work with other accounting firms. Anywhere from usually find the sweet spot between five and 50 employees. That’s a big range. But it depends on really if they have an internal tech team or not. So it’s kind of how far we can help them with. We’ve worked with many firms kind of across the board and have to go into detail on like how we’ve helped them. But it’s really spent in the whole gamut of onboarding, through service, delivery, HR. everything in between.

Roman Villard
Nice. That’s good. And one thing that you didn’t mention that all humblebrag for you, is that I’ve had the pleasure of listening to you speak at a conference and you’re getting more engaged on speaking on this topic of automation at conferences. Do you have any coming up? Is there anything that we should be aware of in terms of your content out there,

Korey Cournoyer
I’m trying to always put out content, cuz I’m passionate about this topic. Conferences, I’ll be at QuickBooks connect, not speaking there. So love to meet up with people hoping to speak at scaling, probably the next one in next June? I think so.

Roman Villard
Perfect. Perfect. Awesome. Well, let’s Let’s rally around the topic of automation. And the process that firm owners should be thinking about relative to starting to move into Phase One of automation for their firm. So when you start talking to a firm, where do you start? What’s the what’s a really good starting point for a firm as they started exploring this topic?

Korey Cournoyer
It’s tough. I usually ask people, do you know what you want to automate? And it’s usually a 5050. Answer. Yes, help me with this one discrete pain point, right, that step baby step eight. And that’s, that takes one approach. But more commonly I find people say, I don’t know helped me figure it out. I just know that automation and AI and chat CBT kind of seems to be the big like, trends, right? I know it’s out there. And I know it could be valuable. So help me figure it out. In my response to that is, like, let’s process map. And process mapping is like a big topic. I don’t feel like it’s talked about enough. Because the common response from people is, I know what my process is, right? Like, I know, Joe picks up here passes it to Sally and enters data here. And that’s great. But I believe that it’s not until you can truly map everything visually, in terms of who touches it, when do they touch it? Why did they touch it? What apps it’s on until you can get that documented? That you should actually even begin automating anything to start with. So that’s usually where I start with firms.

Roman Villard
Oh, that’s it’s really interesting, because to your point, everybody’s so fixated on chat, GPT and AI and trying to figure out how to automate things right out the gates. And it’s such a great suggestion to focus on process mapping first, because I know that firm owners and most business owners in general, just hate documentation of processes. And so when you’re starting to think about process mapping for an accounting firm, do you start there with like the sales process? Like do you start at kind of inception and then work your way through a client lifecycle? Or like, how do you actually accomplish going about process?

Korey Cournoyer
That’s a great question. I like to start with the sales to onboarding phase. And I find that during that phase is there’s so many apps that are kind of intertwined in your workflow between the sales apps, the CRM, the the deal management, the kind of gets passed to the service team with like, the general ledger, their workflow management system, right. So there’s a lot of apps used. And that’s usually the most critical point on a with the clients. Like if you can’t get your Client Onboarding solid, and they have bad client experience that kind of sets the stage. And so not only does this help the firm internally By focusing there, but it helps set client expectations to increase retention. So I like to start there and then go past that.

Roman Villard
Okay, so from there, you know, say we’re using HubSpot, we’ve got external data coming in, we’ve got our leads data, we’re then moving into a discovery process your traditional sales process, contract signing, billing, Client Onboarding, do you then kind of naturally go through the client lifecycle from contract signed to onboarding to ongoing service?

Korey Cournoyer
Usually, yeah, starting with the onboarding. Usually, I find working with the CRM and proposal management, billing, and then the workflow management tools. So it’s kind of like the trifecta, so to say, because everything builds off of that, right, once you get into the workflow management system, then it kind of just expands. So if you have, you know, the common, the common saying, like, bad data and bad data out, right, and so if you have bad data going into your workflow management system, automation is not going to just be a silver bullet.

