Storytelling About Setuply With Rachel Lyubovitzky

William Tincup: [00:00:00] This is William Tincup, and you’re listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today, we have Rachel Ong from Setuply, and we’ll be learning about the business case, the use case for her company. Rachel, would you do us a favor and introduce both yourself and, uh, tell us what

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Setuply does? Sure. My name is Rachel Lyubovitsky.

I’m the CEO of Setuply. Setuply is a client onboarding automation platform that helps to make onboarding more pleasant, both for solution providers and for clients who are getting onboarded. [00:01:00] So,

William Tincup: onboarding in this sense is onboarding to software or onboarding to a company?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Onboarding, well, I can look at it, I guess, from both standpoints on predominantly onto software.

If, uh, hypothetically a company decided to up level their HCM offering. So it’s, uh, getting up and running on the new, um, HCM, uh, provider software. I

William Tincup: love this because it drives adoption. So let’s just, uh, let’s just dig into how did you come up with this idea? How did this come about?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Well, my, my partners and I are serial entrepreneurs, so when we’re looking about, uh, for the next great thing to build, we kind of looked around and said, uh, okay, let’s see what hasn’t been solved in the B2B space, because that’s where we love to be.

A lot of really fun, fun projects. And one area that stood out to us is client onboarding. [00:02:00] Uh, we probably asked around maybe 200, 300 different solution providers and learned. That 90 percent of them are, um, using spreadsheets, one notes or various other, uh, manual, uh, semi manual means to get the job done.

Uh, so if you really think about it, uh, there are tools for sales, uh, folks out there like Salesforce. There are tools for marketing folks like HubSpot and there is really, really next to nothing for the client onboarding reps.

William Tincup: So, and who do you work with? Who’s, what’s the type of companies that are

Rachel Lyubovitzky: partners?

Types of companies that I feel we can make the most impact for are, um, companies that have long and painful and data driven client onboarding process. So that would be companies in the human capital management space, as I mentioned. Um, if you’re migrating somebody to a new [00:03:00] HCM solution, there’s historical data to be migrated, their employee data, their positions, uh, prior payrolls and whatnot.

So long and painful onboarding. So that’s human capital management. Um, It’s enterprise resource planning, so ERP, if somebody is migrating from one ERP to another, from kind of an in house system to a proper modern software solution, that’s ERP, FinTech, Banking Back Office, InsureTech, and basically other B2B markets where onboarding is anything that takes maybe more than a couple of months and there might be a heavy amount of data involved.

William Tincup: And, and, uh, are you always in, involved in kind of a switch? If, let’s, let’s say in, in the HCM space, uh, if they’re moving from a kind of a core payroll, like a DP and they’re moving to something else like Ceridian or Yeah. To a DP or you working in between a switch, or can you work with somebody that’s brand new?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: So our [00:04:00] licensees, companies, uh, our clients are, uh, human capital management, uh, solution providers. So that could be ADP, that could be Ceridian, um, and sometimes it could be companies that work with these types of entities to help onboard their customers. So outsourced onboarding shops that, um, help onboard customers for the, uh, technology companies in that sector.

So those are our customers and they use. Our software to help, uh, make onboarding easier for their clients. That’s what I thought.

William Tincup: That’s what I thought. And who pays? Do they pay the, does the, uh, at the, at that point, like there’s an ADP or Ceridian, do they pay or does the end client pay?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Um, so the, uh, the, uh, Customer, who is using the software to get the job done, so ADP, Ceridian, they pay.

And it is free for clients, this is simply a sort of a stop to help [00:05:00] facilitate the transition from the sales organization to ultimately the system of their choosing. This is where they can talk, work on the knowledge transfer, learn the software, transfer the information, answer questions, so this is a transitional phase.

Before they’re able to start enjoying their new product.

William Tincup: I love it. So, um, is there any instances where you would be direct with a client or do you feel like you’re always, you always go through a client partner?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: So direct, I guess, in our, uh, in our world would be the technology, the solution provider. Um, and then we might get involved, uh, with their customer, right?

