The Handbook: The Operations Podcast

Why your tools aren’t talking & what it’s costing you with Ryan Pearcy

• Harv Nagra • Season 1 • Episode 27

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Your tech stack might be holding your agency back more than you think.

Ryan Pearcy, founder of Digital Transformers and chartered accountant, has helped countless agencies untangle their systems and make smarter, faster decisions. He’s spent nearly 15 years helping service-based businesses clean up their systems, bringing finance, tech, and process together so leaders can make decisions based on reality.

In this episode, he helps Harv troubleshoot three common (and all-too-familiar) agency tech stack scenarios.

Here’s what we get into:

  • Why disconnected tools lead to risky, gut-feel decisions, and how to fix that
  • How spreadsheet chaos is a sign you’re due for a system rethink
  • What to do when your systems aren’t quite delivering, but you’re still paying for them

Whether you’re early-stage or at 100+ people, this one’s a must-listen if your agency is still duct-taping its way through operations.


Additional Resources:

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn. 

Follow Harv on LinkedIn.


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This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system.

Harv Nagra:

What is the biggest mistake you see businesses make when it comes to their finance and operations tech stack?

Ryan Pearcy:

Number one is they don't have an end goal, so they will pick in silos, problems they've got and look to resolve that issue. But if you do that, all you end up with is lots of different systems that don't communicate and don't deliver the ultimate End position, which is clear visibility of the key areas of our business that enable us to make decisions. So start with where do we wanna get to and work backwards from that. And I think that's the number one issue that most businesses suffer.

Harv Nagra:

Thanks for listening to The Handbook: The Agency Operations podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Scoro. If you're a regular listener, you know that I love talking about business maturity levels. Level one is where you're just making things up as you go. Level two is where you have pockets of best practice in your agency. The real milestone is level three. This is where you really grow up and centralize and codify your best practice and have best in class tools in place, and this is usually where agencies realize they need a consolidated tool to run their business. A platform like Scoro. From there, you can move on to level four, where you become a data driven organization. I saw the benefits moving to Scoro brought my agency. So where are you at? Is it time for you to move on to the next maturity level? Sign up for a free trial at Scoro. com. Or, if you arrange a demo call, tell them Harv sent you. Now, back to the episode.

Hey all. Welcome back to the podcast. I've supported and spoken to a number of agencies over the years, and I've seen it all. When it comes to Tech Stacks, there's the early stage optimism tech stack, 10 people, 20 tools and everything duct taped together with Goodwill and a Google Sheet. Then you've got the, we've grown, but nothing's changed. Tech Stack. We quoting happens in Excel, project management is in people's notebooks, and reporting is done by squinting at the bank balance. And on the other end there's the, we've invested in a big platform but kind of hate it tech stack where the tool exists, but the team's still building work arounds in Notion and Smartsheet because they don't trust it or they never implemented it properly. These businesses are all different sizes, but the pattern's the same. The tools don't talk to each other, the data's a mess, and leadership ends up flying blind. That's why I wanted to bring on today's guest, Ryan Pearcy. He's the founder of Digital Transformers, a chartered accountant, and a self-proclaimed Super Geek. Ryan spent nearly 15 years helping service-based businesses clean up their systems, bringing finance, tech, and process together so leaders can actually make decisions based on reality. Essentially, he and his team work on digital transformation projects that allow their clients to work faster and smarter. So in this episode, we're gonna try something a little different. I'm gonna walk Ryan through three agency stories that are quite similar to things I've seen or experienced myself, and I'm gonna ask Ryan to unpack what's going wrong, what they need to fix, and where they should focus first. I am calling it the Tragic Tale of three Tangled Tech Stacks. Let's get into it.

Harv Nagra:

Ryan. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Ryan Pearcy:

thank you for having me.

Harv Nagra:

So we're gonna be troubleshooting some tech stacks today. That's what I wanted to get your support on. But a few questions before we start. There's literally thousands and thousands of tools and platforms out there, there's new stuff for businesses popping up every week. Based on your experience, is there a sweet spot in terms of the number of platforms a service-based business might want to use to, run their finance, their operations, and their project management, or is a more important thing to think about how well the platforms integrate. So what are your thoughts on that?

