Is your firm’s growth limited by the need to hire more people? Adam Blake, Co-Founder & CEO of Magna Technology Group, shares how his Salesforce implementation firm is breaking that cycle. By combining offshoring with AI-driven service delivery, Adam has improved margins, decoupled revenue growth from headcount, and scaled faster in a highly competitive market. In this session, you’ll learn practical strategies for using technology to deliver smarter, more profitable services—without relying solely on people to get the work done.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey, everybody. This is Greg Alexander with Collective 54. You’re listening to the ProServ podcast. This show is designed and delivered for founders of boutique professional services firms. So if you’re in the expertise business and you make your living on some version of the billable hour, this show is for you. We aim to help you figure out how to grow, scale, and exit your firm someday. Today, we’re going to talk about margin improvement and how a boutique pro serve firm can start on one end of the continuum where margins aren’t very great because everything is labor-intensive, moving all the way to the other end of the continuum, where margins have improved dramatically through smart design—things like offshoring labor and using technology instead of expensive heads, etc. We’re going to learn a lot from one of our members. His name is Adam Blake, and Adam runs a Salesforce implementation shop called Magna Technology Group. So, Adam, thank you for being here. Please introduce yourself to the community.
Adam Blake: Awesome, thanks for having me on, Greg. My name is Adam Blake. Career marketing and sales operation. We started this business around 2017, pivoted in a few different directions, knew we wanted to be working in the sales and marketing space, and really started to take off as a Salesforce partner in their ecosystem. We’ve grown to about 65 people now this year, and we’re growing rapidly. We grew about 52% in revenue year over year from 2024 to today. So we’re screaming along and moving at 100 miles an hour right now.
Greg Alexander: Alright, well, congratulations! So let’s dive into it. Before we hit the record button, you were telling me how you and your company had a focus on improving margins. You have two things in flight right now. One is offshoring, and another is tech enablement through AI. So explain to us what you’re doing in those two areas and how they are improving your margins.
Adam Blake: Yeah, you know, I think we’re doing two different things. One, we are hiring a lot of people offshore, and that gives us the ability to add talent. We can hire someone as an engineer in India with 10 years of experience, and they’re coming in and hitting the ground running. So that’s allowed us to improve margin there. The other way that we’re focusing on right now, which is our big bet for 2025, is building an AI product that replicates what a general architect does in their day-to-day. We’re working across about nine different platforms right now, and that’s growing. Salesforce acquires companies like the seasons change, and so there are maybe 300 line items that we do at our shop. We’ve built prompts that allow us to do all of these line items, cutting down the amount of time to complete each task. For example, building a report in the CRM or creating a calculated insight in Salesforce’s CDP tool, which they call Data Cloud. This allows us to move significantly faster. The client will see reduced costs on their side, making us a lot more competitive, and we can improve our margins because it takes far less time to complete these tasks.
Greg Alexander: Yep. So if I understand correctly, the before case was that you needed a person to generate the report, which would have been expensive for the client and margin-compressing for you. You’re moving away from that. Instead of a person producing the report, the technology is going to produce the report, and your value add there is prompt design. Is that correct?
Adam Blake: It is. Anytime you’re using AI, you have to know what the final layout is. You don’t want to rely on AI to do an entire implementation. Our expertise is part of the secret sauce—knowing what the output is, best practices, standards, and how to build workarounds for unclear use cases to get to the final output. You need expertise with AI to leverage it effectively. As far as how it impacts our margin, it allows us to handle cookie-cutter tasks in significantly less time. We’ve pre-designed prompts with inputs and templates to run the inputs effectively.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, I mean, that’s a fantastic example of what people like me refer to as tech-enabling the service. It’s something in the playbook on margin improvement for a boutique pro serve. With these new AI tools, our ability to do that has increased exponentially. You mentioned that you grew at 52% revenue year over year. That’s incredibly impressive because you’re in a very competitive space. Salesforce implementation is a crowded market. You discussed with me that historically, every time you added a salesperson, it generated enough work to require you to hire 10 delivery people and that cycle is kind of rinse and repeat. So, in a way, the rate of revenue growth and the rate of headcount growth were pegged. That’s an unscalable model. And throughout history, that has made services organizations tough to scale. What you just explained to us is that this is no longer the case. Every time you hire a salesperson, you no longer need to hire delivery people because the tech is doing the work instead of people. Therefore, the rate of revenue growth and rate of headcount growth have been decoupled, and you’re scaling. Is that accurate?
