In this discussion, we talked to Chris Smith, Chief Growth Officer at QuickFee, where he discusses how QuickFee helps professional service firms improve cash flow and automate payment processes. He highlights the challenges faced by these firms in collecting payments and the inefficiencies in their operations. Chris shares examples of how QuickFee has helped firms save money on credit card fees and improve cash flow by offering flexible payment options. He also emphasizes the importance of leveraging technology and automation to optimize processes and enhance customer experiences. Chris concludes by encouraging leaders in professional service firms to focus on reducing accounts receivable and exploring more efficient payment options.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Professional service firms often neglect the back-office side of their operations, leading to manual tasks and inefficiencies in payment collection.
- QuickFee helps firms improve cash flow by offering flexible payment options and automating payment processes.
- By leveraging technology and automation, firms can optimize processes, reduce accounts receivable, and enhance customer experiences.
- Leaders in professional service firms should focus on reducing accounts receivable and exploring more efficient payment options to improve cash flow.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to QuickFee and Chris Smith
03:10 – Challenges and Inefficiencies in Payment Collection for Professional Service Firms
08:23 – The Impact of Cash Flow Challenges on Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
12:15 – Efficient Solutions Offered by QuickFee for Daily Operations
15:23 – The Importance of Technology and Automation in Professional Service Firms
24:08 – Barriers to Adoption and Differentiation of QuickFee in the Market
30:45 – The Evolution of the Professional Services Industry and the Role of Technology
35:23 – Key Takeaway: Reducing Accounts Receivable and Exploring Efficient Payment Options
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:05)
Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge podcast. Thank you for joining us today. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions. Today we’re talking with Chris Smith, Chief Growth Officer at QuickFee, a payments and financing provider for professional service firms worldwide. Their main focus is to help you facilitate fast payments, improve cashflow and automate the engagement to cash workflow.
So, to talk more about that and how this all works, let me introduce Chris Smith. Chris, welcome to the podcast. Glad you can join us.
Chris Smith (00:41)
Yes, thanks Beau, thanks for having me. And you know, I thought what a great day to bring my Beau Brights on to just put some added pop into today’s session.
Beau Hamilton (00:50)
I love that. Yeah, we were talking about that earlier. Beau Brights. I’m gonna have to start using that.
Chris Smith (00:54)
Yes, branded that. Yes, yes.
Beau Hamilton (00:56)
Well, I wanna start fairly high level here. Can you just introduce yourself a little more, expand upon the blue brights maybe or Beau Brights and give us an overview of what QuickFee does.
Chris Smith (01:06)
Yeah.
Yeah, you bet. you did a really good job capturing that in the beginning of what we do. But I always like to start with the market that we serve. So as you had mentioned, we focus on professional services, B2B. And inside of the US, there’s roughly 54,000 B2B professional services firms that do over $1 million in annual revenue. And one of the things that those firms do really well is if you look at front office type activities, how do they sell to the customer, what are the pricing and services that they offer, those things are where they put a lot of attention. Where there is some neglect though is when you go into the back office side and you look at how is their business operating, there’s typically a lot of manual tasks that have been built up over time that when you look at all the work they do to win business, deliver value, and then it comes to the cash collection side, getting that value exchange back into their bank account. They struggle and again, it’s something that it’s not that they aren’t aware of it, they just don’t put the attention where they need to to get that last kind of mile effort.
So QuickFee comes in and what we do is we focus specifically in professional services. We’re not B2C, professional services has a different process all together on how to make that work well. And so we provide flexible payment options that ensures the client can pay the way that best suits them so that you can accelerate payments. And then we also have started building automation and better workflows around the invoice delivery and the reconciliation of payments back into all those back office systems that aren’t necessarily the most fun thing to do.
And so that’s where we play is it’s helping B2B firms get that cash back into their bank account in an efficient and, you know, client friendly way and reducing a lot of those manual tasks that they’ve built up over time.
Beau Hamilton (02:45)
Gotcha. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for that explanation. I want to kind of circle around with the challenges you mentioned, you know, every industry has its challenges and hurdles to overcome. I’m curious what some of the challenges are that you see professional service firms faced with in relation to collecting payments for their services.