Ryan Pearcy:

I would say the latter is more critical.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Ryan Pearcy:

about sharing data, building what we now refer to as a modern ERP. A small system that will be connected via secure APIs and allow you to essentially enter information only once. When that information goes to where it's needed. Now the volume is critical. So the volume of apps, the amount of apps you're working in, but only really if you've got people that need to be in each individual app.'cause you don't wanna overload them. If it's segregating what people work in, so you've got one app for approvals and that's the only thing they need to go into for approvals, then that's much better than having to go into three different apps for different areas for approvals. So it's

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

where are. Members of my team interacting and what's the impact on them rather than the total number of apps in the stack.

Harv Nagra:

Where do you stand on the idea of experimentation? because there's so much out there, there might be a temptation to see like., the hottest thing somebody's talking about and give it a go. what's your view is that okay and good to do? Or do you just need to keep an eye on experience for your team in terms of complexity?

Ryan Pearcy:

Magpie syndrome is definitely a problem. Uh, You

Harv Nagra:

What does that mean?

Ryan Pearcy:

it's everyone's looking for the next shiny object, right? We get drawn in'cause it's got a, a useful tool or feature that we've not seen before and we're like, oh, that looks interesting. And that is helpful to some extent because we, we like to be curious and you can only improve and adapt. If you are curious, you don't want to be stagnated and stay in one place because if you shut everything off, then you will become outdated over time. but the number one thing that businesses don't do is really hone in to maximize the software they've got. They tend to go, this isn't working for me. I'm gonna jump ship. Rather than going, this isn't working for me. What can I do to change it? And how does that compare to what's out there? And that's what should be the, the main focus.

Harv Nagra:

Really, really good point. So you support businesses with their tech needs, assessing what they do need and troubleshooting it and helping them integrate and all that kind of stuff. What are the biggest red flags you see? That should be a wake up call to a business that they need to tighten things up and it's not working optimally.

Ryan Pearcy:

So firstly it's are you getting the information you need to drive your business forward, or are you literally working on gut feel? If in today's world you're working on gut feel, then you are at a massive disadvantage to the competitors that you're trying to outbid or, win work from.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

you need to be, I guess, honing your systems to deliver the data you need and the way we work, you should always go, okay, as the, leaders in the business, what is it that are the strategic points that that enable you to make key decisions? And then we work backwards to ensure the tech stack is delivering on that.

Harv Nagra:

Do you think businesses are often good at recognizing there's an issue or do you think they need a bit of a reality check and things starting to really creak and people starting to moan before they recognize there's problems?

Ryan Pearcy:

So I think a lot of the times with this area, the business owner or the key people like the board, strategic decision makers are aware they're not getting the information they need, the more problematic areas. They don't know what's possible

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

they need to talk to specialists to sightly just be made aware, like what is it we can do? What is possible in this day and age? They hear buzzwords like ai. They know they need better data. Everything's data driven, but

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

if it's actually applicable to their business and how they operate.

Harv Nagra:

Right?

Ryan Pearcy:

not, they dunno what the problem is, it's that they dunno how to fix it or actually is this problem just something that we have to live with.

Harv Nagra:

There's AI and then there's also automation. That's another, term you hear a lot. But then, if you haven't seen how that really works and comes together, then it doesn't really mean much. You just have a very vague idea. Right. so this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna paint you a picture of three real life agency tech stacks, and then I'd love to get your help in both debugging them and highlighting the risks. Okay. So let's paint you a picture of Agency A. This is a 20 person agency that's running on gut feel more than structure. I'd say they're at a maturity level one. They price their work in harvest, but there's no formal pricing model. Just copying old quotes from one another and tweaking the numbers. For project resourcing, they're using Google Sheets and it's a bit of a free for all, where their project managers can just throw in a number for what resource they need and how long the next week they're tracking time in harvest, but it's super inconsistent and most people don't do it. Project management is all over the place. Some people are using the notes app on their computer. Some are using Asana. Some people are using their paper notebook. They're sending invoices through Harvest, but nothing syncs with their accounting platform. And for business reporting, it's mostly just hoping that you have more money coming in than going out. And at end of year there's a bit of a freakout when you kind of, look back and realize you weren't as profitable as you hoped you would be. Okay. So, so that's kind of the, the scenario. where do you even start with a business like this really?

