Establishing a solo business isn’t as simple as it may initially seem. There are considerable details that must be first resolved. For instance, based on the state and city location, there may (or may not) be business licenses and local taxes that must be accounted for and paid. While some business types, such as real estate and financial services, may require industry-specific licenses, others, such as code development or creative services, do not. There’s also the need to establish health insurance, and retirement plans and obtain the necessary federal employer ID number. Not to mention the endless paperwork and bookkeeping required.

And creating most of these processes, or workflows, that drive Collective’s business was accomplished manually until recently. As customers entered their information within the Collective webpage, Collective’s expert staff would help guide the process based on the type of business and its location. This was managed by a manual step-by-step task list, and what steps were required for each business type were largely guided out of spreadsheets, explains Shah.

To build both internal and external facing applications, the Collective team chose the user interface JavaScript library React hosted on the Python web development framework Django. Using this stack, the Collective development team created a detailed dashboard view that enables their customers to get insights into their business financial health. However, the internal document management workflows and data transfer into Collective’s internal systems remained largely manual. This caused considerable back and forth as Collective’s experts verified their customer’s information and ensured everything was properly in place.

“The world of accounting tax payroll is very workflow-driven, where there's a specific step-by-step process depending on individual circumstances,” Shah adds. Further, regarding taxes and bookkeeping, Collective’s customers would need support through workflows recurring monthly, quarterly, and yearly.

To gather and manage that customer information, Collective chose the communication platform Front, cloud storage services, and accounting software designed for solopreneurs. However, as Collective’s business grew, it needed a sustainable and scalable way to automate these process workflows. “One of the primary objectives for me was to develop an architecture that would get Collective on a path to successful automation,” says Shah.

A high level of workflow automation would not only benefit their customers with swifter and streamlined services, but it would also help Collective to improve its margins and grow more profitably. “The idea was always to grow like a tech company and automate as many step-by-step processes as possible to make it as self-sufficient for our customers as possible. This would help us serve our customers more quickly, and our staff experts can then focus on more complex customer requests and questions,” explains Shah.

“Orkes Conductor made a huge difference for us,” Shah adds. “If we tried to deploy and host Conductor ourselves, it would have taken a significant investment in staff resources to do it right,” he says. Shah estimates that investment would likely have required three full-time engineers to support Conductor. “We can focus on building Conductor workflows and our deploy to build to the production cycle,” Shah adds.

The team appreciated the scale and swift time to value Orkes Conductor enabled. “The scale is not just in terms of the sheer number of customers we can manage, but also the amount of customization that Orkes Conductor enables for us,” he says. With just one full-time developer focused on Orkes Conductor, Collective could move from their proof-of-concept Orkes Conductor environment to production within two and a half months.

Finally, the Collective team appreciates the environmental and operational insights they can gather from Orkes Conductor. The unit can now see how long each customer process takes. “This was eye-opening for us. This gave us many opportunities for the operations teams to go and look at the possible improvements they can make in the process itself because of the data Orkes Conductor made available,” says Shah.

Today, Collective is on track to implement all of its workflows, including customer-facing ones, within Orkes Conductor. Examples include how Collective conducts LLC registrations and forms S-Corporations. As Shah explains, prior to turning to Orkes Conductor hosted on Orkes Cloud, the team had been launching services in one state at a time. The process of building the workflows took months. While the team had completed manually building these workflows in 13 states, it wasn’t a sustainable process. “By using Conductor, it cut down our time to launch our service nationwide significantly, and we were able to launch in 37 states in one shot,” Shah explains.