Chris Smith (03:03)
Yeah. So one of the things that comes up is we don’t have a problem with our payments today. And so it’s a little bit of neglect that is happening in there and not really recognizing that there is a problem. And then when we just spend time just kind of pulling the layers of the onion back a little bit, what we find is there is a lot of cash that is sitting in their client’s bank accounts that could be sitting in theirs.
One of the examples that I like to give is if you take a firm, let’s say it could be an accounting firm, it can be consulting firm, but if you take a firm that does $3 million in annual revenue, and let’s say they offer 15-day payment terms to their clients. So they’ve contracted that in 15 days, we will pay you once we receive the invoice. And when you look at what the data says, the data shows that, especially inside of accounting firms, that it takes around 60 days on average for clients to actually pay their invoice. So you have 15-day terms. Your clients are paying you on average on 60. And this is from our own internal data that we can see at the beginning of a client relationship. So we know this isn’t a number that’s being made up. It’s a real number, 60 days to get paid. So the financial impact on a $3 million firm is somewhere around $370,000 that’s sitting in that client’s, know, in the aggregate of all their clients that should be over here based on those payment terms. So if you’re a $3 million firm and you could almost have $400,000 injected back into your bank account, and a $3 million firm isn’t just loaded with cash and can just make investments into anything they want and cover all their expenses, that’s a meaningful amount.
So that’s where I would say, when you look at the challenges, it’s recognizing that there actually is an issue in the beginning and not just passing it off because I don’t know how you feel about 400K when you put it in the context of a $3 million business and it scales, if the business is bigger, that percentage and that number just grows with that. But that is a huge amount.
Beau Hamilton (04:52)
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s very like inefficient. There’s a big window for, or gap to improve upon. Right.
Chris Smith (04:59)
Yeah. Well, one other thing to on that Beau, just as I’m kind of thinking through this is the backdrop of professional services firms, they will have some that are enterprise clients, enterprise clients or, you know, those are great. You know, they may still pay slow, but you know you’re going to get paid. But when you look at the SMB space, which is the majority of businesses that professional services firms are selling to, those firms are, 82% of SMBs on a recent study have listed cash flow, or I’m sorry, not listed cash flow, but cash flow is the main reason that they go out of business.
So let’s kind of think about this again. 99% of all businesses in the US are small business. So they make up the majority of what we do. 82% of those fail because of cash flow, and what I want to point out here is they don’t fail because they had a bad business plan. They failed because their cash cycle got out of whack and it took them out. Okay, so that’s a big impact. That just shows the spotlight on how important cash flow management is for a small business. Then you look beneath that and you look at what’s the main concern around SMBs right now.
And on a recent survey, 67% of SMBs right now have cited financial concerns as their main thing that they’re worried about in 2024. So we know 82% fail because of cash flow. 67% are saying, ooh, this is something that keeps me up at night. And then you look below that and you go, what’s driving those numbers? And banks are restricting lending.
So a third of banks in the US have restricted lending to small businesses that do less than 50 million in annual revenue. Well, I can tell you this, the majority of that 99% of small businesses are doing less than 50 million. So you have cash, you have costs going up, you have access to capital going down for these small businesses. And if you’re a professional services firm and these are your clients, if you’re not being sensitive to the different type of payment options that you have and how you can bill around working through their cash flow challenges, then you’re going to be either restricting business that you could be winning or you’re going to have clients that are delaying paying you because they don’t have the ability to pay that in full and they’re trying to hold their cash as tightly as possible and they’ll just send you down the road until they finally have to make that payment. And I think, you know, kind of when you look at what are the challenges that are being faced, I think that’s probably, you know, a good overview of things that make this a challenge in getting paid.
Beau Hamilton (07:16)
Yeah, so you have those cashflow issues and the inefficiencies. What, you know, there’s the recognition of that, right? And then we also know that from an industry standpoint, companies and firms are trying to automate wherever possible. And obviously, that costs some money, I imagine. Could you kind of touch on the costs around the automation?