Ryan Pearcy:

Well, ironically this is very similar to a business I've worked with, so, I mean hopefully this, this is something I can, I can comment on, but you've got, you've got a number of issues here. So firstly, harvest is a really good entry level tool. it enables you to do a lot of the basics. You can get some good visibility, but it sounds like they're not firstly using that tool to its maximum. They've got inconsistency in process and they're not able, or definitely not holding their staff to account in how they operate.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

a big problem that they're experiencing is around, and process rather than tech at the start. they've looks like they've got disparate systems that can be connected'cause Harvest can connect into finance systems. So that may be that they would need to look at their finance system. Is that something they need to connect into Harvest to streamline some of the processes beyond just, I guess their operational tool being harvest in this case. But if you're then getting into resource management. What is a massive pain point for a lot of businesses and really hard to align if you are looking at trying to manage resource in a different tool to the, one you are doing your budgeting, quoting and job or project profitability reporting in, then trying to align those is a huge burden on people because every time something changes in one, you have to manually go and update it in the other.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

whenever I'm talking to businesses that wanna do both, it's like these are two key fundamental areas that really you wanna try and sit in the same platform cause even if you've

Harv Nagra:

got

Ryan Pearcy:

two separate platforms and you're doing it well in both, and you wanna build a connection, that's a really hard build, that's a really hard thing to get consistently correct. There's too many things that change on a

Harv Nagra:

day to day

Ryan Pearcy:

basis that could cause problems and errors.

Harv Nagra:

Especially in an agency where kind of projects and, and clients are so... well, it can be quite erratic and rapidly changing. So having to synchronize all of that stuff, one of the things that I've seen in, in an agency like that is also the complete, like, disconnect from how much budget you have left is just really horrible when you're just making up numbers in a Google sheet and saying, oh, well I need 20 hours for that. Do you have 20 hours in the budget? I was mentioning that there's really inconsistent time tracking; if there's only a few people tracking their time, might as well not even bother. because, what is the point? you're not gonna have accuracy at all.

Ryan Pearcy:

And not only that, like a, a big problem we had with a a client is that all their staff were tracking time and they thought, oh, brilliant. our chargeability on this staff are the points it's supposed to be, but our profitability doesn't match that. Why is that not happening? It turns out. the people tracking their time, they just weren't putting all of their time down.

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Ryan Pearcy:

like in a given week, so they're 35 hours, they're maybe putting 30 hours down. So their charge ability compared to what they were putting down, that's great, but it's just not compared to their full week.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

the ability to bring in dashboards that actually for those individual staff members

Harv Nagra:

Yep.

Ryan Pearcy:

them, have they completed their time sheet? What does their chargeability look like? And get them to hold themselves to account. Change is a culture inside the business. And we did this with a client that went on to Scoro and it completely, fundamentally changed how they worked. it meant that the managers essentially didn't actually have to do as much managing because the staff was self-managing themselves. The culture changed entirely.

Harv Nagra:

Right. That's really interesting. Ryan, where do you stand on the idea of like, only asking your team to track billable time versus tracking their full day, Do you have a point of view?

Ryan Pearcy:

Yeah. Strong point of view. So I think they fundamentally have to track the full day, and there's a couple of reasons for this. you've got chargeable time, that's great. That always contributes to, money that's gonna come in, you've got to determine how much money, because you've got recoverability issues if you are putting way too much time down compared to what a job should take. But the other bit is in the non-chargeable, you've got effective non-chargeable and ineffective. you've

Harv Nagra:

got

Ryan Pearcy:

stuff that can help push the business forward. So they're going out to try and win work

Harv Nagra:

or they're

Ryan Pearcy:

changing a process and being more streamlined. That's really effective non-chargeable work. And you want to be grasping that. You wanna know how much of our staff, who are the ones that are driving the business forward compared to those that are more kind, sat on their hands

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Ryan Pearcy:

Just they're going, okay, I've not got enough work. I'm not going out chasing it. So, in my view, you wanna track the entire of it not to necessarily go after those employees,

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

understand how do we make our our non-chargeable time as effective as possible?

