Case Study: Social Fulcrum
Social Fulcrum saves 15 hours/week and $100K on the first year with SmartBooks
Founded by Andrew Krebs-Smith in 2010, Social Fulcrum is a digital marketing agency that specializes in customer acquisition and content marketing, inbound, SEO, and social. Bootstrapped, the company has experienced immense growth over the past few years and was recently named to the Inc500 list of the fastest growing companies for the second year in a row.
Challenges
Initially Social Fulcrum split the bookkeeping work among several people to reduce the time spent individually, but this led to a fragmented system that was prone to inaccuracy. “We were very reactive when it came to our bookkeeping and this resulted in a lot of time spent on fire drills responding to what we would later determine to be inaccurate reports,” said Andrew. When Social Fulcrum hit $250K in revenue it became evident that they needed a new solution and one that would keep up with their business and provide centralized systems and processes. They didn’t want to hire a contractor and couldn’t afford a full-time individual.
“As a professional services startup we need to move fast and make sound decisions. SmartBooks provides us with current and accurate financials to do so.”
Andrew Krebs-Smith FounderHow SmartBooks Helped
Andrew brought SmartBooks in shortly after hiring Social Fulcrum’s 8th employee. SmartBooks cleaned up the previous year’s bookkeeping and began putting a solid accounting foundation in place that would allow them to get the reporting their business would need to achieve future levels of growth. SmartBooks also hosted their QuickBooks and implemented an online bill pay system so that the team at Social Fulcrum could access reports and pay bills on the go. SmartBooks provided Social Fulcrum with a team, including a bookkeeper for the day-to-day work and a controller to provide thought leadership, oversee more complicated accounting and ensure accuracy with a peer review process. This team approach eliminated the inherent risk of trusting everything to a single individual.
"SmartBooks has been very responsive and available to hop on the phone and answer questions as they arose and frequently provides guidance without ever requesting a price increase or putting a limit on the work done."
Andrew Krebs-Smith FounderOutcome
Social Fulcrum saved approximately 15 hours per week and over $100K of both direct and indirect costs associated with doing their bookkeeping and accounting in the first year alone. SmartBooks freed up a lot of Andrew’s time that he could then use to focus on growth and managing the business. With SmartBooks, Social Fulcrum was able to look at capacity per employee and other metrics which were important to optimizing their business and profitability. Having accurate information and reporting has enabled rapid decision making and supported the company’s growth.