Accelo propels Vortex Fire Consulting’s efforts to preserve life, property and the environment with sales pipeline visibility, project efficiency and faster client issue resolution.

Background

Vortex Fire Consulting is an independent consultancy that advises on building codes and fire safety engineering. They also promote sustainability and help streamline construction with innovative and cost-effective solutions.

Jack Keays, Leader of the Canadian operations, built this unique firm in 2015 on his foundation of extensive experience as a fire safety engineer, mass timber innovator and building code expert in multiple regions of the world.  

Challenges

By 2022, the business was quite successful, with offices in Toronto and Winnipeg and consultants in Australia and the UAE. Yet, their tech stack wasn’t keeping up.

Danielle LaFleche, Financial Controller, says they had too many software platforms, causing consultants to overlook important information and engage in double entry. For example, they used Excel spreadsheets for tracking project numbers, monday.com as a task board and BigTime for project management and time tracking. 

Jumping back and forth between these tools was especially costly because of the high hourly rate Vortex Fire charges for engineers. 

“To be spending so much zero-dollar time on admin is not a smart operational move,” Danielle explains.

She and her colleagues felt frustrated and unsure about where the business stood in terms of pipeline, project status and other key data, but she says there were so many tech solutions on the market that she didn’t know where to turn.

Solution

In an effort to remedy the problem, Danielle started looking for proposal software. She thought it would be most helpful to streamline the sales process. Her search revealed the ultimate answer for this and Vortex Fire’s other struggles: Accelo.

Danielle immediately loved that the platform provided visibility into the sales pipeline — something the consultancy had not been able to generate thus far. The seamless sale-to-project conversion was the icing on the proverbial cake.

When she and her team were ready to implement Accelo, they decided to pay for expert guidance. Her interactions with the Professional Services team turned out to be a source of great comfort along with practical advice for setting up workflows.

“I would 100% recommend implementation,” Danielle says. “I would’ve had no idea what I was doing if I just jumped in without Accelo’s team. They really guided me through each step and had no problem adjusting processes along the way. And they took so much of my frustration and questions and turned them into helpful answers.”

This interaction also gave Danielle a chance to learn the platform one-on-one. It was so helpful, in fact, that she regrets not using more Accelo resources for training her team after the initial implementation period.

Less than a year after adopting Accelo, Vortex Fire uses the platform to:

• Track every opportunity
• Convert quotes into projects
• Manage projects and tasks
• Track employee time
• Collect and assign client requests 

The Vortex Fire team raves about being able to avoid email and see sales, projects and client communication in one place. Danielle says the Stream makes it “beyond efficient.” But she has a different favorite feature: “I make so many custom lists — I love them.”

Every function of the business is covered by the combination of built-in functionality and native integrations with QuickBooks, Microsoft 365 and HubSpot. Any time she and the rest of the team have a question about how it all works together, they get immediate assistance because they’ve signed on to the Premium Support plan. 

“I would definitely recommend Premium Support because I found it very tailored to how I need support,” she says. “I like to have answers right away, and I didn’t want the responsibility of being internal Premium Support for my whole team!”

Results

The boosted efficiency in multiple areas of the business has yielded noticeable results for Vortex Fire, most strikingly a 20% increase in won sales.

“We can see what’s in the pipeline at all times, and it’s helped us realize where we were lacking in sales workflows — for example, forgetting to close out sales proposals,” Danielle says.

Clients have also experienced significant benefits: faster response time, better visibility and more frequent attention.

Danielle reflects on the change: “I was getting so many internal emails that my client response time was not good. Now, my processes are so automated that I get to my tasks right when I need to. I feel like the whole team would agree that we’re managing our tasks and workflows better.”

As Vortex Fire expands in the Canadian market, the team will use Accelo to carefully split and track client work at each location. The platform’s impact has been apparent and measurable.

The investment is a sliver of what we’ve gained in operational growth and financial outcomes.
Danielle LaFleche, Financial Controller

Your consultancy could experience a similar transformation with Accelo: See how.