Owning It

Startup Firm, White & Gale Consulting, Scales their Business with Native Apps on Salesforce®

There are growing businesses all over the world – some are growing faster than anticipated. This often leads to the need for outsourced resources in several departments. In fact, 52% of small businesses plan to outsource at least one business process in 2019, according to Clutch. Finding outsourced talent to fill key roles to Human Resources (HR) planning is where White & Gale Consulting shines.

Background

White & Gale Consulting is a Human Resources consulting firm focused on building better workplaces. Secondly, they expand the well-being of organizations and their people. They build infrastructure, programs, and services to support the health of growing businesses. White & Gale Consulting co-Founders, Laura Gale, and Jamie White saw an opportunity to serve businesses across Canada in need of quality HR support. Their typical customer is in the mid-to-enterprise level with about 200 to 500 employees. Therefore, they serve organizations that are growing fast and in need expertise in several facets of HR. What sets White and Gale apart from other advisory firms is their level of experience. Laura comes from an extensive HR Compensation background. She built compensation programs for multinational corporations such as Blackberry, Lululemon, and PwC. Jamie’s first career was in investment banking. He worked for such firms as Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, and Barclays Capital. He brings a high level of financial and technological leadership to White & Gale. “White & Gale came out of an idea to run our business, our way. We wanted to build a scalable business from the get-go to position ourselves better to serve our clients well now and into the future. Our experience has taught us that a strong understanding of our client’s needs combined with a robust technological platform would give us the best chance for long term success,” said Jamie.  

Starting Your Business with Salesforce

Starting your own business comes with its fair share of excitement and struggles. From obtaining new customers to the processes that run your business, there is so much to focus on. White & Gale is now starting to gain recognition in the mid-market. So, their focus now is on growth and being able to not only keep up with demand but to thrive. “Word of mouth is picking up, people are calling us first. It’s really an exciting time because it reiterates that our belief in this business CAN be realized,” said Jamie. “Our priority and our goal is to build something scaleable for us and our customers. And we believe the combination of our business approach and our technology sets us up to accomplish this.” When Jamie and Laura decided to take White & Gale on to Salesforce, there was a learning curve given the platform’s innovative approach to customer relationship management (CRM). The Salesforce Platform offered a more powerful way to handle customer engagement and tracking. Additionally, the platform features the most up-to-date technology in the CRM industry. In contrast, this is something that many legacy systems do not offer. “It took us some time to get used to Salesforce and all of its incredible offerings and the support team at Accounting Seed was instrumental in helping us come up to speed with both Salesforce and their Accounting App. They are always extremely responsive and incredibly knowledgeable – a pleasure to work with.” 

Technology that Grows with You

The first thing that came to mind after White & Gale signed on to Salesforce was implementing an accounting system on the platform. Scaling their business was and continues to be a major goal of the company, White & Gale needed technology that was not only seamlessly connected but also built for growth years down the line. “We explored many options and came to the conclusion that we would potentially outgrow many of the features in a lot of the offerings within a couple of years. Our first priority was getting an accounting system that can scale with our business. We needed something that would grow with us,” said Jamie. The combination of Salesforce and Accounting Seed has perfectly positioned White & Gale for success. As their number of leads, transactions, and reporting needs continue to expand, both systems work in unison to continuously supply the functionality and bandwidth they need. Above all, the flexibility of both platforms ensures that any changes they need to make can be implemented quickly. As a result, operations and accounting don’t skip a beat. But, it didn’t stop there.  

Seamless Connectivity with Salesforce Native Apps

The smooth connectivity between native applications allowed White & Gale to broaden their IT resources to make running the business even easier. For example, they added another native application and partner of Accounting Seed, Krow PSA. This app handles their specific Professional Services Automation needs. In addition, Krow provides excellent timesheet capabilities which all come together to make a powerful Project Management/Accounting/CRM combination. “As a virtual team, we knew we needed a product solution that fully integrated all of our internal processes,” said Jamie. The combination of these three solutions allows White & Gale to keep tabs on the business without having to physically check-in with their consultants and project managers.

Timesheet Functionality

When it comes to Krow, the timesheet functionality has become a vital and valuable asset to the team. “[The timesheets] work seamlessly with the Professional Services Automation tools as well as Salesforce.com, allowing our consultants to allocate time, on the fly, to individual projects and tasks. At the end of the day, the theoretical cash in-/outflows can be seen in almost real-time. This makes managing the business that much more dynamic and gives us the ability to make resource allocation decisions in far less time than would otherwise be possible.” said Jamie. Because of the one-click cost allocation with Krow, Jamie and the team can plan quickly and effectively. Not only this, but everything that is done in Krow can work within the functionality of Salesforce and Accounting Seed. “The management reporting system we are developing using the data from Krow and Accounting Seed is absolutely amazing. Billables, payables, timesheets, and expenses, etc… all of these inputs available at the push of a button. It is blowing us away!”  

Native Apps > Connectors

White & Gale is experiencing all the benefits of native applications on Salesforce. These are apps built on top of the platform without sync issues or connectors because they share the same API. There is no fear of showing up to work and having systems down or needing to perform manual entry between multiple systems. Native applications on Salesforce bring technology together in a way that isn’t possible with connectors. This is why bringing Krow into the mix made so much sense for White & Gale. “Krow Software fit naturally into everything because they are also built on Salesforce like Accounting Seed. Our entire business is now in one place.” There are a lot of thrilling aspects when starting a new business. But for Jamie, he didn’t expect to enjoy learning the accounting side as much as he did. “When you think about it, accounting really is the language of business. After learning to use Accounting Seed and working with the support team, I feel like I’m now fluent in this language in a way that I wasn’t before despite my extensive background in the banking world.”  

Running Your Business, Your Way

The new technology Jamie and Laura have found with Salesforce has taught them key business lessons and enables them to begin each day with a fresh perspective. “[Starting a business] is a big, big mountain to climb and every day we get a little bit higher. We are now 10 months into this and we often look back and say, ‘Wow, look where we are now!’” Jamie and Laura’s passion for excellence continues to fuel everything they do from new workflows in Salesforce to bringing new services to their clients. The beauty in White & Gale comes from their passion to deliver quality solutions in the HR field and to empower their clients to do the same. Clearly the right technology is setting them up for success in the years to come. “It is the long game, not the short game. Nothing is defined in a startup,” said Jamie. “We get to define it all – from our technology to how we serve our people and clients. How exciting is that?”