Adam Blake: Yeah, that’s accurate. The services component, I think, is where we’re trying to enable tech the fastest. We’ve tried to go from end to end, from onboarding and hiring to overall feedback. We’ve tried to put tech in every space and facet of our business to allow us to automate and continue to keep moving faster. Our services are the biggest lift in this entire operation. But through this entire journey throughout the last seven years, even adding in an HRIS component to help us interview faster, to building our own Salesforce internal test to test people, there’s just a lot of stuff that we’ve continued to keep putting in so that it’s running on its own. It’s not as labor-intensive as it used to be. We can hire significantly faster because we have software to do that. We can test better because we have a prepaid test. All of our feedback and quarterly reviews are automated via software that we use. The service component is like the last and final boss that we’re working on.
A lot of the components of our organization involved me stepping in to be that department head, figuring out, “Hey, what is the software, or how can we actually automate this to make it so that it continues to keep running without a dedicated person?” Then I move on to the next. It’s interesting as a founder. I feel like I do everything but architecture now. At this point, I’m working on the business, data privacy, human resources, accounting, and legal. So, that’s been my journey so far.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, you know, for long-time listeners of this show, they have heard me take a point of view that not many of my peers agree with. I want to put it out there again because you’re exhibit A that this point of view works. What I mean by that is margin improvement, which, by the way, sometimes I say that word, and people think it has a negative connotation. It does not. Margin improvement is good for the client because you’re able to share some of that cost savings with the client in reduced fees or better quality. So, it’s in the client’s interest for the service provider to have additional margin available to them in a variety of ways.
It obviously is advantageous for Adam to have margin improvement because now he has free cash flow to invest back into the business, to hire more people, to give people raises, to make more money himself. Margin improvement is a wonderful thing. So, I just want to make sure that I clarified that. But when I hear people say to me, “Well, I’m in a crappy business. My margins stink, and I really can’t improve them,” they say that because they think the only way to improve margins is either to do something crazy like cut a massive amount of cost, which is not true, or raise prices, which oftentimes is very hard to do, especially in a space like yours that’s super competitive.
What Adam has done to improve margins is intelligent service delivery engineering. He’s redesigning how the work actually gets done so more of it is being done by the machine and less by the people. Now, how did you actually do it? Because when I share that with people, they say, “Greg, there’s like 743 tasks associated with producing a deliverable. I just can’t pull this off. To redesign that would basically be open-heart surgery.” So, how did you pull it off?
Adam Blake: I look at an entire project from beginning to end in buckets and phases. I think we’ve gone into, “Hey, where do we need to triage the most at that particular time?” There have been times where our UAT, you know, we’re running into projects, and they’re not ending on time because there are too many changes that have to happen at the beginning or the end of the project, which is bleeding into our profit. So, how do we focus on that? We build new SOPs on how to UAT. We leverage different software to record test scripts.
It’s always about trying not to eat the whole elephant. It’s about focusing on, “Hey, if you could just bucket them in stages of the project, focus on where you can make small changes over time.” It was never like, “Hey, we’ve made all of these worldly shifts.” Every month, our team wouldn’t be able to handle that. It’s always small changes incorporated every two weeks or every month, just making small tweaks over time.
The majority of our staff is delivery-focused, client-focused. We don’t have many non-deliverable people. We don’t have a huge operations team or internal tech team.
Adam Blake: Up until now, it’s really been me. So I think just trying to focus on very small changes, looking where you can plug in software that makes sense. A lot of times, we’re focusing on simplicity and usability, not trying to solve for everything each time. Even something as simple as our project management software—we started very basic. We started on Google Sheets, then moved to something like Basecamp and Trello, which have a lot of advancements. We continue to keep moving upmarket to eventually get onto enterprise-level project management. But it took seven years, and we’re still making improvements. I look at everything as a phase. I look at where we can make minor changes and how we can track a KPI to that phase to see if it’s performing or not, or moving up and to the right or not.
Greg Alexander: You know, earlier, you mentioned SOPs (standard operating procedures) for all the work that you do for your clients, everything from the complex to the easy. Do you have an SOP for everything, or do you let individual delivery folks wing it from time to time?
Adam Blake: The nature of our work requires you to think through because we move to different platforms. We take on three to four new platforms every year whenever Salesforce makes an acquisition. The reason why we’ve grown as fast as we have is we’re first in line. Sometimes we’re the smallest shop a customer is working with because we’re one of the few shops certified to do that particular platform. We have built out an SOP structure recently, and we’ve used Google Drive to say, “Hey, this is the format, the template that an SOP needs to be written in. This is where it needs to be saved.” As people write new documentation, they’re dumping those into the folders and getting them approved. We’ve done a poor job at always documenting, and that’s a huge focus for us this year on the delivery side. Every time you’re doing something new, make sure it’s in an SOP. Make sure that you can reference it. Something as simple as I remember someone reached out to me and asked about jury duty—”Hey, what’s the procedure for getting jury duty off?” I remember thinking, “I don’t know.” So I realized I needed to write an SOP on how to do this. It makes onboarding faster, training better, and ensures that your processes are streamlined. When we were a four-person company, it was very easy for me to manage every task on every project. But as we grew to 65 people, you have to have SOPs. I’ve learned this the hard way, so this is something we’re really working on right now.
