89 CAS Growth: Outsourcing Doesn't Scale

Why Outsourcing Isn’t the Silver Bullet for Scaling Your CAS Firm

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Drowning in client work and thinking outsourcing is your way out? Think again. In this episode of CAS Minute, Roman Villard, CPA explains why outsourcing without foundational systems can make things worse, not better. Learn how to avoid chaotic delegation, build workflows that actually scale, and make outsourcing a tool, not your entire strategy.

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⏱️ Chapters

00:00 – Intro: Outsourcing Isn’t the Answer to Your Capacity Problem

01:04 – The Illusion of Scale: Cheap Labor ≠ Operational Leverage

03:05 – Communication Drag, Time Zones & Context Gaps

05:21 – When Outsourcing Does Work: Productized Services, Repeatable Onboarding

06:16 – Build a Knowledge Moat Before Scaling the Team

08:00 – Scalable Firms Are Boring (and That’s a Good Thing)

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✅ Key Takeaways:

• You don’t have a hiring problem—you have a systems problem.
• Outsourcing broken processes just magnifies inefficiencies (and frustration).
• Fix your workflows, SOPs, and onboarding before bringing in outside help.
• Train your team for outcomes, not just tasks. That’s how you scale well.
• Scalable firms are often the “boring” ones—tight scope, clear processes, and consistency.

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Full Send | Accounting & Data

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Transcript

[00:00:00] All right, we are diving into another episode of CAS Minute here. I'm Roman, founder of Full Send, and today we're gonna talk about why outsourcing isn't the answer to scaling your CAS firm. And I think this has come up because I've seen a lot, a lot of firms try to look at outsourcing an offshoring as a solution to their capacity problems, a solution to their scalability.

[00:00:22] Issues. And so we're gonna walk through why I think outsourcing a loan is not gonna help solve your capacity problems. Like what that hidden cost of that, that labor pool looks like. what foundational systems you need in place before outsourcing, and then how do we actually build true leverage in a cas firm?

[00:00:38] So oftentimes I don't think you necessarily have a hiring problem when you are looking at capacity. Oftentimes, I think a lot of firms, particularly in early stages, have a systems problem. And outsourcing without fixing the foundation is just gonna make some of that chaos a little bit cheaper. Uh, let's talk about what actually scales a modern CAS firm.

[00:00:58] So. If we look at five key sections here, I wanna talk about this, this illusion of scale, this illusion of scale, meaning we can achieve scalability and redundancy by just hiring more people at a lower cost. Like outsourcing isn't a substitute for automation, it isn't a substitute for quality processes and systems.

[00:01:19] You're just offloading the labor. And so what, what, what you're trying to do. Improve your efficiency, improve your productivity. But when I see firms start to get into outsourcing, they're actually compounding inefficiency. And that less expensive labor that you're looking at and saying, look at this deal, you know, it's not inexpensive when the process is broken from a QA perspective, rework client frustration, like all of that stuff piles up.

[00:01:47] But you might be sitting here thinking to yourself like. Well, isn't any help better than none? And the answer is maybe only if your systems are clean enough. That help doesn't become handholding. And. Because when you're, when you're handholding and when you're having to like go back and forth time and time again because you have broken systems or inefficiencies in your automations or things like that, um, it may actually end up costing you a whole lot more.

[00:02:10] So what is that real cost of some of this offshoring chaos that can come into the firm if you're looking at it as a substitute for quality processes? Now, you may not look at your firm and say, oh, well I'm, I'm offshoring to, you know. Bandaid, these, these inefficient processes, I'm actually doing it to increase capacity.

[00:02:27] Like you may not be thinking that, but oftentimes that is what's actually happening. So the real cost of some of this is the communication drag. You've got more meetings, more handholding, more instructions, more reviews that need to happen. Sometimes you've got time zone delays that extend turnaround times.

[00:02:46] And here's, here's a real problem, is that We're oftentimes not providing enough context in order to provide somebody a good opportunity to complete an excellent job. And so you may not have a process in place to share context really, really well, which yields to this more shallow output of any labor pool.

[00:03:05] It's really just the opportunity cost of managing an outsourced team. That cost is higher than just fixing your own operations. It truly is. So when you sit down, you reflect on what those processes are that really drive your firm. If you nail those, you set up a far better foundation for potentially bringing in another labor pool in order to increase capacity, in order to create redundancy and create a good environment for everybody that works there.

[00:03:32] Now, a quick caveat on this. I don't like the term offshoring. I don't like the term outsourcing because what you're doing is you're saying This pool of people that doesn't live right next to me is different than the team that is stateside. It is different because they do different work.