Harv Nagra:

Absolutely. I think as an operations director of, when I was managing in that role in an agency, my issue with not tracking the full day also was that it makes it really hard to know if someone's just been like lazy with not logging everything or if that was genuinely everything they worked on So the only way for me to know whether they track their time properly that day is if they logged their full day. About this agency. A, there's two other things that I wanted to highlight. One is like that, that thing I mentioned about copying and duplicating quotes, that is just such bad practice. You have like. A legacy of client relationships and discounts and, the reality of scope for a particular project that is in a certain quote. So if you're using that as like a template to. Copy and run with for another client project. A different client project. That is absolutely terrible. That was the first thing. And the second thing was what you were saying about workflows. A priority for an agency like this is really maturing their ways of working in consolidating that. before they even try to improve their systems and stuff like that, but I think really getting a good handle on that it's just something they need to do.

Ryan Pearcy:

a lot of it is a lack of visibility of it. So as you grow, when you are, I guess, a small business, you see everything that's going on. But as you start getting, 15 up to 20 employees, you start losing track of what's being done. So something that we always do before we get even close to recommending any changes, we process map out. So the, the business owners, the, the strategic decision makers can see exactly what's happening by who at what stages, and then the, the amount of times they go, oh wow. We've got full reliance on this one individual for a critical point.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

everything stops. We've gotta resolve that. And that's

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Ryan Pearcy:

to do with system. That's just refining actually how they operate. And that is fundamental that businesses should be 100% all over.

Harv Nagra:

Alright, let's talk about agency B. So this is a hundred person business that is doing a lot of things. Right that I quite admire. But I'd say they're at like a 2.5 on the maturity scale, not quite at that level three milestone, which means they have really consistent and documented ways of working and really more importantly, really tightly knit systems in place. So let me describe their situation. They have really clever pricing calculators set up in spreadsheets so they can. Define the scope very accurately. But they still build their quotes in Google Sheets to issue to clients as a, as a PDF. They separately track deals in Pipedrive, which is a CRM platform, if anyone didn't know that. Resourcing and time tracking happens in Aava time sheet reports are exported from Aava, and then budgets are tried. They, they try to reconcile budgets in Google Sheets. Where they have to remember to add expenses and purchases. Project management happens in Asana. They're using pipe drive pipeline stage as a reminder to invoice. So they've set up an invoicing stage, okay, as a reminder that they need to invoice something, but it's a manual process to check what's left. To bill. Obviously, a CRM system and a sales funnel is not set up to track. How much you have left to invoice and all that kind of stuff. And then sales activity is tracked in terms of reporting. Sales activity is tracked in Pipedrive, and they're doing a really, really good job and kind of analyzing what, what their, pipelines looking like. Project tracking, like I said, is in Google sheets, and financial reporting is also this. Spreadsheet puzzle that takes place with weekly meetings and a lot of kind of sit downs with project managers, account managers, and the finance team. what are the issues?

Ryan Pearcy:

I mean, this sounds very much typical of a post covid business

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

they've gone. We need to pivot a lot into cloud-based systems that allows us to work more flexibly. I. But they've just had to make some quick decisions on something. There's no overall IT strategy. Where are we going? What is the ultimate goals here? So you've got some really good tools in place, some market leading tools in place, but they're just not connected.

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Ryan Pearcy:

like disparate. Everything is being shared manually and, and you become very spreadsheet heavy. The other thing I would say is that I think you're optimistic with a 2.5 there. I'm giving that a, a two, a solid two based on my

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Ryan Pearcy:

you're creating so many problems along the, the way and you are also prioritizing certain tasks in the wrong system. So for example, CRM pipe drive is perfect, up to the point you are going to be winning work, and then it needs to hand over is to

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

a system that is managing those projects to the point of invoicing. And then you've got another area which is taking over the, the reporting.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

you connect the systems in secure APIs with trigger points. So those stages where you said about now we've got a stage in Pipedrive for invoicing. As soon as it gets to the point of we are now quoting that should be moving data into another system. the brilliant thing about the likes of score is the, the marketplace where you can connect tools together, you can still do best to breed, but hands over the data into the relevant system when you need to. finally on this, the reporting side.

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

you do have to report in Excel.

Harv Nagra:

Yep.

