They Hired Consultants and Got Order Takers (Stephanie Taylor)

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Stephanie Taylor's diagnosis of her own industry is blunt. With the rise of SaaS, consulting got diluted by product specialists. Companies thought they were hiring consultants to implement new technology, and what they really hired were order takers.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Stephanie Taylor, CEO and founder of VFP Consulting, the firm she started in 2015 to bring management consulting discipline to Salesforce and Certinia implementations. VFP is around 40 people today, and Stephanie is candid that headcount has been flat for four or five years by choice, because she is protective about which customers her team takes on.

She talks about implementing a professional services automation tool right out of school at 21, and discovering that the questions that actually mattered were about process, change and people rather than the product. She explains what VFP stands for (vision, focus, passion), why configuring a solution on top of a broken process just digitizes the problem, and what it means when a customer says they are not ready to go live even though the system is. Stephanie also walks through the split with her co-founder in 2019, the moment she considered walking away instead and found her real reason for running the company, the Big Four referral that funded her first hire six months in, and her first seven-figure project, a Muscular Dystrophy Association engagement brought to her by a CFO friend, where every dollar saved went to the cause.

On private equity, she traces the relationships back to Vista Equity work at a previous employer, including telling them no on a platform evaluation and coming back a year later when the roadmap had caught up. On AI, she is direct about what it does to her own business. Hands-on-keyboard configuration is commoditizing, that work represents 30 to 40 percent of VFP's implementations today, and rather than wait for Salesforce she built the engine herself inside Campfire, the requirements and lifecycle management product VFP spun out of its own delivery process and now sells on the AppExchange.

We close on the advice she gives anyone starting a services firm. The confidence that makes you start a company is the same thing that convinces you that you can do every job inside it, and you cannot.

Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Connect with Stephanie Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spicardi
VFP Consulting: https://vfp-consulting.com
Campfire: https://campfire-app.com

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