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Filaments co-founder, Joel Johnson, saw the challenges his customers faced working with other bookkeeping firms, outsourced accounting services, and fractional CFO practices: disconnected processes, a lack of direct communication lines with accountants, and high turnover of accounting POCs. He knew that Filaments had to be different: it had to be a place that customers could trust their financial information and accounting processes with – a true partner that enabled companies to do what they’re good at, knowing that their financials were in good hands. Achieving this meant maintaining an incredibly high quality and standard of work.

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Joel had already worked with MAVI during his time as the EVP of Finance and Compliance at Suzy, a leading consumer insights platform. Having a sense of the exceptional profiles in MAVI’s deeply vetted talent network, it made sense to tap the AI-driven talent marketplace again to build out his team.

When reaching out to MAVI, Joel already had a couple of hiring factors in mind. Apart from high-quality talent, he needed people who could work within US time zones, given that the team would be communicating directly with Filaments’ clients. He also required senior talent – CPAs who can critically think about problems, but don’t quite fall under the level of Controllers. Cost was also a consideration upfront; he wanted to achieve maximum ROI, enabling customers to grow without necessarily bloating the price of Filaments’ service.

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MAVI immediately sent out multiple relevant profiles, allowing Joel to screen candidates for particular client situations. “The profiles had a good summary of the person’s experience, so I could get a sense for what their history has been.” He scheduled discussions with everyone and was always impressed by how each person was prepared to go on camera during meetings. He also appreciated how a MAVI representative was present at each interview to make sure everything went smoothly.

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“I really enjoyed that interview and discovery process.”

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Joel had previously worked with US-based temp staff and part-timers when he was at Suzy. But he never had the same semi-tailored experience that MAVI provided, from actively asking questions about role requirements to laying out perfectly matched profiles to facilitating interviews. “That upfront work [helped] a lot, rather than just pushing somebody in front of us.”

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Filaments started with one MAVI Senior Accountant, and has now expanded to three – each one providing consistent high-level accounting support to different clients. When talking about the quality of MAVI Talent, Joel described them as “significantly better.” They’ve done extremely well for the company’s use cases; the MAVI Senior Accountants don’t just have excellent technical skills, they’re also proactive, hard-working, and communicative, making them very easy to work with.

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“[The MAVI Talents] have definitely succeeded most of the quality that I’ve seen domestically.”  

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Joel also applauds MAVI’s customer service and how it has taken a load off of him having to manage common issues that small teams face. For instance, during a time that one of the MAVI Senior Accountants was having connection issues, MAVI quickly stepped in to give them access to the work that they had to get done.

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“I appreciate that you guys have thought through some of these considerations, and I feel like, as somebody trying to run the Filaments business, I feel very confident that you guys are supporting the MAVI team so that I don’t have to jump in and firefight some of the technical issues or access issues.”

Joel has directly felt the value of having three MAVI Senior Accountants on his team: “They’re essentially the entire accounting team [of our customers].”

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The first MAVI Talent, in particular, has freed up 100% of his attention from a key client that Filaments manages working capital for very tightly. He used to handle all the work associated with this customer, but the MAVI Senior Accountant has become directly integrated into their workflows, owning everything from collections to forecasting. Joel was especially impressed at how she dealt with a relatively complex cash forecasting file that she’d been given; she’s since kept that updated on an ongoing basis.

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“Her impact is directly felt in the fact that we can deliver nearly constant visibility into their cash balance, their cash runway, their working capital management almost every single day – which is not something that they had before they started working with us.”

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Similarly, the second MAVI Senior Accountant has completely taken over the accounting function of a customer that runs a complex manual invoicing process. She has ingested this entire universe – the invoicing portals, purchase orders, POCs, etc. Plus, she was able to effectively train the third MAVI Talent when she came on. “It’s enabled me to be very much hands-off, which I love.”

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Joel has become very confident in the MAVI Talents’ problem-solving abilities, so much so that he is entirely comfortable putting them directly in touch with customers on Slack and e-mail chains. “That’s also critical to me so I can leverage my time to do other things.” 

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With time back on his hands, Joel has been able to scale Filaments even more as he focused on getting the company’s baseline set up and exploring ways to improve customer experience through automation.

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“The growth of Filaments generally speaks to how much they have freed up my time to focus on business development.”

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The MAVI Talents have also been pivotal here as well, contributing to the wider discussion of making the business better: “They’re very good sounding boards and partners, constructing new process narratives and testing things out with me.”

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The cost savings were also impactful, with MAVI Talent coming at a substantially lower cost than hiring in the US. But with the standard Joel was getting, the ROI wasn’t far off.

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“Having the experience that I’ve had, I would say that there was no sacrifice to achieve the cost savings. I think that I am getting higher quality work with people that I really enjoy communicating with and working with, which is an incredible value for me when I run Filaments.”