Ryan Pearcy:

But if you're doing quotes in Excel you know, building them out, if unless they are really complex, you should be moving that into what are very advanced quoting systems now. And if you do have to do in Excel, then at least connect that into like a, a Zapier tool that pushes the data into systems such as Koro. So you're not having to retype it.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

a little bit of smart engineering there that goes. Okay. We've now created a quote. We know that like what it's gonna be, it's gonna be accepted. Let's get the data into the project management system. Automatically

Harv Nagra:

I totally agree, but I, I do think there's probably a lot of complexity in mapping a spreadsheet to a system as well. So it's probably, you're probably better off just using a system for that, I, I think a couple of things that I wanted to highlight about this case is, downloading time sheet reports from one system and trying to reconcile in a spreadsheet. Like, nobody wants to do that, first of all. And obviously you're not gonna be doing that on a daily basis. So it gets done every two weeks. And in that amount of time, you could have over burned on all your deliverables. Right. And and the other thing this agency was saying to me is that they don't know if they project managers remember to add all the expenses and purchases into the spreadsheet as well. So there's a big mystery about whether everything is being tracked. think you already said, but using a pipeline stage to remind yourself of what needs to be invoiced is just like, it, it's just not on. Yeah. It's nuts. And I, I think for an agency that's a hundred people, they've waited way too long to build a better integrated system or, or bring in an integrated system, is what I'd say is like

Ryan Pearcy:

Well you say that, but what I'd say is, if they've got to a hundred people and

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Ryan Pearcy:

money, and

Harv Nagra:

Yep.

Ryan Pearcy:

you know that, that level, think about the efficiency gains and the profit you can get

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

by tweaking how you operate.

Harv Nagra:

Totally.

Ryan Pearcy:

a business, at that stage, say if we are still successful at this point.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

be so much better just by refining what we do.

Harv Nagra:

I think that's why I gave them 2.5 because they had some really interesting things happening, like these calculators and processes that were not automated, but then it was just in terms of systems, it was quite immature. Here's agency c. We've got a 60 person multi-entity business. Okay? They've got entities in different countries and they have a PSA platform in place, which is great, but they're not using it to its full potential. Okay? So some teams are using templates for quoting. But others are doing that copy paste trick. they don't like the PSA's project resourcing features. So they're building project plans in Smartsheet instead. they track time and expenses in the PSA for their projects and invoice through it, but still do manual financial reconciliation in spreadsheets and using a, a tool like Fathom. Since they're multi-entity and they need a central place to look at all their entities. That's all I'll say about them. So they've got a PSA platform, but not using all of the functionality. And there's obviously some things that they don't like about they see either.

Ryan Pearcy:

Yeah, and you can understand that there's in a business that's, I guess of that size, you're now getting critical people that are heads of teams. So you can have a, a head of operations ahead of finance and they're gonna have very different requirements and desires out of the system. And there's always sacrifice that has to be made somewhere. Because if you go for best of breed in every single area, the problem you're gonna have is they're all gonna be disparate and you're creating more problems overall. the other bit, and I've got a question to you on this, is that they're in different jurisdictions here, but are there teams collaborating across those different jurisdiction?

Harv Nagra:

They do share resources in terms of design and development. Sometimes project management as well.

Ryan Pearcy:

Yeah. And so that now is a very niche thing that needs to be resolved.

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

of systems can handle project management and, project reporting, et cetera. But to enable collaboration, effective collaboration across multi entities creates a problem because the data now needs to go into separate. Legal entities from a finance perspective, so you need

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

connections, which a lot

Harv Nagra:

Right.

Ryan Pearcy:

don't do. need a, a rare, like a, a unicorn tool here that basically allows you to collaborate across multiple jurisdictions. is fundamental, I think, when you're looking at Cross country or cross entity, they can be in the same country, but different legal entities. So that's gonna be what narrows down what you need to use. And that should be a deciding factor over many other areas because the sharing resource element, the tracking of that and the rebilling of that and the recharging cross multiple entities cause a massive headache,

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Ryan Pearcy:

admin burden, which will lead to things being lost and margin being deteriorated.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

you don't use a tool that can grow across modern, that's my number one point. Other elements by the sounds of it, is if they're not utilizing the tool effectively or they've got this big problem with the resourcing, how fundamental is it? Is it something where you can be in discussion with that tool that you're currently using to go, well, what's your pipeline look like? How long until you, I guess, adapt this into things that we'll need? Because sometimes it's much better to work with who you know and what you know than jump ship into, into the unknown. So find out the gaps you're missing. Have a good dynamic conversation with the software provider you've got before exploring anything else further.

