Eye on platinum #4: The upward trajectory takes hold
When Charles Klvana, founder of Eye on Books, offered to lend his perspective on his journey towards achieving platinum partner status, we jumped at the chance.
In this ten-part series, Charles takes us all down memory lane and throws in some great advice for potential partners looking to follow in similar footsteps.
In part four of this series, twenty Xero clients shoots up to 30 Xero clients – and soon after, 30 becomes 50. The upwards trajectory is well and truly in motion.
Date: December 2011
Client count: 30 clients on Xero (then 50)
In mid-November that same year, Xero launched a promotion: Whoever added the most number of new Xero clients by Christmas would win a special branded Xero iPad!
I wanted that iPad! (We didn’t have one at home yet.)
Winning MYOB clients over
To help win MYOB clients over, my team adopted a plan to simply show them a set of management reports from Xero.
“Want this? Then we’re moving you to Xero. It won’t cost you any more, and you’ll have these beautiful reports, and access to your accounts anytime from anywhere.”
The tactic worked. We got thirteen new clients onto Xero. This was a 30 per cent increase.
Xero ran a Christmas function in Perth that year, which Chris Ridd attended. Chris came up to me and knew who we were. (Yep I had an, ‘Oh my god, the MD actually knows my name and who we are?!’ moment.)
However, Chris gave me the sad news, we didn’t win that iPad. A Perth accounting firm had beaten us to it on the last day.
No new iPad for my wife that year! But a good promotion all round.
Out with Excel and in with Workflowmax
By March 2012, with 50 clients now on Xero, it was getting hard to manage clients and their jobs. We had Excel timesheets saved on OneDrive, which we could access from anywhere. This was kind of working, but compiling the numbers at the end of each month was getting laborious. We were 95 per cent hourly billing for clients.
I knew there was a Xero add-on called Workflowmax. After much discussion amongst the guys in the office, we put it in place at Eye on Books. It cost us $80/month, but I hoped it would save me some time on the weekends.
When putting it in place, we originally planned to run it side-by-side with our Excel systems for three months.
After just two weeks the advantages were clear. We ditched Excel, and fully went to Workflowmax. We’ve never looked back!
Stay tuned for next week’s instalment: Going for gold!
Click here to read last week’s article.
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Source: Xero Blog