Chris Smith (07:39)
Yeah. So when you look at automation, just in the market, so forget about quick fee for a moment, and you look at automation of engagement letters to invoicing to capturing the payment to reconciling back into a practice management system, that can range from low automation or almost no automation where you might just provide a credit card or an ACH bank transfer payment option on your website to you can have it pull all the invoices, send them out, do reminders once the client pays, reconcile it back in, do all the matching. And what’s crazy is the pricing in the market can go from, like I said, almost no cost to there are vendors that charge around a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to help fix this process.
Now, that may mean nothing without context, but from a QuickFee perspective, one of the things that we focused on is we don’t want to make the invoicing process and the cash collection process a hard decision for firms to make. And when you look inside of those 54,000 professional services firms inside of the US, most of those are gonna fall into the small-to-medium size range. They’re not gonna be those top tier enterprise firms. I’ll give you an example. Inside of the accounting world, you typically hear people talk about the top 500, the IPA top 500. And four of those firms inside the top 500 are billions and billions in annual revenue. But then you quickly get down to the bottom of the 500 and it’s about five to six million in annual revenue. So there’s a big gap inside of that.
So when you look at top, you know, number one top firms and then you go down to the top 500, you quickly see that they’re not just big firms that are making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. And what we’ve done is, if you look at the other numbers inside of there, roughly around, so once you get out of the top 500, there’s about 6,000 firms that still do between one and five million in annual revenue. Cash flow is really important, pricing is important.
So what we’ve done is we come into the market and we want something that is affordable to the majority of the market. And so we span from 1 million up into, you we do have some clients that are in the billion dollar range, but our solutions are less than $10,000 a year. So when you compare it to solutions that could be 100 to 150,000, what we get excited about is we’re playing in a space that can have a huge impact, be super affordable and create win-win-wins across the board.
Beau Hamilton (09:57)
Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. So it’s a spectrum of automation costs, right? You don’t have to spend a fortune necessarily to automate 100% of your business or…right? How? Could you kind of elaborate on some of the efficiencies solutions or efficient solutions that you guys offer your clients just to help them with their daily operations?
Chris Smith (10:21)
Yeah, so I’m gonna break it into two different components right now. One is, we serve professional services, but accounting firms are where we’ve put our beginning focus on the automation process. So when you look at QuickFee, we can help in two ways. We can help your clients by providing these flexible payment options that can go from card and traditional ACH and we also have a unique financing plan that allows clients to pay their invoice over three, six, nine or 12 months while the professional services firm gets paid in whole.
So we offer these flexible solutions where the client of the firm can go, you know what, this is my best payment option. I can go ahead and go with your services because you have a way for me to be able to pay that and break it down to meet my budget needs. Okay, so that’s one area that we help. But when we get into automation, I’m gonna speak specifically for accounting firms right now. So if you’re listening and you’re a senior leader inside of an accounting firm, what we do inside of accounting firms is we think about how can we be a best of breed solution that works inside of their tech stack?
The majority of accounting firms today are using Walters, Kluwer, CCH AccessPractice Management, they’re using ProSystem FX, they’re using Thomson Reuter’s Practice CS, and they’re using Iris Practice Engine. And so we’ve built integrations with those practice management solutions that takes the invoicing that they do today. And I always think about it as like a player piano, a player piano, you step away, the music keeps playing. Well, think about all the people that are doing the invoicing process, making the invoice music play.
They can step away and QuickFee is now taking that out of their single source of truth system. It’s delivering the invoicing, it’s creating the reminders, it allows you to customize the messaging and the templates so it’s in your language and your voice and it’s reminding at the time that you want. And when the client gets it, it makes it very convenient for them to pay because now they don’t have to type in some of that key information.
You think that, somebody gets an invoice. They type it in and then they pay. How could that be hard? People mistype numbers all the time. They forget which number they really need to be putting in. And if you’re in the back office of an accounting firm and you’re having to make sure all of these transactions match back to the invoice and your system is updating appropriately, you know the pain of that.
