By the time Growth Plays hired its 11th employee, it was no longer a startup. But financially, it sort of was. The bookkeeping and reporting hadn’t changed much since the early days when the founder, John-Henry Scherck, was just a freelancer. Back then, he’d started using a “good enough” DIY accounting software and when it didn’t work, he just used his bank balance as a barometer. But as Growth Plays grew and served sophisticated household-name clients, things rattled apart.
“Our bookkeeping software’s AI miscategorized everything,” he recalls. “I would have to go through every transaction manually and oftentimes recategorize it and redo my books. I had zero trust in it.” Yet he increasingly needed to forecast revenue to hire and pay bills.
John-Henry switched to Pilot for smarter, hands-free bookkeeping—“It’s now clockwork”—and financials and dashboards that give him what he needs to confidently grow.
By the time they’d outgrown Bench, they’d really outgrown Bench, says John-Henry. “At the end, I lost 40 hours of my life to cleaning up their work. They were at least four months late on our books and each year, they would deliver the prior year’s books as late as April 1st, so not only was I scrambling to file taxes, but I was flying blind.” John-Henry wanted an operational understanding of his profitability or where money was going, but he was consumed by having to double-check even minor transactions.
“As a result, I had to live out of my bank account, versus out of a general ledger,” he recalls, which made for five difficult years of having to do it all himself. In the end, he wonders if they might have grown faster had it just been handled.
“You really have to automate what you can because there’s so much complexity to running an agency that you wouldn’t expect. The U.S. tax system isn’t set up for hiring multiple people across states, between Social Security (SSI) payments and California’s contractor laws. We’re 11 people in six states and I’ve got forms from Rhode Island on my desk today for things I didn’t know we had to pay for,” he says. “And the bills add up. You get some $19 per month software tool and then suddenly you’re on a team plan and you’re like, “We’re spending what?” I have a tool that was once $99 that we now spend $30,000 a year on.”
The whole time, John-Henry was asking how do we budget for this? How can we catch rising expenses sooner? When does it make sense to convert a contractor to full-time? But without financial insight, he had to keep what he jokingly calls a “cash security blanket”—six months of cash on hand for contingencies.
John-Henry knew hoarding cash meant they weren’t reinvesting in hiring and growth.
John-Henry decided it was time to grow more seriously. He hired a fractional chief operations officer and evaluated several bookkeeping providers. Pilot stood out because they asked better questions.
“Pilot’s questions were way different. It showed they had so much more business acumen and a better understanding of the agency model than any other vendor we talked to,” he says. “They asked me, ‘Can we do accrual? Should we be tracking depreciation on that hardware you’re buying?’ I had to Google some of it, but I could trust they knew more than me which is exactly what I wanted.”
Upon kickoff, Pilot reorganized Growth Plays’ ledger and cleaned up the entire year’s transactions, so it was pristine. They then set him on a cadence of completing the books quickly at the close of each month.
“I have a much better pulse on money in, money out, and specifically what that money is going towards. I never felt like I was in that state with any bookkeeper before,” he says. “From day one, everything was cleaned up. I now have an exact understanding of where we’re spending money, how much money we were making, all of it.”
John-Henry appreciates Pilot’s software integrations along with the bookkeeping team’s common sense. The prior bookkeeping provider thought Growth Plays’ HR system, Rippling, was just a payroll provider. But Growth Plays also uses Rippling for insurance, credit cards, and more. The prior provider would categorize it all as “payroll,” which made all the reports widely inaccurate. Whereas Pilot’s team intuitively knew the difference. Pilot uses intelligent automation, but also trained bookkeepers and controllers to quality-check the data and refine the model. Pilot proactively reaches out with questions and whenever John-Henry has questions, he can reach someone who actually knows his account.
“Now it's like clockwork,” he says. “They just understand what we're doing.” The result is he is free to do what’s most important: grow.
“I’m very happy. I’m really focused on hiring right now and I know exactly what cash we have on hand to cover onboarding, and when states or insurance prices or whatever change, I don’t have to recalibrate—it’s just handled and I have answers,” says John-Henry. “I can focus on finding great people and hiring them at the pace that makes sense for us and always know we’re in the black.
Growth Plays is a demand agency that helps software companies and venture capital firms build content engines that get them discovered, remembered, and chosen.
