“Trusted & Efficient Outsourced Bookkeeping” with Hayden Huff of Supporting Strategies

Jeffrey (0s):
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to radio entrepreneurs. My name again is Jeffrey Davis. I am the host of radio entrepreneurs. We’ve been doing this show for geez, over seven years, over 7,000 guests, entrepreneurs alike. But one of my favorite moments is always with this guest host, who I have here, and that’s Evan Macedo, VP of finance and operations at Sapers and Wallack, and also my partner with FEI segments, financial executives international. Welcome back, Evan.

Evan (27s):
Thank you. Jeffrey is an absolute pleasure to be here supporting both safest and wallet in FEI.

Jeffrey (33s):
Well, our next guest, I can’t say she’s new to me. I’ve known her in a different context, not Radio Entrepreneurs, Hayden Huff, director of business development at Supporting Strategies at Supporting Strategies. Welcome Hayden and wow. I get to see you in a different context.

Hayden (49s):
I know it’s so good to see you guys and connect. I’m so happy to be on the show that I’ve heard so much about and see what you guys have going on. So thanks for having me.

Jeffrey (59s):
So first of all, since everybody else listening, probably doesn’t know, Supporting Strategies, tell us first about Supporting Strategies.

Hayden (1m 6s):
So Supporting Strategies has just been my ultimate favorite place to be and to work because the people here are so incredible, but we’ve been providing outsourced virtual bookkeeping since 2004. So it’s all we’ve ever known. So it’s not just the bookkeeping. It goes all the way up to controller work. And we do accounts payable, receivable, payroll, and HR administration and reporting. And that’s the type of clients that we support is just people who don’t meet a full-time resource. And we’ll either fill in a little part of their accounting department or be the entire thing. That’s what we do.

Evan (1m 41s):
That’s great. And Hayden, can you tell us a little bit about what your role is there?

Hayden (1m 46s):
Yes, I would love to, I have the most fun role. I love being a connector. And so I get to meet with a lot of the cool startups that we’re talking to or nonprofits, or I don’t know, we’ll have work with a lot of professional service companies and learn about their business challenges and ways that I can help them with Supporting Strategies, but also beyond that and really figure out who I can connect them to in our network. And yeah, so that’s what I do. I go out and I make the relationships with partners. I do fun stuff like this with you guys, like radio shows and try to be active on social media on LinkedIn, just to create brand awareness and now I’m helping need a team. So we’re expanding.

Hayden (2m 27s):
We just screw into Philadelphia as well as Milwaukee. And we just hired somebody down in the Stanford, Connecticut area. So a lot of exciting stuff going on,

Jeffrey (2m 36s):
Hayden you’re in a pretty crowded category, just like the rest of us. Why Supporting Strategies,

Hayden (2m 43s):
Why supporting strategy? So, okay. And my previous roles, which I loved the companies that I worked for, but service was always a challenge. And for me, I love money. That’s why I love sales, but it’s empty calories. And what makes me feel excited and joy is when I can really help somebody. And my team here really fulfills what they say they’re going to do. And I love that. I also love that our CEO is so forward-thinking and way ahead of the times, I mean, she had the vision to create a virtual company back in 2004, before there was even a cloud. So it’s really fun being part of something that is really adaptable, changing. Like we have a lot of drive to make moves quickly and just to work alongside an entrepreneur who has so many great ideas.

Hayden (3m 30s):
So that’s why I love Supporting Strategies take care of our clients.

Evan (3m 34s):
Well, that’s certainly wonderful. And I also got to say, I love Supporting Strategies for the fact that we did hire you guys back in, I think 2020, and for somebody with me, we’re in many, many hats at my company, definitely gave me my nights and my weekends back. And I’m very happy with all those services.

Hayden (3m 52s):
No, thanks Evan. You do a lot for Sapers and Wallach. You’re just like such a value there, and I’m glad we could alleviate you to focus on things that you enjoy doing a little bit more than,

Evan (4m 5s):
And to switch gears a little bit. I want to talk, you know, we, we are, we’ve been in this pandemic for a couple of years now. We think it’s going away. It comes back. It’s definitely effected a lot of our clients. It’s definitely effected a lot of your customers. And then coming out of the pandemic, we’re in this new job economy where there’s two job openings to every one person applying for these, these positions out there. What is your company doing to one adapt to that and to help out your clients or prospects that are maybe struggling a little bit?

Hayden (4m 41s):
Yeah, so it’s really interesting because we have our hands in so many different types of clients. There’s a lot of different scenarios. So our bread and butter has really been the tech and life sciences space. And a lot of those companies have really just excelled during this time. But then on the other side there’s companies that, you know, are nonprofits. For example, sometimes they’re a little bit more paper, heavy manual base. So we really made a push to help modernize them and to get their systems speaking to each other and able to, you know, run their back office in a virtual setting. And then on the other side is just like you said, there’s so much opportunity in a job market and it’s really become a war for talent with accounting and finance people.