Harv Nagra:

I do agree. I, it is a lot of work to move to a new platform, learn it, and, implement it and change management we know is a difficult thing. So I think you're, you're totally right. Talking to the product team and understanding How you could be using that functionality and why it's not working for you. I also wanna flag that I don't have an issue If somebody really thinks for a really particular thing, like project management, they want to use Asana because they just have to create a load of tickets and the PSA system for example, doesn't support that, or something like that, or it just gets really complex. I, I don't have an issue with that, but I think when you're paying for a tool like a PSA or just any kind of really robust project management system, you do wanna make sure you're trying to get the best out of it and trying to consolidate. Otherwise it's counterproductive to kind of the whole goal. I think at some point if you also recognize that something's not fit for purpose, like the multi-entity issues or things like that, you might have to switch, which is absolutely fine, but it's recognizing that it's not fit for purpose.

Ryan Pearcy:

So the other thing I'll just add on that is that be very careful because you might have a very strong-willed dominant head of operations.

Harv Nagra:

Yes.

Ryan Pearcy:

about from a I guess a task management resource perspective that goes, this does not work for me.

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Ryan Pearcy:

to look at another tool. And then

Harv Nagra:

I,

Ryan Pearcy:

reaction is they're probably gonna have a tour that they like, they wanna move you over to it and you may not be considering the impacts. Of the other elements of the team about doing that. So you need to bring everyone into that discussion,

Harv Nagra:

mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

and properly understand, well, what is it? The, the other tool we're looking at doesn't have, that we currently have in the, the tool we're using. there's a, a natural reaction I guess we touched on that at the start, to chase the shiny object.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

you know, always consider the grass is greener.

Harv Nagra:

I think as you mature and as you have much clearer picture as finance or operations leaders about how your business runs or how you want it to run, you also get a very clear idea of your requirements.

Ryan Pearcy:

some people, I guess, are not great at teasing that out. So some, some, we, we can get a really good defined list. We covered everything. Others, know, the way the mind works, you really need to sit down with a third party.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

them ask you the critical questions that brings that information out of you,'cause sometimes you'll, you'll think something's really important, but actually talking it through you realize it's not as important as other areas. So

Harv Nagra:

Good point.

Ryan Pearcy:

and step back and sometimes bringing someone else in helps you do that.

Harv Nagra:

Ryan, thank you so much. So we've looked at three cases there. I've got a few other questions for you, so I'm gonna dive into those. What is the biggest mistake you see businesses make when it comes to their finance and operations tech stack? It might have something to do with some of this stuff we've been talking about, but what, what comes to mind when you hear that question?

Ryan Pearcy:

Number one is they don't have an end goal, so they will pick in silos, problems they've got and look to resolve that issue. But if you do that, all you end up with is lots of different systems that don't communicate and don't deliver the ultimate End position, which is clear visibility of the key areas of our business that enable us to make decisions. So start with where do we wanna get to and work backwards from that. Whenever we work with the business, we're holistically looking at multiple different areas of that business and then bring that those together to go, okay, well this is what you need to get out of it. What do we need to build to get there? And I think that's the number one issue that most businesses suffer.

Harv Nagra:

I, I, my, my next question is not about knocking other tools, but there's the PSA route businesses maturing can go, but there's also tools out there that are tool stacks in themselves. There's the clickup, the Monday, and teamwork and stuff like that. They're not really PSAs, where do those fit and is it part of the journey? Can you make it work? What are your thoughts?

Ryan Pearcy:

I should probably disclose this at the start. So, I'm a accountant by background, so I'm led by numbers. I think the numbers are critical and you'll find in virtually every system in a, a business, something that is in there will lead into what ends up in the finance system, which then ends up in the reporting tools that enable you to deliver I guess. And the problem we have with a lot of these generic systems is they really ignore finance. And

Harv Nagra:

if you

Ryan Pearcy:

want some visibility of the profitability of what you are doing, which actually is gonna drive whether what you're doing, is it success or not?'cause in the end, it all comes down to money. you really need to have something that enables you to track the finance in the same way you're tracking the, the management of the project. So the likes of Clickup Monday, et cetera. Great tools, really good at managing tasks. Not so good at managing the financial element. And you can sometimes bolt things in, but it feels very much a like a, an ancillary thing rather than a key focus.