So this removes that. And the big thing, I think we all see this with automation is it feels good when you can stop doing low value tasks and start doing something that is more high value, it’s more exciting and you feel like you’re giving back to your business. So I think that is where, when you think about what does automation from QuickFee look like and what is it doing?
I’m hoping I’m able to kind of articulate how it’s adding value inside of that process.
Beau Hamilton (12:53)
No, I love the analogy too with the piano, the self playing piano that I wonder if we can get some visuals on the screen here.
Chris Smith (13:02)
Yeah, yeah. Drop in the player piano at that time.
Beau Hamilton (13:07)
That’s often the player. Yeah. Hit the soundboard. That’s great. And the accounting example, I do want to kind of, that’s a good transition into my next question, because I want to get a little more personal and kind of ask you about some of the types of professional service firms that work with QuickFee. Are there any stories that you can share about the results that they are seeing having worked with you or working with you?
Chris Smith (13:30)
Yeah, yeah, there, there are trying to think of a few that would be good here. I’ll try and hit on a few different points. So some firms they look at when they are working with, you know, when we talk about serving professional services B2B, one example is if you’re a B2C, it is not normal for a client to pay a credit card surcharge for using their credit card. You know, like you go to a restaurant or you go to the store, you don’t expect to pay anything above the sales price and the taxes included. Well, in B2B, that is not the case. In B2B, there is a huge impact on these large transactions where if a client is paying with a credit card, the firm could have a lot of fees that they’re racking up just by allowing the clients to pay that way.
So inside of B2B, we have 91% of our firms who pass on a credit card surcharge to their clients to help cover the cost of those fees. And one of the areas where I think it’s really cool is sometimes other firms, they don’t know, right? They think, my clients are not gonna wanna pay that. They’re gonna be mad at me for doing this. And so they don’t do it. Well, with QuickFee and because we work with over a thousand firms and we’ve done this and done this over and over, what we know to be true is this is a beautiful thing that clients are willing to pay for that can save a lot of money. So we have one firm who saves over $140,000 annually in their credit card fees because of the technology that we have that allows them to easily pass on that surcharge to their clients. And, you know, just because I know there’s going to be some people who are going, eww I’m cringing thinking about surcharging our clients. It sounds like such a bad word.
What I’ll say is, the best thing to do is give your clients flexible payment options. So if you go to a website and you offer, hey, you can pay through your bank or hey, you can pay through your credit card or hey, we offer these monthly options, your client has choice inside of that. Now, if you only chose credit card as the only thing and then you put a surcharge on top of that and you didn’t give them any other way to pay, yes, that could be frustrating from a client experience. But $140,000. That is an amazing amount that’s being saved. So that’s one story that is exciting.
The second one is, one of the coolest things we have is our monthly payment plans that we offer. We have a solution that it is set up differently. It’s not like traditional lending or third-party lending. It’s set up so that the firm has full control over it and they can use this to quickly allow their clients to pay their invoice over, like I said, three, six, nine or 12 months. Well, one of our firms, this is a firm who is roughly two and a half million dollars in annual revenue. And they’ve done over $400,000 of clients paying on monthly payment plans that were stuck inside of aging AAR. So just imagine your firm, you have clients who you’ve done this work for, and now they’re hitting 60 plus days on not paying you.
Now your option without what I’m talking about would be, hey Beau, can you pay this $50,000 invoice or it’s maybe multiple invoices that are up to 50,000? And you may be sitting there going, I don’t have it. You know what? I had an unexpected expense, something else came up and I don’t have that. And so you’re thinking you have to pay it in full and you’re dodging, you you’re just saying, okay, I’m, yep, I’ll get to it. Well, when you have a monthly payment plan option that doesn’t hit the customer’s credit, you control the approval and the speed of it and you can literally offer it to them and in 30 seconds get it started. Well, they can afford breaking down that $50,000 invoice over 12 monthly payments. That’s, so that is not a scary thing, but they didn’t know you had the option for it.