Hayden (5m 24s):
So there’s, you know, people who wouldn’t have traditionally outsourced coming to us and we’re able to put our people in who are all controllers. And so turnover never falls on them because we’ve been seeing a lot of that. We’re just really a struggle of trying to find the right person internally to bring onto their team.

Evan (5m 43s):
That’s fantastic. I know for myself, just turn over with people helping me and having to retrain somebody every three months, six months, or we had interns in here for awhile, which was very nice, but to have some more consistency on getting bookkeeping done for somebody that I can trust has certainly been a big weight off of my shoulders there.

Jeffrey (6m 4s):
Well, and you’re a personal endorsement because you’re the CFO and you’re able to explain how it’s sort of helped to make your position more efficient. Do you see any other trends in the marketplace or particular industries that are looking towards your types of services more than any other?

Hayden (6m 20s):
Yeah, I do. I mean, there, there’s a bunch of different trends. I would say one of them being that it’s now a big trend to outsource just because it’s not such a taboo thing anymore. Whereas it kind of was before, but after the pandemic forced us to live in our homes like caging animals for two plus years, people are like, huh, I guess we really don’t need somebody onsite. And we can save a lot of, you know, overhead on not having a full-time employee. So that’s the biggest trend that I’m seeing across all industries for a lot of like tech and life science companies. There’s just been a lot of VC money being thrown at companies. And so groups like that, they are coming to companies like Supporting Strategies because they need, you know, a third party resource to do and manage their books for the investors.

Hayden (7m 8s):
So that’s another big trend. And then, yeah, just along with the whole turnover thing, that’s really the biggest.

Jeffrey (7m 16s):
I spent a lot of turnover in the marketplace, everybody, and there’s much more demand than there is supply and salaries are going up.

Hayden (7m 23s):
I know, and I w I don’t know where the heck all the people have gone. It’s just like, there’s just not the amount of people out there that there was prior.

Jeffrey (7m 33s):
Well, I know it, your system’s a little bit different than let’s say what I do as a management consultant, but talk to us a little bit about the HR functions that you play as well.

Hayden (7m 44s):
Yes. So the HR functions, this is interesting. I can’t totally speak to this yet because we are rolling out a new service line, which is going to do more around HR, but our existing HR part of our business is really the administration. So anything like onboarding or off-boarding employees being your payroll administrator and running payroll, that’s kind of a trade that people aren’t as interested in doing anymore. So it’s a great piece to outsource.

Jeffrey (8m 12s):
Well, it takes up a lot of people’s time and they in HR needs to free up their time as well.

Hayden (8m 19s):
Yeah. And you know, you’re still right, because a lot of times the payroll function will fall into HR and they’re like, we’re in HR. Like this is what we’re supposed to be doing. So that’s how we’ll alleviate. And even just getting the benefits administration over to the carrier or the record keeper for, you know, benefit plans or retirement plans like Evan would help with. So that’s really how we help on the HR side today.

Jeffrey (8m 47s):
Well, and we, when you, as things get updated and you have new services with, or without Evan, I hope you come back and talk to again, we’ve been speaking with Hayden Huff, director of business development, Supporting Strategies, also Evan Macedo, VP of finance and operations at Cypress and wallet. Hayden. If someone were looking for you and interested in your services, how would they find you?

Hayden (9m 12s):
So you can find me on LinkedIn, or you can email me. My email is just H Huff at Supporting Strategies dot com. And I’d be happy to get to you, but if you send me a LinkedIn message, I’ll definitely see you on LinkedIn as well.

Jeffrey (9m 28s):
Great. And Evan, all my, my partner at FEI, how do people find you? I know how to find you. I go for, I go for coffee down the street and then call them, just show up

Evan (9m 40s):
Jeffrey for you. I’m always a phone call away for, for sabers and a wallet. We just built out a brand new website. We have a recourse our resource center on it with blogs, podcasts, videos, when we’re putting content up there every single month, I think we have 300 and some odd articles already on there. So I would just go to say, personal wallet.com. You can go to our team page by myself or any one of our other team members. Additionally, if you are looking, if you are a senior financial leader and you were looking to join a wonderful growing group of other senior financial leaders, I ask you to go to FEI boston.org.

Evan (10m 21s):
You can check out our wonderful group there. It’s one of Boston’s premier networking groups, and it is a fantastic place to meet your next connect connections, meet your next client for your business, and be amongst a group of really good professionals who can really deepen the knowledge that you have in your industry.

Jeffrey (10m 39s):
Oh, that was a mouthful. And you know, you mentioned 300 articles. How long has sabers and wallet been in business?

Evan (10m 45s):
We’re going to be hitting our 90th year in, in June. Oh, I know that’s a big accomplishment for us. We’re very excited about it.

Jeffrey (10m 54s):
And I can say for a lot of confidence being in the New Zealand market, been in my business for over 37 years, that bill Sapers and now of Eva, Sapeurs have always held the tradition as thought leaders. So I want to thank you. My name is Jeffrey Davis. I’m the host of Radio Entrepreneurs, also an a chairman of the board, founder of MAGE, LLC management consulting firm in new England. And this is Radio Entrepreneurs where we’ll be back with more stories after this break.