Only if, uh, there is a case to be made that our solution addresses their needs as well. So, got it. Those customers could be in one fantastic case, uh, is medical software, right? So to get medical software into a hospital could take up to a few years. [00:06:00] So this is another area where we could be helpful.

William Tincup: Right.

I see. So, so I mean, I totally under, uh, I like it. And again, I think it drives adoption too, which is great, especially when you’re bringing in new software, getting people to understand kind of, okay, what, what did you just buy the value of what you just bought? And in your case, you’re taking that Uh, in a lot of cases that historical data and helping them bring that historical, wherever that historical data might’ve been from and bring into a kind of modern software.

So I love that. What are, uh, what are some of the, what are the, some of the things that people can, uh, when they think of it? Because they might not have, like, when you looked around at the market, you said, hey, there’s not a lot that’s going on in the client onboarding space, have, have, uh, have you had a great reception so far with the people that are your clients, uh, the system integrators or even the, uh, the software providers themselves?

Have you had a great [00:07:00] reception with them, the ADPs and sardines of the world?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Absolutely. This is something that, uh, is, is, is a subject for much frustration, specifically if you kind of look at the HCM area at this time of the year. Uh, you know, this is the peak time where everybody’s running around trying to get their mon, mon, months implemented.

I mean, the companies that are getting up and running, uh, and are expecting to do their first payrolls at the beginning of the year, it’s very busy time for them. Uh, and so they’re very receptive with the idea. to make this a more predictable, scalable process, uh, with less of their time spent, uh, kind of reminding their customers, Hey, I need you to send me your roster.

Hey, can you please send me a list of your positions? Hey, can you send me your accrual rules and things like that? The system will take care of staying on top of those customers to help get that data safely retrieved and positioned and stored in one place. [00:08:00] And so these solution providers, the onboarding reps, can move on and focus on other things like helping their customers with change management, helping their customers with training on the new product.

Although nitty gritty, the details are taken care of by the system.

William Tincup: Yeah, I love that because it lets, it lets them kind of focus on, you know, at one point, I’m sure the audience is thinking to themselves, well, why doesn’t, why don’t some of these larger HCM players want to just build this themselves? It’s like, well, you know, maybe, but the thing is, is there’s a lot of the minutiae that can be easily outsourced.

And that’s some of the, some of the things you’re talking about. It’s like, yeah, we take over that layer. Let us just do that and do that well so that you can focus on other things.

Rachel Lyubovitzky: That makes total sense. This is a little bit of a shoe, uh, shoemakers paradox, right? Right, right. Uh, so a lot of these HCM providers and other B2B tech providers, their first imperative is to really deliver the best of the [00:09:00] breed product for their customers.

The best of breed, of breed ERP, best of breed HCM. So you really, when you’re deciding where to allocate your resources, you really want to direct them, most of them towards, you know, your primary business. And so not a lot is left towards kind of ancillary activities, which is the reason why these providers don’t build their own sales CRM, their own marketing engine, and unfortunately use kind of an outdated means to get the onboarding done.

They simply You know, prioritize their core product, which totally makes sense.

William Tincup: Yeah. And I mean, when you think about it like that, they should be doing, they should be building out more of their roadmap and not doing this because you’re building out something that’s far more sophisticated and will be continued to be more sophisticated.

We didn’t talk about kind of the, the big three with SAP Oracle and Workday. Do we, uh, do we currently do work with, with [00:10:00] them or is that on the roadmap?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Um, we are able to exchange, um, data with just about any HCM provider. Right. So, so this is very, very helpful when you want to avoid kind of manual data entry, yet another thing of the past.

Oh, yeah. Uh, so being able to exchange data easily, uh, validate, make sure that it is transformed to the correct format, that it is safely protected in transit. So definitely.

William Tincup: So you don’t have to be an official partner of anybody per se. I mean, I’m sure you are in some cases, but you don’t have to be. Uh, you can get data.

Uh, again, if it’s, it’s, if it’s coming out of a system or going into a system, you can do that without being kind of in a quote, unquote, official partner, having a partnership with anybody, UKG, uh, any, anybody, anybody that [00:11:00] we’ve talked about, you don’t have to be an official partner.