Greg Alexander: And then once you have the SOPs and you have them stored centrally, how do you train everybody on how to use them?
Adam Blake: What we’re doing is migrating over to Asana. We’ve built out templates, and on the template, you have a task and all the subtasks that go underneath it. These are linked to SOPs that live on our Google Drive. For example, if I’m going in to make a new report on a CRM, I can click the link on the SOP that gives me the knowledge sharing—”Hey, this is how you create them. This is how we approach creating dashboards and insights, and any considerations to make as you go through this.” That’s always been the huge problem because we’ve gone through waves of documentation. But as soon as you put them into a Google Drive, to me, it’s like they’re out there in the ether. You have to be there in the moment and reference that for someone to be able to use it. We’re trying to make it so that it’s front and center every time. People live in our project management tool, so if it’s linked there, then we know it’s visible if someone needs to use it.
Greg Alexander: You know, when I was in your seat running my firm, SBI, we had what we called procedure manuals, which is basically what you’re talking about here. We required everybody to follow the procedure, and what that allowed us to do was take in talent that might be less experienced but have a ton of potential and convert them from kind of an unpolished piece of raw material to a polished piece of talent that clients valued greatly. The trick with that was the enforcement of the procedure manuals. So how do you enforce the use of the SOPs?
Adam Blake: Every task is estimated. Over the years, we’ve continued to polish our estimator, so we know how long it takes to do every line item. People log their time in 15-minute increments every day, due by the end of the day. This allows us to see if someone is completing their tasks in the estimated time. It’s hard to enforce, but we follow a very similar hiring mantra. I don’t generally hire experienced people. I hire people with grit and a lot of raw potential out of school, knowing that we can train them on how to run these projects. I would say 95% of our company started as entry-level people fresh out of school and gained experience over the last seven years. They’re phenomenal, and their overall ceiling is significantly higher because they were hired for their potential and attributes, not because of certifications or experience. Experience can vary greatly. For example, being at a company for five years on Salesforce doesn’t mean much compared to someone who’s done a hundred implementations in a few years. We value skill over experience tremendously here.
Greg Alexander: Okay, I’m gonna ask you a curveball question, and we’ll end on this one. And that is a lot of companies like yours became successful because they were able to tap into the global talent pool that’s called offshoring and nearshoring. And there are some out there that think the potency of that plan is going away because the advantages you would get—lower labor cost by using the global talent pool—is being eliminated because of technology. So why would you send a piece of work to India when you can send a piece of work to the machine? And if that is true, then the whole offshoring nearshoring movement is about to come to an end. I don’t have a crystal ball on my desk. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I’m asking you this question as someone who’s in the middle of it right now, what do you think is going to happen? What will AI’s impact be on the offshoring nearshoring movement?
Adam Blake: You know, I think a lot of the standard day-to-day entry-level. I think that’s what I worry about the most is hiring for entry-level people, because I think AI will replace a lot of the entry-level positions in every company. I don’t think it has to do, or at least from my experience, offshore versus nearshore. Because I have people working in India who are absolutely brilliant, and they’re so needed on solutioning and determining how to use best practices. I worry about the entry-level roles that we would normally hire for that won’t be there, because we can kind of automate that day-to-day, which is typically the first set of work that someone starts on as a new analyst here.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, interesting. Yeah. So I wonder how the apprenticeship model? Because people that you have in India, they’re brilliant because they grew up through the organization, starting entry-level and progressing accordingly. Well, if the entry-level jobs go away, how does someone develop the expertise? It’s going to be really interesting.
Adam Blake: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how this continues to keep progressing, how that affects professional services as a whole. But you know, I think this will just allow us to move faster. This is a tool that we’re using. And I’m excited just because we’ll be able to take on significantly more projects with the same type of team, because we’ll just be able to move faster. You know, we have the ability.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, productivity is gonna go up way up. All right, Adam. Well, listen, hey! On behalf of the community, I just wanted to personally and publicly thank you. You know our community thrives, and we have members who are willing to share parts of this story with us, which you did today. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
Adam Blake: My pleasure, Greg, I really appreciate you having me.
Greg Alexander: All right. Well, a couple of calls to action. So if you’re a member, and you want to hear more about Adam’s story—I mean, 52% growth year over year in a very mature market like Salesforce implementation is impressive. If you are a member and you want to attend that, look for the meeting invite and show up for the Friday role model session, and ask your questions directly to Adam. If you’re not a member and you want to become one, go to Collective54.com and fill out an application, and somebody will get in contact with you. But until then, and until next time, I wish you all the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and exit your firms.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.