One year on: how Swoop has helped Complete HQ cover all their clients’ funding needs

This accounting firm has found that partnering with Swoop adds to the bottom line in more ways than one

Andy Sullivan is Founder at Complete HQ, a Plymouth-based accounting firm which helps SMEs across the UK (and beyond) to build better businesses.

Looking after 175 businesses and their owners, the firm focuses on the construction sector and emerging technology / creatives. 

What did you do when it came to matters of funding before you joined Swoop?

Previously we worked with another advisor in an introductory arrangement and they mostly dealt with unsecured lending. But we needed a more client-centred approach where we could identify a variety of products and services that are available to their business. 

Since we’ve transitioned to working with Swoop, unsecured probably is still the core for a lot of businesses, but we were also able to introduce asset finance, kind of more bespoke funding requirements for the businesses, including commercial property lending, grant funding and some equity searches for clients as well.

What are the benefits of partnering with Swoop for you and the team?

One of the great things is that the guys at Swoop will provide quite a lot of training and development to my team. We have a monthly session with one of the specialists from within Swoop who do a session and provide some factual information around a particular area of funding which touches on grants and equity as well.

That trains the team so they can spot opportunities with our clients and gives them all the ability to upsell that particular service to create revenue for us in the business.

What does partnering with Swoop mean for your clients?

The feedback has been really positive. A few of our clients have repeat funding requirements and since we’ve introduced them to Swoop, the funding management is taken care of on a day-to-day basis by a particular person in Swoop. 

They will make sure that they check in with the client, ensure that the funding is still needed at the same level. It takes the onus off of us to remember that we have all these funding requirements coming through. And when there is revenue being created from the service that we’re providing, it can add additional value to what we’re doing with our businesses.

Has partnering with Swoop made extra revenue for your business?

Very much so. Within the first three months of transitioning to Swoop, we generated enough in commission revenue that paid for our first 12 months of subscriptions to use the Swoop platform. We’ve got one case that’s about to complete and the commission on that alone will cover our full next 12 months. And there have been various other cases in between that. It’s very much a profitable service to us, and it creates that sticky relationship with clients. We’re adding more and more into the mix and it just helps us with client retention massively.

Does Swoop save you time compared to before when you were doing sort of the introductions?

Some clients still want us to lead that process for them. Where we can save time, though, is if we introduce a client to one of the account managers at Swoop and we may receive requests for financial information that we just need to provide copies of, but there’s less of a day-to-day input required from us. That’s usually led by the client and we’ll be there to hold their hand if they need to.

What do you think of the Swoop team as a whole?

The Swoop team is so very diversified in terms of their skillset. We’ve worked with enough of them now to know that we can tap into different experts and they will be able to cover all of the funding landscape. What differs slightly with other providers that we’ve worked with is that you work with one specialist who can really provide the best level of service and knowledge to our client for their own individual circumstances.

What are the benefits of the Swoop white label?

There are two benefits. We’re just using it for generic marketing, so we might share it on our socials because we have the white label built into our website and we have had some leads that have come through via the white label as well.

Clients who might have less of an immediate requirement for funding can set themselves up, take a look at the market, see what might be available before they decide if they want to pull the trigger and proceed. 

What would you say to other advisors that are thinking about partnering with Swoop?

To other advisors that are looking to partner with a broker, such as Swoop, I would definitely say that it’s a value added service. Clients will value what you can provide, more so than if you’re just doing your day-to-day counting. Plus, you can add additional revenue streams to your business and that’s a bit of a no-brainer if you can push the service in the correct way.

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