Breakout Finance: Empowering Transparent and Honest Funding with Salesforce

“Breakout Finance is great at processing and servicing small business loans. We’re not experts at building software at the level that would get the most out of what Salesforce could bring to us, so we needed a partner with those capabilities.“

– Ian Bradley, SVP of Ops

Doing What’s Right for Small Businesses

Business owners are faced with many options when it comes to raising working capital. Breakout works for small businesses every day to provide responsible working capital solutions, coupled with important educational resources so their customers can responsibly pay back loans and continue to scale with funding solutions tailored to their specific needs. As a technology-enabled small business lender, Breakout prides itself on being able to help almost any small business owner across geographies and industries.

Bracing For Growth

Ian Bradley, SVP of Operations, recognized that Breakout was heading towards an inflection point: the success of their business was testing the limits of their technology stack, mostly comprised of point solutions that were integrated together as the firm grew, but lacked a cohesive source of truth for all applications, business development and customer acquisition activities, and loan servicing. Through Ian’s previous professional experience working for fast-growing companies, he knew that the move to Salesforce would be ideal for Breakout. However, he recognized that he would need to pull in help to deliver results on Salesforce.

Selecting The Right Partner for The Job

During discussions with the team at Salesforce, Ian was given guidance to look into a short list of partners, one of which being Plative, for the upcoming implementation and change management project for Breakout. The first solution implementer that Ian spoke with was a larger Salesforce partner that had a very rigid methodology with the way they wanted to be engaged, and didn’t seem interested in hearing Ian and his team’s vision for their end users, which was informed by his institutional knowledge of the team. That’s when Ian turned to Plative.

“It became very apparent very quickly that the Plative team ‘got it’. Plative understood what we were trying to do, the resources that we were able to commit, the timelines that we were on, and the type of support we actually needed. That’s very important because the first step in solving any problem is a mutual understanding of what the actual problem is.”

– Ian Bradley, SVP of Ops

Measure twice, cut once

It all started with a responsible and robust discovery phase. Breakout and Plative began the project by leading discovery workshops with various stakeholders from Breakout and hearing the businesses’ requirements, vision for the future, and voices of various end users to gather a holistic understanding of the project goals and must-have outcomes. These became the goalposts for the project and ensured that both teams were on the same page throughout the engagement.

“Phase one was the smoothest integration with the highest adoption that I’ve seen and that’s not easy. I don’t want to take any credit away from my team doing a great job, but we couldn’t be where we are if Plative didn’t do what Plative does.”

– Ian Bradley, SVP of Ops

This method of engagement enabled the Plative team to work alongside Breakout to put their business imperatives into the forefront and prioritize the most pressing needs first without disrupting the business.

Shaping a Custom Salesforce Solution That Accelerates Business Outcomes

Every financial services company is becoming a financial services technology company. This project required a technical staff that could speak not only to the Salesforce solution, but also one that could translate niche financial terminology and use cases into the technology itself. Serving as a translator for lending professionals’ day-to-day actions to technology requirements was one of the primary roles that Plative played on this engagement.

“[Underwriters on the lending operations team were processing applications] 20 – 30 times per day… with what we are building, we can do close to 100 per Underwriter. They’ve got the technology to be able to do it and save a considerable amount of time in the process. We’re turning our team into superheroes.”

– Ian Bradley, SVP of Ops

Together, Breakout and Plative developed a custom lending CRM that baked in the top-of-funnel motions like intake and early stages of loan processing as well as loan officers workflows for application management and collection, to underwriting, to closing and post-close covenants like automating the completion of contracts using DocuSign and document generation technology that’s automated within Salesforce.

Ongoing Innovation On Salesforce

Breakout came from a place where their original technology was getting them from point-a to point-b, but it was evident that throughout the borrower’s journey, they were leaving money on the table whether that be from re-engaging business owners who had come to Breakout for some of their educational articles or prioritizing individuals that showed the highest propensity to borrow based on their past history.

“I’m excited for what happens as we move through building out additional capabilities. We’re bringing the Plative team with us the whole journey because they’ve been really good at accelerating our objectives.”

– Ian Bradley, SVP of Ops

Since these functions are directly related to business outcomes and increased loan applications from more borrowers, this was the natural first step. Up next are additional modules, deeper integrations and further refinements which will serve as additional functionality on Salesforce that will enable Breakout to continue to uphold the level of outstanding borrower servicing that got them to where they are today, well into the future.