[00:03:50] We limit them to just transactional workflows. And oftentimes when you say offshore or outsourced, you're, you're, you're denoting almost a different class of teammates. Personally, I don't like that. I want everybody to be on the same team, have the same level of opportunity, the same benefits relative to their, their situation, and they're just a part of the team.

[00:04:10] So. That's my, my quick rant on, on offshoring, why workflow is the real bottleneck is that without a standardized workflow, any new hire can't move independently. It doesn't matter where in the world they are, but without standardized workflow, especially if you're going outside of domestic hires that maybe are less familiar with language or common customs or what have you.

[00:04:35] Without a standardized workflow, like you're gonna be handholding a lot. Again, when we think about workflows, if you put garbage in, you're getting garbage out. The old adage, um, if you're outsourcing these broken SOPs, you're putting a magnifying glass on the problem, that's when quality control becomes a lot more difficult and not super simple.

[00:04:54] So before you scale the team, scale the process Now. When can outsourcing actually work? Well, once you have those standardized workflows in place, once you to some degree have productized your service offering, you have definition around how you do what you do and who you do it for. We've, we've recorded a lot of episodes to drive specificity on your target market to drive specificity in your services library.

[00:05:21] If that's in place, you've got a pretty decent foundation to be able to build upon. Another element is your client onboarding? Is it templatized? Is it repeatable? Is it something that you can hand off to a team and they can easily understand how you onboard a new client? What information you need to drive success in that engagement.

[00:05:40] Once you have those quality control systems, the checklist, the automations, team lead communication, you really start to create a better foundation for bringing on additional team members. But you don't necessarily want to outsource until you've built a knowledge moat, a moat to being your, your unique advantage in the market.

[00:06:00] Maybe that's your internal ip. Maybe it's a playbook that your firm has. Maybe it's process ownership within different levels of team members at your firm. Like these are all unique to you, and this is the advantage that you have in the market, whether you have team members stateside or not.

[00:06:16] So once you have those things in place, we want to scale it. For those of you that wanna grow your firms, we want to scale our practices. And I think you can do that with narrowed services. With a repeatable delivery, you can segment your clients with repeatable processes that you can deliver in a more narrow cohort of your clients, and you rightsize expectations with those clients based on what.

[00:06:40] You can be delivering to them. You have a team no matter where in the world they are, that is singing from the same songbook. They understand what technology you're using. You've trained them on it. There are embedded QA systems like this. Training that needs to take place, needs to be outcome driven instead of just task level delegation, meaning when you're driving towards an outcome, you're driving towards a destination for somebody on your team. Maybe it's destination of here's what the process looks like when it's executed perfectly.

[00:07:10] Here's how we want to improve X, Y, or Z, and you work alongside of your team on that. You start to drive a little bit more scalability. And understanding of the process as a whole of how your whole unit economicsb works. If your team is incentivized properly. You drive that understanding of how to operate well in a role now that is far different than just task level delegation, where I think so many firms start when they're looking at offshore team members.

[00:07:37] They say, oh, well, I've got all this transactional level work. We can just delegate this task to team overseas and it'll be done in the morning. And I think that's the wrong approach to take if you want to scale a CAS practice and maintain a really high quality of service. So. Uh, here's the thing. I think most scalable firms are actually kind of boring.

[00:07:57] And, and what I mean by that is it's like if you play golf, some of the best golfers out there play really boring golf. They just hit it down the fairway, they hit it on the green, they put, and they walk off. Non boring golf is, you're spraying your drive 30 yards off the fairway. You're hitting out of the.

[00:08:12] The woods back to the fairway, then you get into a bunker and then you chip onto the green. And like, that's less boring, but it's, it's, uh, you know, more interesting. But as a scalable firm, I think boring is good. You've got clear processes, you've got a tight scope, you have very clear expectations on communication.

[00:08:31] If that's not in place, that outsourcing is just gonna be a bandaid over that bullet hole. So. Be thinking about what foundation you can be setting prior to offshoring, prior to outsourcing. Outsourcing is a tool. It's not a strategy, it's a lever after you've dialed in that foundation for your firm.

[00:08:49] So if you, if you skip that hard work of operational design, outsourcing is just become more chaotic for your firm. So you gotta do the work up front and then. You can explore different automation, ai, and outsourcing strategies to help you scale upon what you've built. I hope it's a helpful overview of, of just a perspective on outsourcing and how it may not be your lifesaver that you think it is, and a few things to think about as you work your way up the scalability ladder more next time.

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