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Well, as long as there is a formal, everybody obviously has to protect their data, their customers data.

So when there are. Published APIs and formal process to gain access to specific data on client’s behalf. So you have to follow through all these formal, through all these processes. Although when there is a partnership in place, we’re able to kind of experiment and do some interesting things, uh, to together to maybe bring in a third party provider and enrich the data that is going into the third party or, or that HCM partner.

So you, you could, you could. What in a, in a closer relationship, you, you can accomplish more, uh, was taking a little bit of a deeper approach in how you exchange information between the two entities on behalf of a shared client.

William Tincup: Tell me more about that. Uh, data enrichment, because I’ve had the experience that, uh, a lot of, [00:12:00] um, a lot of HR.

And a lot of TA, they don’t trust the data that they have. They send out a lot of data, have a lot of data, always have, but they don’t trust the data. Uh, maybe it’s cause it’s not trustworthy. Uh, maybe it’s, maybe it’s because some of it is, they just, uh, have the perception that their, their data isn’t, uh, as great as it should be.

So when you said enrichment, it just kind of triggered something for me. Tell me in the, in the cases where you can do that, what does that look like for, uh, for a

Rachel Lyubovitzky: client? Well, uh, outside of HR data, which is a whole other special case, I’ll give you one good tangible example. Uh, you know, client onboarding is a significant portion of a solution provider’s P& L.

And when you ask a question, well, you know, you guys charge set of fees. Yes, we do. How much? Do those set up fees cover the cost of your onboarding? Very [00:13:00] few companies can answer that question. And yet, in larger sense, when you’re doing financial reporting and you want to be very granular, it’s kind of useful information to know.

So, by Being able to granulate as you’re onboarding customers, how long does the task take? How long does the task cost based on who is working on it? Do you have a domain expert or you have a regular onboarding rep? Do you have a tax benefit advisor or somebody? So being able to granulate on the task level and then raise it up on the project level that you’re working on a client.

You can get to the point where you’re able to say that, How take to onboard this customer? This is precisely. how much it cost me. So you can then Have more accurate read on the general contract value of this new relationship, and you can drive better decisions as to, hey, these, these guys, this particular vertical, let’s just say, uh, no kidding about, uh, municipalities, but let’s just say municipalities are [00:14:00] a fantastic, fantastic client with the lowest onboarding cost possible.

Hey, that gives you a good read to the, to the sales and marketing organization. That, hey, these guys are probably easy and inexpensive to onboard. Let’s bring in more of them, right? Let’s focus on that vertical. And then, so that’s from the sales, uh, directive that you’re able to get from kind of a richer, deeper insight into your onboarding costs and then passing it on to finance folks who love, love, love their numbers, you can get beyond.

Okay, just basic figures. Hey, we have 20, 30, 50, 100 employees doing onboardings. This is their salaries. This is what we collected. It’s a very brute force and very, very, very generalized approach to figuring out how much onboarding costs. And so being able to granulate on the project, on the products, on the clients, on the verticals gives obviously finance folks wonderful peace of mind that this is where they are.

Perhaps [00:15:00] a directive that, hey, maybe we should increase our setup costs. Maybe there are areas that we have to focus on. Uh, maybe there’s some efficiencies of scale in improving our onboarding process so that it’s a little bit faster. It’s very useful, uh, data points for finance folks and, uh, your operating staff in general.

So that’s on, you know, getting a little bit richer, deeper into the

William Tincup: data. Well, and it gives them, uh, knowing that, uh, safety, the security of mindset of what’s, what’s going on, but also helps improve up the business case, so the ROI for the software that they’re buying. Uh, the faster, the faster those folks get set up and comfortable with software, the faster everyone kind of gets to the value of software.

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Absolutely. Yeah. If you get into that area, exactly. Uh, customers make their buying decision for a reason they’re looking for. better, better employee experience. They’re, they’re looking for more, more compliant [00:16:00] solutions, richer feature set. And so they can’t usually, when, when, when they’re, when they’re closing that deal, when they’re about to start with the new HCM provider, they can’t wait to get started.

