The Savvy-CFO Tech Stack

Along with having an online presence, EVERY business needs to put the tools they use to run their business as a TOP PRIORITY. This is commonly referred to as your “Tech-Stack”. Many Blogs talk about conceptual solutions. We even have an article that does just this - A Business Owner's System Toolkit.  Here at Savvy-CFO, we practice what we preach. In this article we’ll outline something we’re very proud of - our very own Savvy-CFO “Tech Stack”.

WE PRIORITIZED OUR NEEDS

Buyers’ Journey - The Immutable Standard

All alone in the #1 spot, never to be vanquished, comes our audience; ambitious business owners and their advisors. This community is our “Buyer”. Paying or not, we want their journey with us to be next-level.

Of that audience, those who who choose to engage our services, our Clients, enjoy front-of-the line service and the added competitive edge that we deliver.

For us at Savvy-CFO, in choosing and maintaining our Tech-Stack, the Buyer’s journey is always at the forefront - Everything else is benchmarked off optimizing this.

The Priorities Behind the Buyers’ Journey

OK, we’ve put our stake in the ground on what we want to deliver here at Savvy-CFO. Here’s what we  have identified as the priorities for doing so:

• • Information Rich;
  • Agile;
  • Data-driven;
  • Seamless;
  • Always on; and
  • Engage how and when you want to

WE MEASURED TWICE - CUT ONCE, THEN MADE IT A REPEATING PROCESS

Technology is rapidly changing, mostly for the better, certainly with leapfrog effect amount competitors. So, not only did we follow our core idiom to start things off, we added it to our Savvy-Lab, and turned this process into a repeating task.

Our Founders, in their predecessor businesses and careers have successfully followed this principle. They’ve always been early adopters of revolutionary technologies, in hardware, the internet itself, “cloud-born” software, API enabled integrations, remote-work efficiencies, even AI. Savvy will continue to do so. It’s core to who we are.

Our Core Tools

Every business will have technology tools that they need to use everyday (its “Core Tools”) which, without them, cannot deliver on its promise. Here is a listing of our Core Tools:

Hardware

Processing hardware:

1. • At a minimum, a transportable lap-top, “work-anywhere” ready
   • Any state-of-the-art device will work, user’s choice

Mobile devices:

• • To enhance responsiveness;
  • Same as 1. above

Communications

Slack

Yes, Slack is listed first here, ahead of obvious tools like email, virtual meetings, and calendars, on purpose. We see Slack as the current leader in ad-hoc communications, and let's be honest, ad-hoc is where a large portion of communications has always occurred in the workplace. Managed well, these forms of communications can also be very, maybe even the most, effective means to delivering quality business services. Slack has focused not only on its ad-hoc functionality, but as well, its integration into the workplace, including the tools we've listed below. Think, "water-cooler" convos, "got a minute" hallway chats, "let's jump into an open office" impromptu meetings from days gone by. Slack is next-level, and in our view not just a "remote-work" solution, but a foundational tool regardless of where work is being done, and why.

Slack, in our view, is so important and often inaccurately judged, Kieran Zakaria, our Savvy-CFO Slack Guru has created a Blog on this tool that we think you'll want to read. It's called 15 Slack Tips to Supercharge Your Productivity and Improve Your Communication.

The Rest of our Communications Tech Stack

There's a very active debate happening with respect to what a business should use for its core communications tools. For us it narrows down to 3 choices:

• • Google Workspace
  • Microsoft 365
  • An integrated version of best-in-class of each sub-category.
    • Examples of these would be serious contenders to the Google- Microsoft oligopoly such as:
      • DropBox
      • Zoom
      • Firefox
      • Calendar

At Savvy-CFO, we've chosen to adopt one of the fully integrated suites as our internal business communications infrastructure. Due to the fact that Google's Workspace solution was truly "born in the Cloud", and after rigorous debate and testing, it is the current leader when it was subjected to our Savvy-Lab scoring system regarding current functionality, ease of use, and future capabilities. The Microsoft 365 option came a surprisingly distant second to Workspace. the third option a distant third, primarily because any added additional features that this patchwork solution offered outweighed the time, energy and cost of integration that comes out-of-the-box with either the Google or the Microsoft options. 

Google Workspace

• • Chrome:
    • The clear winner, first and foremost because of its search capability and first-in-line status for compatibility with most leading business applications.
  • GMail:
    • As with Chrome, GMail leads because of its search capability and first-in-line status for compatibility with most leading business applications.
  • GDrive:
    • Catching up with other leading file storage tools. The fact that it is integrated into the Workspace system gives it the edge over other choices.
    • Options are:
      • The independant offering DropBox, like Zoom mentioned below, was a first-mover in this office service function, and does a remarkable job keeping itself current and competitive. My other business, inHouse CFO has used it since 2005, and it has served us well.
        • That said, Google Drive is part of a one-stop office service offering making iut Savvy-CFO's choice for today and the foreseeable future.
      • Microsoft's OneDrive tool, which in our view is overly clunky and old-school "enterprisey" in its feel and function.
  • GCalendar:
    • Always has been, and it looks like forever will be, the calendar tool of choice. Others (HubSpot, and Asana for example) have acknowledged this by building integrations into GCalendar. Microsoft Outlook, while having all the functionality of GCalendar, scores behind it in terms of agility and UX.
  • GMeet:
    • This one has very serious competition with the early rise of and market-share grab achieved by Zoom. Both Google and Microsoft were caught napping here, allowing Zoom to catch a foothold. 
      • We do find the video and audio quality of Google Meets to be marginally better than its competitors.
    • MS Teams on the other hand is, like its OneDrive tool, is overly clunky and old-school "enterprisey" in its feel and function.
    • GCalendar allows for integrations of both Zoom and Teams, so we have the ability to use any of the 3 leading applications in our everyday work.