Roman Villard
Yeah, and what’s interesting is that within each of those systems these days, you have so many tools that are starting to reinvent themselves like HubSpot AI, or fill in the blank AI automation. So I can go into HubSpot and say, Hey, automate this thing for me. How is that different than taking this approach of process mapping everything out? And then applying a broader approach to the entire process? Great question.

Korey Cournoyer
What we try and do with automation, how we want to approach it is not from a siloed lens, right? Because that’s kind of like why we, why we even got into automation, right is, is data’s in one app, whether it’s a CRM, billing QuickBooks, like Xero, the workflow management, wherever it is, it tends to be siloed. And it usually takes an individual that is usually like pushing that data along the workflow. So these tools embedded like are great for the workflow within them. But it’s when you want to expand past that. So for example, HubSpot with their like AI, right, like, can be great for generating documents or like helping the workflow in the sales process. But then you still have to pass that baton from sales process to billing and invoicing or proposals, and then pass that process from that. And that opens up a whole new can of worms. So I think they’re great tools. Don’t get me wrong, but not in silos.

Roman Villard
Yeah, because when you look at it in a silo, one automation that you have early in the process could ripple effects something way down the line that you may not have visibility into until you get there, you’re like, shoot, that automation really kind of messed me up, because now I’ve got a different data set at a different point in time in the client lifecycle.

Korey Cournoyer
Yeah, and that’s exactly why you process map is because if you build an automation to solve the pain point in the first interaction with a lead, and that automation messes something up on the last call the last touch point with a lead, like, what’s the point of the automation? Right?

Roman Villard
Yeah, then you’re, you’re causing more work for yourself the end of the day. So in the process mapping, you mentioned a variety of apps, that that companies may have you, you mentioned, individuals that are moving data forward throughout a process, what are the other key factors in process mapping that somebody should be aware of, if they’re putting pen to paper on process mapping?

Korey Cournoyer
I’m going to come full circle to question for a second, because I like to approach automation from more of like a human and loop style. So I’m not a believer in the current state of just using automation to replace people, or to automate your entire firm and like, sit back, like, I think there’s a place for that. But that’s not my approach with it. It’s very much workflow focused. And so I bring that up, because I think we’re an important piece of that mapping. And kind of some of these like, components you want to think of are also what’s the logic behind it? Like, does the does your workflow, follow a standardised logic, whether that’s, you know, if if this then that or it always follows this data set, or it always comes in this format, right? You need that logic, you need that standardisation in your process, because otherwise, the automation is going to have so many variables that it’s not even worth doing it in first place.

Roman Villard
That’s interesting. And so in order to process map effectively, you’re trying to advise to coach firm owners on let’s understand, like, what the inputs are, let’s granularly define things, because firm owners are like, Oh, but this exception happens and I let clients do this to me, and then I oftentimes allow for that. So you’re trying to drill them down into specificity. around a process, so then they can start to process map more effectively for automation.

Korey Cournoyer
Yeah, and it’s okay to have, you know, nuances to that, obviously, it’s going to happen can avoid that. But if you can’t document them, and it’s kind of just off Romans whim, it’s, you know, no automation, whether I do it or someone else does it, it’s not gonna, it’s not going to be successful in the long run.

Roman Villard
Gosh, I feel like you’re preaching directly at me right now, where, you know, I like the client service aspect, I like kind of going above and beyond, and I go outside of the normal process, to serve clients. And ultimately, I kind of shoot myself in the foot because of that, but it’s a good point to hone in on those things, and then build a process and a map around that. So then you can start to focus on automation. So, alright, we’ve got process mapping, kind of articulated in the sense that that’s a really good first step. Now, once we have that process map written out from client lifecycle beginning to end, how do you start to triage what is the most important place to start from an automation standpoint?