You know, you’ve got a little bit of this instant gratification feel like, hey, I want it right now. And so by providing the means necessary. To help drive that value faster by again using the proper tools for client onboarding, you’re able to satisfy that need. Uh, and, and make customers happier, faster, happier.

Yeah.

William Tincup: So tell me about like system integrators and consulting firms. Uh, I was at Syrian Insights in October and on one day I got the podcast with a bunch of, uh, of, of a lot of their partners, which happened to be, uh, system integrators and consulting firms and, uh, a lot of fascinating work that they’re doing.

Um, do you get, Do you get to kind of interact with the EYs and Deloittes and, you know, uh, [00:17:00] all of those folks? Do you get to interact with them at all, uh, yet?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: We are actually working, Deloitte actually, we, hey folks, we had, we had a conversation, uh, actually last week, but on. The, uh, subject of, um, consulting organizations and implementation organizations that provide the, are the service providers for that space.

Absolutely. These guys have a little bit different business model as opposed to technology providers like the aforementioned, the Workdays, the ADPs, Ceridians. Their monetization window is usually only during the time that the service is provided, right, when they’re onboarded. So they have a much bigger incentive to figure out what is the best thing they can do in terms of the process, product, technology, to, uh, have the best, realize the best margins to have the most efficient process during that time.

Because a minute [00:18:00] of delay, project getting out of scope, out of timeline, out of budget, the impact for them, they may never become profitable on that particular implementation, because they never get the recurring revenue.

William Tincup: Do you think that there’s a model for them going forward of data as a service?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Probably. I mean, conceptually, when In the consulting world, the companies that are advising technology providers on improving their overall efficiencies, improving their margins, improving capacity of their teams. That’s another topic we didn’t talk about, how difficult it is. Especially in the complex B2B markets to hire, train, and retain, uh, skill, you know, skillful knowledge workers, uh, these consulting organizations that are helping technology providers with their visions [00:19:00] and their roadmaps, this is something that is super helpful to have you actual quantifiable data points that, hey, if you’re able to migrate to an automated solution, that could improve your team’s capacity by 25%.

That could reduce your onboarding time span by 30%. And at, you know, the higher up you go in terms of the volume that these technology providers have to handle, the bigger the impact.

William Tincup: Yeah, I can see, you know, uh, I mean, I hope, I’m sure they can see this too. It’s, it’s on the, on the front end, it’s setting up the data and making sure the setup, uh, goes extremely well for all parties involved.

Got it. But then there’s kind of not just the maintenance of said data, it’s the making sense of data that I think, uh, again, someone needs to do that. Well, maybe, maybe that’s the, maybe that’s Ceridian’s job. And we’ll just use Ceridian as a, as a, as an example in this case, maybe that’s [00:20:00] Ceridian’s job is to make sense of the data, or maybe that’s Deloitte’s job is to make sense of the data, but someone’s going to need to make sense of the data for the end user, uh, because they’re not.

You know, even, even with the most intuitive software, they’re still going to need someone to help them at least for the next couple of years to make sense of what data they have, what they don’t have, what the data is saying, you know, trending, forecasting, all of that stuff. Some, somebody’s going to have to make sense of it.

Don’t, don’t you think? Or am I reading, reading too much into this?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Oh no, I totally am on the same page with you. In order to start really optimizing the process, understanding where your bottlenecks are, you need to measure what’s happening. So your backlog, how long is your backlog? Backlog is the time between, hey, you closed the deal.

But guess what? You’re gonna have to wait for nine months before I have reps available to onboard you. So that time is the backlog. And during that time, the [00:21:00] client is free to leave, you know, if they, if somebody makes a more compelling offering. Um, so starting to track The baselines, at the very least, if you don’t do anything else, uh, technologically or process wise, establish your baselines.

The backlog, the project time span, how many onboard, how many clients can a single onboarding rep handle. Once you have that in place, Then you can start working with it and figuring out, okay, why is the backlog so long? Well, because maybe I don’t have enough team members staffed. Well, what do I do about it?

How do I find new ones? How do I incentivize the ones that are working? Um, to, how can I make a, help create a more satisfying work environment for them?

