Arron Bennett owns a successful accounting firm driven by one goal - to save his clients money. While the business was doing well, he needed a cost effective solution to scale up.

“We're a highly profitable company, but having stateside workers at $50-60k a year doing just bookkeeping didn't make sense for us,” says Arron.

Bennett Financials had previously hired part time staff, but due to the large workload, mistakes crept in - some which were very costly.  What he needed was to increase the number of bookkeepers on his team but give them smaller workloads so that they could handle complex clients. And they needed to be top talent - CPAs or chartered accountants with at least five years experience or more.

Along with that growth he had to ensure that there was profitability to support the rest of the business. There was a need to plug in more staff quickly without breaking operations - including bookkeepers, a forecasting specialists and a financial planner.

Their first offshore hiring attempt failed

Arron had previously used outsourced staff from Columbia, but the language barrier proved to be an issue. His other staff members couldn’t understand his outsourced workers due to their accents. There were also lots of errors in the work.

Turning to TeamUp

Arron was referred to TeamUp and decided to take on Filipino talent, growing his team of 5 to 12.

Now, more than half of his staff are Filipino accountants hired through TeamUp. This includes two CPAs, a chartered accountant who was a university professor teaching GAAP, and someone who Arron describes as “really green with only three years of experience.” He ended up promoting her within six months. “She turned out to be our rock star, and she handles all of the bookkeepers overseas now.”

From cost center to revenue driver

Before hiring their Filipino accountants, Bennet Financials’ bookkeeping arm was a cost center due to the high cost of stateside staff. Now, it's a revenue driver.

“There’s way more money in my bookkeeping department than my CFO department,” says Arron.

He describes his Filipino staff as extremely hard-working, dedicated professionals. Prior to hiring them, he was nervous about getting remote staff and being able to manage them - but his team work autonomously and don’t need micromanagement.

“They're extremely hard workers. I don't have reservations about them being remote because they come in, they do their job, and they're constantly curious. I just like to make sure that I constantly challenge them. Their biggest thing is wanting to grow.”

Due to their previous hurdles with communication, it was very important for Arron to have talent on board that the rest of his staff could communicate with clearly.

He says his team easily understands his Filipino bookkeepers.

“One of the things that we spoke on very heavily was that any outsourced staff needed to be able to speak English very well and to communicate with us well. We haven't had a problem yet.”

Arron says his team members work together to get tasks done and create processes to solve problems without him needing to be involved. He can trust them to conduct day to day tasks and fully invest himself in the work of being a CEO and growing his business.

“I’d definitely recommend TeamUp. I’ve made introductions to my own clients who are looking for people, not necessarily just from accounting, but from other areas as well.”