Korey Cournoyer
can answer this 20 ways? It depends. It depends who’s building the automation. And I don’t just say that for my angle. You know, automation is a fun thing for people where I feel like it provides an outlet for creativity and an accounting space, which is traditionally not as creative, right. And so if you’re doing it, because you enjoy the aspect of like trying to build an automation, right, and you’re going to spend your time either way, experimenting, start with like the lowest hanging fruit that’s going to open up as much time as possible, right, it may not be the most impactful to the client lifecycle. But if it’s something that you’re going to spend the time in either way, experimenting with, free up your time first, right? Because you’re going to free up your time, you’re gonna be able to focus on more things. If you’re having someone else do it, then I usually say the opposite, like focus on what’s going to impact the client lifecycle the most what’s going to create retention, what’s going to create capacity openings for your onboarding or service team focused on what’s going to impact down the line the most. So there’s like really two routes? And it depends, unfortunately.

Roman Villard
Yeah, no, that’s good, though. Because I think you can start to, to orient firm owners around the different paths that they could take where on one side on the client experience client retention side, you’re really talking about revenue and net revenue retention. And that is an impactful metric for firm growth. Whereas if I’m a firm runner that you know, I’m okay, where I’m at, I just want to free up my time. So I can, you know, be my kids soccer coach, like, I want to free up those repetitive tasks. And I’m totally fine with taking the approach of let’s get my time freed up and not worry about as much of the revenue piece of it.

Korey Cournoyer
Yeah.

Roman Villard
That’s, that’s super interesting.

Korey Cournoyer
I’m glad you brought that up. Because I think firm owners should ask themselves, why are they automating? And that, like, seems so silly of a question. But I don’t think it is because, like you said, like, do you enjoy just technology and experimentation and stuff? Like, that’s cool, like, do it right. But know that going into it. Because if you’re just going into it just to automate without understanding why you’re doing it, I don’t feel like you will get the biggest impact out of any automation.

Roman Villard
It’s an interesting question, because I would pose that question to myself. And I would probably say, Well, I want to free up my time, I want to increase revenue. I want better retention, like all of the above, please. And I would think most founders would probably fall under that bucket. But I think it is a really good introspective question to ask, it’s like, what what is the why behind this? And do you have those conversations with with clients that you guys bring on board?

Korey Cournoyer
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s usually one of the first questions. What are you trying to accomplish out of this, because I don’t believe when you process map, you usually uncover multiple areas that you can automate, right? And I don’t believe that you should automate all of them at once. Because it usually impacts not only yourself, but your team, right. And if on one day you flip a switch, and their whole, their whole processes changed, it doesn’t matter that it’s automated, it’s not going to be successful if the team doesn’t adopt the new process. And so I usually like to tell people to kind of chunk it into phases. And so that those facings come into play based on what do you want out of that? So you try to free capacity and you try to get clients to the pipeline quicker. Are you trying to increase your billable rates?

Roman Villard
Yeah. That’s great. So we’ve got process mapping as a first step and then prioritising and understand the why behind. You know why you want to move into this step of Automation. From there, you know, if a firm owner is DIY in their approach to automation, they’ve gone through these steps, you know, and they’ve identified Alright, I want to I want to start with this one specific, simple task to free up my time. Where do I go to start understanding how I can I can do that. And we can kind of talk about a scenario that you guys have encountered in that space too.

Korey Cournoyer
If it’s a DIY, I usually say look for something like, like a Zapier or something like that. And there’s plenty of resources out there for Zapier, we personally would rebuild things. We don’t use Zapier. Happy to go into that, because I think that’s a valuable conversation. But if it’s more of a DIY, and kind of getting started and feeling comfortable with automations, I do recommend Zapier because it’s, there’s so much resources out there that you know, you can, you can set up an automation in 510 minutes very easily. And I think, I think when firm owners begin to do that, and even if they experiment by themselves, I usually find their eyes just like, wide open, right, they realise the potential, and then that opens the doors to “now what else?”