So we have one firm who, I’m just looking at a note here, and they said, since working with QuickFee, we’ve been able to not only bridge the gap in accounts receivable collections, but also start additional work on a client that’s holding on because of cashflow and budget constraints. A $50,000 investment in accounting and tax planning becomes very affordable with the 12-month payment plan.
So I think, you know, those are two stories where different ways of QuickFee helping add value. We’re saving $140,000 over here, and we’re helping move an invoice where services have been completed of $50,000 back into the firm’s bank account because the client starts paying that way. So I think those are probably two that give you a gist of where clients win when using QuickFee.
Beau Hamilton (17:36)
Yeah, those are great examples. I just think of just my own personal finances and just having the flexibility is just absolutely huge. And that’s the thing I was, I was always look into when working with a company, right? It’s just trying to figure out what fits my budget and how I can pay for it in a financially responsible manner, right? Are there any examples you have of like reducing the time of receiving a payment? I know you kind of touched on some of them but…
Chris Smith (18:08)
Yeah, so we on average on data that we have internally on average we see at least a 32% reduction when you apply the best practices of using digital payment solutions around the messaging and then with the automation side that enhances it even more to where with if you are able to apply automation it can get you into the healthy range which is below 30 days. So you know I would say, on average just by applying digital payment options into your business without automation, you’re gonna see roughly a 32% increase. And part of that goes back into what I was just saying about the, when you have flexible payment options, you increase the speed in which a client can go ahead and make a payment and buy.
And this, while I’m just talking about fun analogies today, this one is one that I always think about is just imagine, you’re all excited, you go to Amazon and you just start racking up stuff that you want to buy. And then imagine you get to the payment page and it says send a check here. How long is it going to take you to complete that process versus if they would have had other options like credit card that you would expect or ACH?
Beau Hamilton (19:09)
Yeah, that’s no, that’s that’s that would slow me down for sure. Yeah, I would have to get the checkbook out, get the stamps. Yeah.
Chris Smith (19:18)
Yeah, but it’s simple. It’s, you know, the thing that I would say is if you’re listening, it sounds simple, but it’s these little micro changes that you make in decision making. How do my clients pay? What are we offering as payment terms that can make this thing really take off or it can just apply hindrances in the process of how hard you have to work to go and collect that money.
Beau Hamilton (19:35)
Hmm. Now, okay, you have, mentioned these outcomes. If there are outcomes like this that can solve the various challenges that you outlined earlier, why aren’t all professional services, service firms leveraging them? Like, it, is it just, I know you kind of touched on the education, but is it a matter of just getting the word out or is it a matter of educating the clients about like the downsides of maintaining the status quo of keeping the same operations humming?
Chris Smith (20:01)
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the first thing is every day there’s a new company and there’s a new technology and there’s a new distraction out there about where you should be spending your time. So I think we’re just in a noisy environment. know, all of us, if you’re a business, you’re in a noisy environment with a lot of people saying, we can help you do this. So part of it is just how much mind share do you have?
But the second part I would say is, I hit on this earlier, but I think it holds true here is we tend to, in a business, focus on front office. What are we selling? How are we selling it? How are we positioning it? How are we packaging it? How are we pricing it? And even if you’re, you know, there’s a lot of firms we deal with that do IT consulting and they do consulting on accounting and back office type functions. But they do it at the expense of neglecting their own, right? So they know everything to do here, but they don’t spend time doing it. And they just allow the manual kind of hamster-wheel type activities to go, that’s okay. We need to focus over here.
So I think that is the, you know, probably two of the key things of it’s, you know, that you likely need to spend some time on it, but you’re just not giving it that mind share. And that’s where, you know, what we try and do is I love when we have what I call these light bulb moments and we can trigger somebody into going, my gosh, you know what? I have been neglecting that, but you just help frame it in a way that shows me I need to, like I need to go do something about it. Because again, $400,000 in cash for a $3 million firm is game changing. It is. But if you’re just kind of ignoring it and not putting the right lens on that, then yeah, it seems like, we’ve always done it this way.
