Imagine waking up on a beautiful spring day. Crisp air, birdsong, and a promising sunrise make the outdoors seem inviting! You decide to take advantage of the conditions and enjoy a nice hike. Midway through your walk, the weather changes. Although the cheerful weatherman predicted clear skies, an uninvited rainstorm dampens your perfect morning.
Suddenly, the trail is muddy. The shoes you picked out have become, in hindsight, the wrong choice for this expedition. You fight to stay upright while thinking of your perfectly dry umbrella hanging on the coat rack at home. You’re going to make it back, but the journey doesn’t look anything like you imagined it…
Anyone who has gone from Point A to Point B knows the struggle. The straight line path you originally envisioned is fraught with obstacles, seen and unseen. This is especially true in business. Conditions change, challenges emerge, and sometimes new opportunities appear.
In a practical sense, few understand the connection between conditions and experience more than Lance Laurent, owner and operator of Pro Track and Tennis. With decades of experience surfacing courts and tracks, Lance and his staff of specialists construct and repair incredible athletic surfaces for schools, municipalities, country clubs and private properties.
The Pro Track and Tennis team executes new construction and renovation projects with precision in order to meet the exacting standards of their clients. After all, the condition of a school’s facilities are a point of pride for communities, and this is especially true for public-facing athletic spaces. Additionally, these surfaces have a direct impact on the quality of play and foot control of athletes.
Due to the nature of their work, Pro Track and Tennis experiences a seasonal business cycle, with more work being done during warmer months. As the business has grown, it has added more clients in the South, extending its busy season. As it adds clients across 17+ states (and counting), Pro Track and Tennis is experiencing the challenges of growth that any business faces: Increasing complexity, increasing opportunity, and increasing risk.
According to Director of Finance, George Rubino, the challenges of financial management became particularly complicated and time-consuming. In his role, George is responsible for reporting job costs, controlling inventories, integrating processes, and generally ensuring a positive financial path for the business.
Reporting and accounting tasks can quickly dominate your schedule, especially as a business grows. As a result, George found himself spending too much time entering and formatting financial reports, leaving him limited bandwidth to tackle his more complex responsibilities.
Before reaching out to Advantage Insights, George had made attempts to remedy their financial management challenges with internal hires. Hiring staff to help with accounting and financial management can help, but finding one person with the right combination of skills and expertise isn’t always possible.
After a few unsuccessful attempts at an internal staffing solution, Lance and George were recommended to meet with Mary Ferry of Advantage Insights. They spoke about the unique financial management challenges they faced, with an emphasis on time-saving processes.
One advantage of using a trusted vendor like Advantage Insights is access to the latest tools and expertise. Mary and her staff investigate new software solutions as they emerge and incorporate them into processes when appropriate.
For Pro Track and Tennis, Advantage Insights has introduced a more modern point of sale system that takes advantage of new card features. They have also introduced a process for instantly capturing receipts so expense reports are more accurate and timely.
Pro Track and Tennis uses a unique per diem pay structure that Advantage Insights has been able to adapt to, taking over payroll responsibilities. Dext is used for billing, automatically transferring data to the QuickBooks database. The Advantage Insights team also introduced Melio, a system that helps Pro Track and Tennis pay their vendors efficiently, with automatic reporting.
According to George, working with Advantage Insights to set all of this up has been a dream,
“They’re very professional and easy to work with. They’ve been able to accomplish so much I simply didn’t have time to do.”
-George Rubino, Director of Finance, Pro Track and Tennis
At the end of each month, George and his team meet with Advantage Insights to review the books. These meetings offer confidence in the process and some much-appreciate perspective,
“She asks questions we might not have considered, and we work together to find the answer. It’s great to have this kind of check from outside the organization.”
-George Rubino, Director of Finance, Pro Track and Tennis
Thanks to working with Advantage Insights, George has more time to address some of the really important analytical questions. Before the partnership, he says he was swamped, “I was on a fire drill, taking care of urgent fires.”
With time to address complex challenges and confidence in financial data and analysis, Pro Track and Tennis is in athletic position, ready to sieze new opportunities with confidence in their ability to manage growth. 2023 was their best year ever, and George is confident that this year will be even better.
Remember that muddy morning walk? With a little extra knowledge and preparedness, you don’t have to worry about getting stuck.
Pro Track and Tennis delights customers with amazing surfaces that provide a solid foundation for athletic journeys. At Advantage Insights, we like to help our clients realize their dreams by creating reliable pathways for financial management. In each case, it’s about laying the groundwork for agility and adaptability on the playing field.
If you need help accomplishing time-consuming accounting tasks, contact us today! Your potential relies on your ability to plot a confident course with the ability to modify it as needed. Nothing can empower you more to that point than expert financial management.
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