William Tincup: Yeah, you bring up a really fascinating point. Um, we’ve all been through kind of, uh, implementations that take, I used to say Years ago when I would, you know, do speeches and, and, uh, around implementations and around user adoption in particular, [00:22:00] I’d say, I’d do this bit, I’d say, listen, I can, I can make every single one of you in the audience fall down on the ground and start sucking on your thumb.

And all I have to do is saying one word and you know, people are, you know, it’s always, it’s a bit, right? So I’d say implementation, because at that time. Everybody had been through just an implementation and it went sideways. Everyone. And if you lived in HR or talent acquisition, if you lived there, you’ve been through an implementation and it’s been taught sideways.

But I’ve seen kind of, uh, in more recent years, firms moving to a model where they don’t try to implement the full solution. It’s more of a, um, let’s get you into kind of the, it’s almost like a, uh, iceberg approach. Let’s get you into a piece of the, of the, of the solution that’s above the waterline, but let’s do that quicker.

So instead of doing, let’s say we’ll do a workday just for fun for this one, uh, instead of [00:23:00] doing, um, a nine month implementation where you, we take you on and we implement all of the pieces that you, you’ve bought for workday. Let’s get you into just core HR. And do that. We could do that in 30 days. And so it’s, it’s a piece and they stand that up faster and then they move around to the other pieces.

I’m sure you’ve, you’ve seen this. What do you, what do you think of that model? Uh, and it like the standing up someone faster in one part of the solution and then kind of moving your way around to the everything else that they bought.

Rachel Lyubovitzky: I love it. I think it, it plays to our. Basic human nature, the change management that, to, to, when the change is made more gradual, gradual, gradually, you are able to, you know, engage with it a little more, understand how it fits into your lifestyle, into your work day, uh, and, um, get into it.

with a lot more [00:24:00] deliberation than something that’s kind of like avalanche lands on you. I’ll give you the winter example since we’re headed into the season. You know, why, why does everybody do body slope? Right. Yeah. You start simple. You get comfortable. You understand what you’re doing. You know where, where, where, where your equipment is and then you can go for the higher slopes.

William Tincup: Right. Right. I’m still on the greens, but yes, I understand the metaphor well enough to understand. I mean, if I ever get above anything above a green. I’m in a snow plow the entire time, all the way down. I, I, I made, accidentally, I was in Taos, and, uh, I got off, what is it, Blue Diamonds? I got off at the very, very top, and I was just not paying attention, and I went all the way to the top.

And so I get to the top, and then, you know, you know the bit, right? So I’m looking down, and I’m like, uh, yeah, I’m gonna die here. This is where I die. So I just got on the snow plow and people are whizzing by me, you know, yelling at me, whatever. And I’m just [00:25:00] going really super slow. It took me six hours to get, to get down the hill.

Rachel Lyubovitzky: See, that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s exactly, hey, that exactly relates to what we were talking about. You get all the way to the top and you look like there’s no way in hell I’m making that journey, right? That,

William Tincup: that, that we just explained some of the more intense. Transitions, again, for SAP or Oracle or for Workday, it is an intense, we don’t even think about it.

When we, when we talk about, we don’t even think about how intense this is for the end user and what, what it’s changing in their lives. Uh, and so I, you know, I love it. Um, last thing is I saw you at HR Tech and we didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time with you because I was worn out, uh, from doing a lot of podcasting, but what were your, what was your goals at HR Tech?

What were you trying to do there?

Rachel Lyubovitzky: Well, as always, it’s fascinating to see how the HCM space continues to evolve, so fascinating to see all the [00:26:00] AI and incredible new innovations that are coming up to make the workforce management workforce environment a better place. And with that, obviously for us, uh, where we see it’s an opportunity to potentially accelerate realization of all these awesome new innovations in the HCM space by helping the providers, uh, deliver those faster.

So we see that as an opportunity to see what’s the best out there, what’s the latest and the greatest, and how can we help to get that into customers hands faster. Jobs

William Tincup: Mike walks off stage. Rachel, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for coming on the show. My

Rachel Lyubovitzky: pleasure. Thanks, Will.

William Tincup: Absolutely. And thanks for everyone listening.

Until next time. [00:27:00]