Roman Villard
It’s amazing what open API’s have done and tools like Zapier to where, you know, you can just select what systems you have, you want to connect, and then there’s a series of tasks that are already kind of baked into the platform that you can say, I want to zap this data over to this system, and boom, you’ve automatically reduced that one step from manually typing information to now it’s in your new system. So it’s a great starting point. In what cases would you not advise a tool like Zapier to start?

Korey Cournoyer
I would not advise it if if there’s too much logic involved with it, you know, if it’s like, if you have four different routes that someone could take, and there’s filtering involved in things, you can definitely do it in those tools, those DIY tools, but it may become too overkill to actually manage on the line. And if you’re spending the same amount of time to manage this as you are to just do it. Once again, what are you automating? Right? So yeah, based on the complexity, unfortunately.

Roman Villard
Well, it’s the same, it’s the same way that we advise clients on the accounting and financial advisory side of things, right. It’s like, you can manage your own bookkeeping, you can manage your own accounting and financial reporting. But you’ve reached a point in complexity in which it merits an outside service or professionals implementing this for you. And there’s certainly those those inflection points at companies and their complexity to do that. And so with the if the first step is Zapier is maybe too simple, too, too easy. In a way, you need more complexity is the next step to go find a provider to help with that type of support.

Korey Cournoyer
Yes, usually, there’s actually something or like another approach to that I suggest with people, if they’re doing the DIY method is also like, take a look at which ones of your apps have native integrations already. And this is an interesting one that we come into a lot. And I’ll use a random example with ignition with we use carbon internally. There’s a native integration there. But sometimes there’s some logic that you want to build in that the native integration doesn’t have. So for example, on our case, we built this a few, many times. You know, if an engagement agreement is signed, create this work item, this workflow, right? Well, what if it’s just a pricing adjustment, and it’s the same workflow, just reprint repriced re scoped? We don’t want to duplicate that work item to keep going. Right. So that’s where maybe you do want to do like a Zapier integration more custom, even though they have native available. So that opens a whole new floodgate, right.

Roman Villard
Yeah, that’s such a good recommendation, because many of the systems that accountants use today do have those native integrations and it’s just a matter of navigating down to see what apps you can connect to. Yeah, you know, all the gastos of the world, the ignitions the carbons, the financial sense, like they, they all have these native integrations. And so if you don’t have to go spend more time and money to go build something out and Zapier, start there. That’s such a good a good tip. Okay, so we’ve gone through kind of the DIY approach the process mapping. What types of conversations do you have with clients who have tried to do it themselves and are just like, gosh, I am fed up with this. I’ve tried my best I don’t get it. I don’t know where to go from here. Like how do you how do you talk to those those clients and help them unwind their own challenges?

Korey Cournoyer
What I usually find is they Come to me once they’ve built it. It’s been successful. And they deployed it, ironically. And then they realise it breaks. And now what do you think of automation and technology, and we’ve been fortunate to have these tools, that kind of sass just kind of takes care of itself, right? They have bugs, but they fix it. When you’re building your own DIY automations. Like, these tools are very easy, and it’s amazing. But it’s going to break. And it doesn’t matter. If you have you know, someone from Google developing it for you, it’s going to break its natural, that’s usually where I find them kind of throwing up the white flag and saying, I need help. And that’s kind of where we’ve historically come in is helping them to manage it and monitor and maintain it after the fact.

Roman Villard
Got it. So it’s not only in the initial setup, and the importance of getting that done correctly, it’s in the ongoing support and maintenance of that, because one thing that I always forget is like once it’s set up, you still have to monitor it’s not just set it and forget it type thing. And so what types of maintenance items, ongoing support, should somebody be thinking about whether they’ve done it themselves, or they’ve partnered with a team like Growth Lab to support them in that?