Beau Hamilton (21:32)
Interesting. Well, I think you did a great job kind of outlining that because I mean, prior to this conversation, I’ve I mean, I didn’t quite fully understand exactly how what kind of gains to expect working with you. So I think hopefully the listeners kind of extract some insights from from what you just mentioned, you know, kind of mentioning with the noise and then along the same lines of maybe competition, you know, QuickFee isn’t the only fintech company working out there to win potential clients, right? Where do you feel like, how do you feel like QuickFee differs from maybe the other options out there?
Chris Smith (22:11)
Yeah, so I’ll say the market is full of people who have good technology, you know, or competition. They have good technology. We have good technology. What we do though is we start differentiating on who is QuickFee and who is our competition and what is the value proposition that we bring to the market. And I think there’s two key things that we do really well.
One is that I mentioned earlier, we want to win by being able to create a solution that firms, it won’t break their bank account, it won’t disrupt their budget, and it’ll allow them to get more returns than they’ll ever pay for using QuickFee. So we love that. We love the thought about being able to help a big, broad part of the market on this.
On the second side is, everybody says they are people care. But then there’s a ring of people who like, no, we really care. No, like we will all, you know, when it comes to collaboration and partnership and the level of engagement we bring to our firms between our president, Jennifer Worwa, myself, our CTO, down to our operations team, to our development team, our engineers, our operations. We are so customer focused that it makes work fun. Like I cannot explain to you what it feels like when you’re super collaborative with your partners and your customers, and you’re just working on this level that creates wins for them. And then because you spend time creating wins for your customers, it creates more wins back for the firm or for QuickFee, but it also helps other firms win too when we do that.
So I would say that is an area where, you when you’re looking at technology, sometimes feeling like a commodity, we are great partners and we have fun working with our customers.
Beau Hamilton (23:51)
That’s amazing. That’s a great answer. I do, I completely relate to that where I’ll read, you know, like in a bio about somebody or just kind of like surmise information about somebody based off an article they wrote or a thing they did and posted on LinkedIn or something. And I get this like preconceived view of who they are. But until I actually beat them and talk to them and work with them, that’s when I really fully understand just how genuine they are helpful and insightful they are. I mean, I can just talking with you is kind of like a similar story where it’s like, I just face sort of face-to-face here as much as we can. You seem very genuine and I think that’s great. I think that’s awesome.
Chris Smith (24:38)
Yeah, well, I appreciate that. And, you know, I don’t want to brag on ourselves, but we just, I think anybody who’s in a business, if you’re not doing something for your customers and you’re doing it business first, customer second, when you get to experience it the other way around, oh my gosh, it’s so, so feel good moment type stuff. Yeah.
Beau Hamilton (25:00)
Yeah, I like that. Now, what is your view on the industry as a whole, from your perspective and as a leader in this space? How is the professional services industry evolving in ways that will affect customers or users?
Chris Smith (25:15)
Yeah. You know, I think we’re, it probably feels like, you know, every five years there’s some kind of big disruption that’s going on. We obviously see it with Gen AI, especially right now. And what do we do? What does it do? How do we work together? Will it, you know, affect my job? But it’s still a very, I think it’s a very squishy topic.
So when I think about professional services firm and where the industry is going and what are some of the things that are going to be pivotal moments right now, I think it’s looking at how do you take technology and embed it into your processes that allow your employees to be superhuman, to be really good at what they’re doing on the high quality stuff, and then you allow it to take over, I always refer to like the hamster-wheel activities, but it’s those low value activities.
And that’s gonna be a challenge for everybody. Technology for most part has been, especially inside of a lot of accounting firms or law firms, you have desktop applications, local on-premise applications that have a lot of information. So now you have the ability to, what things can we plug into here to help optimize it to add more value through automation rules? If you look at programs like Microsoft Power Automate, Power Automate has a desktop application that you can sit here and you can program in step by step by step by step of all the things that you hate doing. And if they’re repetitive processes, you can use stuff like that.
