It’s been probably two years since we started working with TOA and it’s going great. There’s no complaints with our current team member and her communication is awesome.
We wanted to find somebody that shared our mindset and goals. In particular, we went into this process looking for somebody who could lead the team over there as it develops. We’ve been very clear with our first hire, Jam, that this role might morph more into a leadership position.
We want her to grow with us. There are a lot of possibilities and we’re all excited to see how big this can get. You hear about teams with five, six or seven members – we’d love to do the same. I’m excited to see Jam step up and manage a team like that when it happens.
Our outsourcing journey started with not being able to find quality temporary tax season help, which made past tax seasons a disaster. We wanted to make things better, so we started to play with the idea of outsourcing.
Our employees know that their jobs aren’t on the line. They see this as a way to move them up so they can be in leadership roles and have extra support from overseas.
TOA had lined up 14 interviews for us. Before the day of the interviews we received all the resumes and the test scores. It was really neat to see the proficiency of knowledge and English. We ended up hiring seven staff in total.
Our president said if we had 14 spots, we would have hired each and every one of them because he just enjoyed all of them so much!
We had a lot of difficulty finding qualified accountants in the States. Another CPA friend told us about TOA. Honestly, I don’t think we had thought about it at all as a potential option, but we were very open to it once we heard about it.
We love our TOA team. They’re just like a regular part of our team, just they’re thousands of miles away. We have four staff accountants. They do a full range of work for our clients from bookkeeping, sales tax, business and personal returns, basic tax planning.
It’s economically is a great advantage. It’s a huge force multiplier and a competitive advantage for us. We’ve got a vision for growing our firm’s revenue, but finding qualified CPAs has always been a sticking point… Now we’re able to bring on more clients faster. So that’s a big win for us.
TOA has given me more resources within my admin team at the office. The offshore team does not get interrupted the same as the receptionist does back in the office or the same as the other administration person. They don’t get the same phone calls from clients. They don’t get the same interruptions as interactions are done via email or via Skype.
TOA gives you more time and more resources to do the things that you actually want to do. You can then get TOA to do the things that you don’t necessarily want to do.
We’re very focused on helping our clients grow and improve their business. A lot of what we do is bookkeeping. We believe that if we control the data, we control the client. So if you can get your bookkeeping right, everything that flows on from there becomes simple. We needed to be able to scale up that part of our business. We haven’t been able to find the people that we need over in Australia, and we were able to find them here in the Philippines. So it’s been a great experience.
The role that our offshore team play will become an integral part of the business moving forward. Our business in Australia has gone through a phenomenal period of growth over the last 18 months. We’ve probably doubled in size. The team that we’ve put in TOA has allowed us to do that. As we bring on more and more clients, we’ll put more and more people on, and I expect that our existing team will be able to train them up.
Our office is pretty much at capacity now and it was difficult trying to find accountants to come to the suburbs. I looked at a few options before choosing TOA. I liked that they specialized in accounting.
The recruitment team is really accommodating and very, very accessible. We’ve expanded our practice rapidly over the last three years. I now have eight staff in Australia and I have three staff in the Philippines. I’ve had rapid growth of clients and I wouldn’t have been able to achieve that without TOA.