Korey Cournoyer
I think this comes back full dislike full circle is, you know, what, what do you focus on automating right? If you’re doing it yourself, especially like, where do you prioritise? And I kind of answered you with, you know, depends what you want out of it. Right, maybe another lens, look at this through is, in a very simplified manner, though, was how many apps you connecting? And it seems so like linear and simple, but it’s also the more apps the more prone to issues, just, you know, breaking the API changes, it’s natural, right? Some things to think about are how many apps do you have connected, just more prone to errors? How much data is passing through, because if it does break on you, and you are doing, say, daily journal entries, or daily, like entries of transactions, right? If it breaks, you could be missing a lot of data over that time. So it’s, it’s it’s the sheer amount of connections and transit, connections and data that flows through, that people should be thinking about where they may want someone else to support them.

Roman Villard
Yeah, I feel like that’s one thing that the failsafes, the checks and balances on DIY automation that are probably more difficult to achieve. It may be Zapier has made it easy and a lot of ways to create some degree of automation. And maybe they’ll send you a notification if it breaks. But ultimately, to be able to stay on top of that and find that email in your inbox says hey, this is broke, and your clients no longer receiving X, Y and Z data to stay on top of that is a lot more than just creating an automation and letting it run.

Korey Cournoyer
And sometimes the maintenance takes twice as long as the build. Because then you’re you’re going back to you know, finding what was the error? What what what data came in what did it so that I don’t have duplicates, right? And it comes back full circle to why you automating in the first place.

Roman Villard
Right? Yeah. So what I’ve gathered from this is that you really have to know your reason, behind pushing into automation, and not just following the whims of what you see on social media as to why you need to automate, but realistically identifying how and why you want to be moving into this arena and have purpose behind it.

Korey Cournoyer
Yeah. Yeah, I am supportive of you know, experimentation. Like I love experimentation, right? So I’m very supportive of that. I think we just have to all be comfortable with why are we experimenting, which will help us all, you know, be better at what we do, right?

Roman Villard
It is a lot of fun to experience. I listened to want to chat, Davis’s sessions that that scaling or bridging the gap. And it just was so motivating and encouraging. Like this is possible to go in and build something with chat GBT on Google Apps Script. And now I recognise fully that the amount of time that I spent on building something very simple was far more time than I need to be spending on that. But it’s fun. It’s a lot of fun. But also, like, I need to self recognise when it’s time to bring in somebody that does this day in day out, because ultimately, if it comes back to time, then I need to be aware of how my time has been spent, like every other firm runner out there.

Korey Cournoyer
I think it’s you made a great point. Like it’s the same thing with recommendations for accounting to businesses, right if if they just started their business yesterday have no transactions have nothing going on? They’re probably not a good fit for many firms, right? It’s helping them do it themselves is very healthy because then then they begin to value automation or bookkeeping, before they even get up to that point.

Roman Villard
And the other thing too, that I was thinking about is this not only automation, but when you go back to process map, that is certainly something that can help increase your your exit potential, your valuation potential if you ever are looking to get out of your current business. And so for that as a number one first recommendation and get started in this, if you can just start there that will add a tremendous amount of value today for your team and tomorrow for a potential exit.

Korey Cournoyer
On top of that, the exit potential plus team retention team training, right? You know, we obviously have a challenge across many industries, but accounting with finding people. And if we can have documentation and standard processes for these people, you know, new team members, it’s gonna make your life a lot easier. Forget automation to start with, right, just there.

Roman Villard
Yeah, that’s great. And I do know that you personally, and the Growth Lab App stream team, more broadly have a tonne of content out there related to specific apps to automations. You’ve built different things happening on the marketing front. So if somebody’s looking to learn more about what you guys do, looking to find you. How they go about finding ya’ll?

Korey Cournoyer
www.growthlabfinancial.com and at the top, there’s a automation section. So check us out there this will find all the content or on LinkedIn, feel free to reach out.

Roman Villard
Perfect, sounds good. Well, I learned a lot and I’m going to be digging into my process map shortly after this. So really appreciate you coming on to counting flow today.

Korey Cournoyer
Oh, thanks, Roman.

Roman Villard
See ya Korey.