The Buyer’s Journey

HubSpot

The acronym CRM ("Customer Relationship Management") applies here. Salesforce immediately comes to mind. More recently Microsoft Dynamics, and NetSuite have become considerations in the CRM space.

Why HubSpot CRM?

Simply put, it wins on many counts (Ux, Community, Training, Scalability, Customizability, to name a few). The most important feature though is it now covers (and understands) the entire Buyer's Journey. At Savvy-CFO we see an audience (ambitious business owners), some who pay for the competitive edge we deliver, others who are simply browsing. HubSpot allows us to interact with this audience on their terms and hopefully add value each time we do.

Google Analytics

This is the only tool outside of HubSpot that we need to understand our audience and their journey (or not) with us. It integrates perfectly into HubSpot.

Project Management

Asana

Much of our work uses teams of people, and not only our people. Client personnel, and outsourced specialists are used frequently to deliver on our mandates. We chose Asana over the many choices which are available. There's a common theme and reason here. First it is "Cloud-Born", and easily integrated into an ecosystem such as Savvy-CFO. It understands the way projects need to be managed. The Company is well financed, and continuously adding to its features and functionality, each of which reflects clearly they are specialists in managing projects, and have a road map that shows they understand how to make a tool that deploys this technical skillset.

Professional Services Management

Karbon

Karbon, again "Cloud-Born" is a tech tool that addresses the unique needs of professional service businesses like ours. We've chosen it over other more mature alternatives to ensure we deliver services to our clients in a timely, accurate, and comprehensive manner. Their community is not unlike HubSpot's, it's focused on the Client's experience. That is attractive to us; we can gain valuable insights from this community of like-minded professionals. Using Karbon, we are able to match our people's skills and availability to the needs of our clients, both in the longer term, or the everyday ad-hoc needs that confront our Clients every day.

Microsoft 365

Formerly known as "Office", Microsoft 365 was introduced to the business world in 1990. Nothing more needs to be said. It's a must for everyone's tech stack.

Microsoft Power BI

We think of Power BI as "Microsoft 365 on steroids". As a result, a must for our Tech Stack. The "power" of Power BI + AI will give us great intelligence in all of our Clients business affairs for years to come.

Financial Management 

Financial Management:

Xero

Dext

Online Banking

• • Any of the CRA validated services will work (eg - TD Easy Web)

Reporting

Many of our tools listed above provide the reporting capability we need to measure our KPIs for managing Savvy-CFO. One added tool stands alone and is the key tool we use to measure overall how well we are progressing on our Mission. That tool is:

Survey Monkey

Savvy-CFO is driven by its client's and team's satisfaction of their experience when interacting with each other. Survey Monkey delivers the truth by which we behave.

Security

All Tools listed above

While we haven't stated it, it goes without saying that, before we consider adding any tool to our tech stack, their structure must have at its forefront, privacy and security. A minimum of robust password requirements and 2-Factor Authentication must be available (which we require at Savvy-CFO). Data protection is paramount, and part of our risk management mandates with our clients.

Keeper Security  

For password security, first and foremost, we do not recommend relying on other tech stack tools (like Google) to manage your very valuable password data. While nothing indicates that there's a risk, using a tool that's offered as a merketing ploy simply brings things too close for our comfort.
This is where our principle of integrated systems doesn't apply. This must be independent from all other systems.
For this we've chosen Keeper. To us, there are 3 choices (Keeper, 1Password, and Zoho). Of these 3, Keeper and 1Password both work. From prior experience, our Founders are most comfortable with Keeper. Here's a great review and comparison of the 2 options so you can see for yourself.

Added Responsiveness

AI:

• • ChatGPT 4
  • Fireflies

Other Tools - the Supporting Cast

Once a business sets up its core Tech-Stack, it will have tools that give them an edge. These supporting cast tools work with the Core Tech-Stack and add something to our audience’s experience, our work quality, and/or our service speed. Here are some examples of what Savvy-CFO has for Other Tools:

Tools used by our audience:

Every one of our Core Tools has an alternative choice. Just because we’ve made ours, doesn’t mean the others don’t work. Our audience may choose others. To deliver a next-level buyer’s journey, not only must we have their tools in our kit, we must know how to use them.

Examples of these are:

• • Microsoft Teams
  • Zoom
  • NetSuite
  • QuickBooks

Marketing Tools:

1. • Shutterstock is a great cost-effective place to access quality images for sprucing up your Blog, and/or website pages generally.

Sales Tools

1. • PandaDoc - There are many choices for electronic signature facilitation. We've chosen PandaDoc for our tool, as it is one of the top 5 tools, meets our UX, Security, and Financial requirements, PLUS it's integrated into HubSpot. It ranks right up there with the more commonly known names such as DocuSign, AbobeSign, and DropBox Sign. 

Service Tools  

True to our focus on the Buyer's Journey, our chosen CRM, HubSpot, has a very powerful and user friendly "Service Hub", which allows us to manage our ad-hoc queries from clients, and provide valuable information to our non-client audience.

Administrative Tools

• • Miro - for virtual “white-boarding”.

Summary

Right behind “Mission, Vision, and Values” and the “Buyer’s Journey”, Technology now occupies the #3 spot in any business’s sequence for building a complete business plan. From this the other components will fall more easily into place.

We’re proud of the work we’ve done on this important process for ourselves, and happy to share the results with you. It may give you insight into yours, and/or raise questions. That’s intentional. If you have questions that arise from this article, please reach out by using our Chat tool at the bottom right of this page, or directly to us in our “Let’s Chat Further” tool and we’ll be excited to hear from you!