CANADIAN CPA CHANGED HIS PERCEPTION OF OFFSHORE STAFFING

Adam Briggs is a CPA and a partner at Briggs & Associates chartered professional accountants based in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

They are a full-service professional accounting firm with a nine-person team. They've got three people working in their office two working remotely from within Canada and also they have  four people working with entigrity.  

Adam was against this idea

Well initially he was against the idea of offshore staffing and kept ignoring emails and once even wrote us and told, “don't contact me anymore”, but eventually he attended one of our free CPD webinars on a platform myCPE and that kind he expanded the horizons what he realized from there was that the big four and the other large accounting firms have expanded their operations by virtue of their global teams. Offshore staffing was a similar solution for firms like theirs that would help them grow. He started to have the feeling of being left behind at first but they caught up pretty quickly. They started two years back and in fact, entigrity's offshore staff inspired them to hire remote workers from Canada.

The Stigma around offshore staffing is going away 

Like Adam said watching our webinar was a trigger point that led him to explore this whole new arena of cloud or virtual working, virtual operations, virtual firms, remote operations. When he dug further he realized that offshoring didn't just save cost but actually helped expand practice. Now it's no longer confined to 30 square miles of the city. In fact, he guesses about 50% of our clients today are spread nationally. So now even he can move from one province to another and build his office there. Building an offshore team has given him the flexibility that he wanted. In fact, Adam says, “if I have my laptop and Wi-Fi I can manage my work from pretty much anywhere I can communicate, review, get everything done easily”. And it's just changed his professional life. Now he can plan to go on a three week trip to Europe with his family, it doesn't bother him unlike previously when he needed to plan in advance, even if he wanted to take just three or four days off work, now that the operations are fully under his control all he needs is to ensure to check on everything for maybe a couple of hours every day or whatever read emails get a report of what's going on. Adam Briggs added a remark “Honestly it's been a life-changing idea for me”.

In fact this compelled him to even go remote locally

Well as someone who was himself against the idea but now has come up with a changed outlook. He says people need to look at this with an open mind because this is the new way the world is operating now and it's going in the future. Communication is most important unlike when you speak with your office colleagues directly, now technology has taken over all that, here all your communications happen over the phone, Skype instant messaging, or video calling but still, you've got to communicate regularly, review and give instructions in order to make this relationship work. Then the second most important thing is to think of them as your own core team. You never treat them like a third party, you don't treat them like a machine, just the way your people work for you as your core team. And when you do that's where the most important things are taken care of and lastly, for him it's a solution where he can build an efficient team in the long run and not have just a temporary or seasonal solution. So this has given him the flexibility of working just about 25 to 30 hours a week except in ordering grilled high-traffic peak seasons when there's a lot of pressure otherwise. It's just 25-30 hours a week now and it's given him the flexibility to travel whenever and wherever he wants and this compelled him to even go remote locally.

So he thinks of it as a long-term solution to grow his practice and at the same time balance his professional and family life because of this new opportunity and he is planning his next trip abroad to India where he can meet our team as he never been before to India and have met our team only virtually ever since we have been working together so he might take a couple of days off and just to be with us and it would be a great opportunity for him to know us better and understand the way we operate. 

Concerns for Data security & Privacy

On the concern of data security and privacy, he said, yes it was initially while building a virtual practice but it popped into his mind a few days after he had hired the first offshore person so he came back to entigrity and asked about how we take care of this and he was literally amazed by the policies and controls that we have in place they are completely paperless, fully digital, everything is monitored on CCTV we have access card control entries and excess exits. There's a whole policy of security parameters implemented at our offices as part of our business. We suggested them to implement multi-factor authentication and their operations for better security so that the only person with sufficient rights and a password can access the system so they’re secure and have grown about 80 percent virtual and the practice with our advice.

The reason they were saved in a pandemic

Well, today they have four full-time offshore staff of entigrity working with them. But initially, they were upset with the quality staff that we had assigned them. Though we have also interviewed first to shortlist and then they interviewed and asked him a lot of questions and performed tests as well. So that was a properly evaluated hire and really that's the best thing that can be done but back then he was convinced that maybe all this worked well on paper but not really well and practiced and even though that was a mistake. It could have still happened even if they had hired directly, it was just a hiccup and he panicked which honestly wasn't necessary. He spoke with the Account Manager team at entigrity kind of convinced him to give it another chance and on the brighter side entigrity provided them with an immediate replacement while the outgoing person provided proper hand-holding during that and so there was no transition gaps to speak of. So in this pandemic situation, they continued their relationship and understood they are fully secure and they are satisfied with the working. What they built in 2019 is helping them to sail through 2020. For them, their average workweek is 25 to 30 hours a week and this was the biggest reason which saved them in this pandemic.  

Entigrity™ is a trusted offshore staffing partner to over 500+ accountants, CPAs and tax firms across the US and Canada. Our flexible and transparent hiring model gives helps firms of all sizes to hire staff for accounting, bookkeeping, tax preparation or any other task for 75% less cost. As a firm 'run by accountants, for the accountants', Entigrity captures the hiring needs of accounting firms most precisely, providing staff that works directly under your control and management, still you are left with least to worry about compliance, payroll taxes, overheads or any other benefits.