Harv Nagra:

Hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

I tend to not to go down those routes, I tend to go with something that has finances, the core alongside project management side.

Harv Nagra:

I agree with you. I think one of the things that I've seen in, in systems like that, that was quite stressful for me is that I've got a toolkit now, and now I've gotta go out and build this thing to work for my agency or get somebody in to build it for my agency, which is like, I'm short on time and I am not a systems engineer and I I, I I just don't have the time for that. So that's what I found quite stressful is that you're giving me a toolkit that's fantastic, but I don't have like ages to figure all this out and see how it's all gonna integrate.

Ryan Pearcy:

the other bit on that is, is not, in my opinion, finding a consultant that can help you build this isn't the problem, right? You're

Harv Nagra:

mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

upfront.

Harv Nagra:

The

Ryan Pearcy:

problem is that now you get tied to that consultant because they know how the system works and you are not skilled enough to do it. So now you are tied to what they do. They can charge you what they want over time to make tweaks. And you end up finding that the, the monthly or annual costs you're paying for this are far higher than you expected.'cause you had the idea of the software costs and the upfront rather than the constant iterative changes that will come out of generally a business using things. So you've got off the shelf, you've got custom, generally, most business now want an off the shelf package that connects into other solutions with some flexibility to make changes that work for the business.

Harv Nagra:

Really good point. I've come across agencies on occasion that have brought in a tool, you know, they're at an early stage of maturity, stage one or stage two, and they've brought in a system thinking this is gonna sort out all their problems, so they're paying for it. But they didn't sort out those workflows that we were talking about earlier, and now they're paying for a system and kind of, it's just sitting there and everyone's scared of touching it. Do you ever come across situations like that and like I, I don't even know if there's a question here other than I'm really sorry you've decided to do that. That was not the right way to go.

Ryan Pearcy:

I know, I mean, it's not necessarily the right or wrong way. It's quite standard that this will happen because everyone will have the right mindset in that we need to make change, which is

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Ryan Pearcy:

the the biggest thing to overcome. So we've now made that decision. We're implementing, but everyone's busy. So the implementation path, the training path doesn't go maybe as slick as we want. And then once we're back in our day jobs, we're started to

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

how we're supposed to be using this tool effectively. Now we're finding work arounds and those workarounds take longer. They feel clunky,

Harv Nagra:

Yeah.

Ryan Pearcy:

it's putting us off using the tool. What I get brought into a lot is that. We're using a tool. We dunno if it should be the one we're using. It's not working for us. Let's look at something else. And I go and go, well actually the fundamental things you need are in there. We just need to make some tweaks to how it's been set up. We need to change, I guess, some of your workflow processes through it. And we need to retrain the team and then have a support service that goes on for maybe normally six months to bring those individuals back'cause they'll go off and find other ways of working back to actually what you should be doing. Cuz until you overcome the change curve, which is usually at least three months where you're going from, this feels cumbersome to, this is now second nature. You're gonna find people start diverting from the path. It's completely normal, happens all the time. You just need a plan to bring them back to it.

Harv Nagra:

So let's say we're in a level two business. You were saying earlier that sometimes when you're really close to the, the situation or the context in a business, it can be hard to come up with your list of requirements. But there is, let's say there is a business that's at that level two listening saying, yeah, we need to, level up and get to that integrated stage, whether it's a single system or multi-system integrated if you were leading that discussion, does anything come to mind in terms of how you would prompt them to think about what they really need?

Ryan Pearcy:

Yes. So firstly, involve the team. Too many business owners or strategic decision makers go, we know what the right thing to do is. We know where the problems are,

Harv Nagra:

mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

when you start having proper conversations with your team, do you identify that actually what they're flagging isn't really what we thought the problems were. They're happy with these elements. Even if they moan about it, everyone moans about IT, right? That's the, that's the thing we can get away with, moaning about IT. But sometimes the moan is just frustration of what's happened at that exact point and not necessarily a fundamental issue that's going forward. So do that map out your process because it brings to the surface areas you were completely unaware of that were problematic or makes it clear that certain areas are taking far longer than they should do.