So that is where I think there’s so much optimization that can be done, but you have to care about it. You have to have somebody inside of your firm who goes, I love the thought of being able to scale our business while keeping costs either flat or even going down in cost. And one of the things that we’ve done at QuickFee, and so as a Chief Growth Officer, I have sales, have marketing, I have customer success, and I love thinking of like, so we’ve adopted a technology first strategy. It’s not anti-people, it’s just how do we make sure we solve problems through technology first, and then we look to people second on that.
So that way it keeps us from over hiring, from, you know, just building non-repeatable processes into our business. But here’s a cool part that I think is, has been really fun to watch over the last year. We’ve adopted a new technology called Gong. It’s a sales application that helps with a lot of different things. But one of the things it does is our sales reps no longer have to take notes. Okay, so we, if you’re a sales rep inside of QuickFee, we tell you do not take notes. You be present with your prospect or with your existing customer and you can stay there and have the best conversation. You can have the best discussion because you can trust every single note is being captured here.
Well, a couple of things, Gong does not miss a note. It summarizes everything. It summarizes everything in here’s what your follow-ups are from that exact meeting. Then it does a chapter by chapter play where it takes all the key themes if you need something deeper. It has a full transcript. So if we want to hand anything off to our product management team so that they can hear in the customer’s words exactly what the value is and what they’re asking. We can send follow-ups to the customers. You can have it reply with an email and say, here’s a recap of what we’ve done. That’s just one tool in one process that is game-changing, which it doesn’t take the sales rep away. It just makes them better and more effective. So apply that into the industry and where is it going? I think we all have a chance to up our game that way.
Beau Hamilton (28:27)
Yeah, that’s a great, I use that form of summarization with various AI tools on a daily basis. That helps me so much in how you can summarize it into different bullet points or different links, I guess. That’s huge. And I like your of broad, don’t hyper-focus on any maybe one technology, but it’s just a matter of when the technology arrives and how you’re how you choose to recognize it and incorporate it in an efficient manner. I guess that’s the most broad way. Now I want to expand a little bit on that question. If you could recommend one thing for a leader in a professional services firm to take away from this podcast, what would that one thing be?
Chris Smith (29:13)
I would say, you know, what’s near and dear to my heart and I think can have a big impact is I’m going to go back into ask your team how much is sitting inside of your accounts receivable today. And if it’s over 10% of your annual revenue, and it’s definitely if it’s around 16%, then I know you’re at 60-day payment terms. Ask what’s sitting in there. And if you hear anything that’s above 30 days, and then definitely if you hear anything that’s above 45 and creeps into the 60 days, take time to explore what are the payment options that you offer today? How do you bill your customers and what’s the language being used?
And if you just spend, and it doesn’t have to be through QuickFee, this is just, it could be internal processes of how do we do this a little bit more efficiently? Every day that you reduce that DSO from 60 down to 59 down to 58, it can impact thousands of dollars per day reduced that goes back into your business. So I think that’s my key takeaway is I wanna challenge that area that you work so, you build this business to go and win and deliver value and when it comes to the final exchange of value where it gets converted into cash in your bank account that you’re not giving up and just watching some of that fall out of a leaky bucket.
Beau Hamilton (30:25)
Hmm. That’s a great answer and it’s a great way to wrap up this wide ranging interview, I think. Chris, where can people learn more about you and QuickFee and just get in touch with your team?
Chris Smith (30:38)
Yeah, what I would say is go in and find us on LinkedIn. Just look up for QuickFee and you’ll find us there and you can find me on LinkedIn, but I’ll send you just sort of my LinkedIn post that maybe you can link onto here where they can connect with me there. But I think that’s that’s our best channel that we put a lot of content on.
Beau Hamilton (30:54)
Perfect. All right, everyone, go to LinkedIn, check out Quickfee. Thank you so much for your time, Chris. This has been really, really great, and I appreciate all the analogies and breakdowns of the information you shared.
Chris Smith (31:06)
You bet I’ve enjoyed the session and again, I’m glad I’ve got my Beau Brights on today. I knew I had to bring it when I was meeting with you. So thanks a lot.
Beau Hamilton (31:13)
Of course. All right. Well, thanks, Chris. Take care. Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe and stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software-related podcasts. I’ll talk to you guys in the next one.