Harv Nagra:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Pearcy:

out your processes and that will help tease out some of the key requirements and do a RAG assessment, so put a criticality against every area I'm a sucker for spreadsheets. I'm an accountant, a minimum thing, stick in the spreadsheet and put some visualization to it. It really helps refine what you need to focus on.

Harv Nagra:

think the next challenge sometimes is that when somebody has identified what they need, they might not have the headspace or the resource to actually implement something properly or figure out the workflow. Is that where your team, for example, can come in or someone like yourselves to help support in that kind of process? And how does that work?

Ryan Pearcy:

Yeah, so I, I, I guess if I go a step back slightly, when you are, I guess, identifying what you need, what I'm saying is you've identified the pain points. It's not the solution. As you said earlier you've got thousands of options out there, and each one connects into different systems in different ways. So they say an example. We, we've got Xero that integrates into Harvest. Great. But that integration is a completely different integration to how Scoro integrates into Xero.'cause they operate in different ways. They share data in different ways. And you can't just take that, it integrates as a definition of, oh, now we can share every bit of data we need to share. that point, talk to someone. There's so many people, including us that just have a complimentary discussion to help you identify, have you got the skill set internally to do this yourself and identify the right tools, or do you need to bring someone in to help you pick out what is the right flow? When we do it, we map out your existing processes. We map out what the process will look like in the tools that we are saying are, are probably the best fit for you. And then Mm-hmm. visually compare the two. And now when you transition, you know how you need to work'cause you can bring people back to the actual process steps that they should be adhering to. So if they do start pivoting and start diverting from the path, you know how to bring them back to it.

Harv Nagra:

So in, in terms of kind of the scenarios I described earlier, that's kind of a, a real example of how your team could go in and start debugging and understanding needs and stuff like that and helping them build the right tech stack and do you support with training and, and that kind of stuff as well?

Ryan Pearcy:

Yeah, it's all system dependent. So, as you said, thousands of systems, we know quite a lot of them out there. But if we don't know it, I guess we've built up a network of Very experienced people that we can pull on to implement, train and support on the systems that brought in. And it's not always, I guess, independent consultants. It could be the software vendors that have a really good team for that, but wouldn't necessarily understand the overarching ultimate goal. So they go, well, this is the way you need to set it out for your business. Great. But actually you might need some tweaks in that that enable you to do the next step in the next system. So we sit above. All the various systems and work out how they should work together and bring the business and the software of vendors and the consultants together to go, you need to adhere to this overall strategy.

Harv Nagra:

Excellent. So, Ryan, if somebody's listening and thinking that I could use that kind of support how do they find yourself and start a discussion?

Ryan Pearcy:

So easiest way to find me is on LinkedIn.

Harv Nagra:

Okay.

Ryan Pearcy:

a very recognizable head as everyone says. So, uh, so look for Ryan Pearcy on LinkedIn. Add me and drop me a message. Always happy to have a chat. The website is www.digital-transformers.co uk. And yeah, we've got information on there on how to reach out as well.

Harv Nagra:

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate you being here.

Ryan Pearcy:

It is been a pleasure. Thank you.

All right. What did you think? I mean, if some of that felt a little too close to home with the situation in your agency, it's not meant to cause offense. The point is to highlight that how these workflows can hinder the efficiency, accuracy, and visibility in your agency and end up being roadblocks in your journey to operational maturity. I've been on the ground in agencies working in those ways, so I know how tedious it can be for project managers as well as finance and operations leaders who are trying to understand how the business is doing. I do hope some of Ryan's advice there at the end was helpful and do reach out to him if you think you want to change the way you're working or bring in a new system, but recognize you could get some support with that process. I'm trying a new thing here. If you have any questions for Ryan that you'd like me to pose to him in a follow up, drop me a note at podcast@scoro.com. That's it for me this week. If you've enjoyed this conversation and this podcast, please share it with someone who'd appreciate it. Share your thoughts when you see us discussing this episode on LinkedIn. And if you haven't already, sign up for the handbook newsletter at scoro.com/podcast. Scroll down and you'll find the newsletter sign up form. We send out a newsletter with the takeaways from each episode every other week so you don't have to scribble down notes and you've got something to reference. I'll be back with the next episode soon. Thanks so much.

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