Increasing Business Profits With Sales-Driven Operations

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now, let’s go get started with the show.

Chad Franzen: Chad Franzen here, Co-Host of the Process breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at their job. Past guests include David Allen of Getting Things Done. And Michael Gerber of the E-Myth and many more. This episode is brought to you by SweetProcess.

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Chad Franzen: Carlos Amaya is Director of Operations at Corvia, a payments facilitator in Austin, Texas. He has held senior operations positions in the payments merchant acquiring and BPO space for the past 15 years. Carlos, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Carlos Amaya: Doing well, Chad. Thanks for having me on.

Chad Franzen: Hey, so tell me a little bit more about Corvia and what you guys do.

Carlos Amaya: Yeah, certainly. So Corvia is a full stack payment processor located in Austin, Texas. Corvia’s most recently known as F1 Payments. We just went through a rebrand. And essentially what we do is we provide the ability for business owners to process payments quickly and ease. So imagine Chad, that you are a business owner and if you want to begin to accept credit cards, right? You’ve got a local store. You want to accept credit cards, you want to make sure that’s a way that you can sell your products and goods so we can do that for you. As well as if you have an online business, we specialize in eCommerce online business and specific high risk vertical, and yeah, ultimately that’s what we do.

Chad Franzen: What does a full stack payment mean?

Carlos Amaya: Yeah. So full stack essentially covers all the various different types of merchants that you have. So there are some payment companies out there that allow you to board, but only in a specific vertical, so only brick-and-mortar, or only if you’re online or they specialize in certain areas, right. As a full stack processor, we can accept just about every time.

Chad Franzen: What is involved in your day to day role as director of operations there at Corvia?

Carlos Amaya: Yeah. So my day to day role is several right, it’s multifaceted, but it’s about the onboarding of new merchant accounts. It’s about the management of those onboard accounts once they’re clients of ours. And it’s also relationship management, relationship management with our various different partners. So what’s interesting about this space chat is we have clients, obviously who are the merchants themselves who are to accept payments and able to provide goods and services. But we also have responsibilities to the sponsor banks that we work with as well as responsibilities to our independent sales offices. So the clients are multifaceted and within the operations space I have to ensure that we’re servicing all of those areas.

Chad Franzen: So what is kind of your process for onboarding new clients?

Carlos Amaya: Yeah. So that’s a good question. So as we onboard new clients or new merchants, what happens is an application is submitted to our underwriting and application review team. It’s submitted directly in order to apply for a merchant account. So what happens essentially is one of our independent sales offices, or one of our direct sales team members will recruit a new application with a potential prospect that potential prospect will fill out an application and submit it into operations. So we review setup application and we look to get it appropriately prepared with all the various requirements that our bank is looking for in order to approve the application.

Carlos Amaya: So what we try and do is get to a good place with the merchant, make some evaluations on that piece in order to get it into our internal credit team and our internal credit team at that point makes a credit decision for that application. Onboarding the account after approval includes also looking at the way that the merchant wants to process. What type of unit are they looking for? Are they an eCommerce? Are they just looking for a payment gateway? Is it a shopping part? And then getting all of those features appropriately set up to the customer’s expectations.

Chad Franzen: How streamlined is the operation? Is it like you have five different categories of clients and then you have a direct process that can apply to each one of them?

Carlos Amaya: Yeah. So, the operation’s very streamlined. What we try and do is we try and add specialization into areas that require a little bit more attention to detail, but we try and ensure that our processes are relatively standard across the board. So we’ve gotten to a good place and we’ve had some learnings, but we’ve gotten to a good with our onboarding process where we can generally fit in all of our merchants into our general standard process with our teams.

Chad Franzen: How many people work at Corvia and kind of how many kind of little silos or departments are you kind of in charge of operations for?

Carlos Amaya: Yeah, so we have about 45 team members right now and within operations, we have a front end boarding team. Of course, we have our application review team. We have a customer service and support team as well.

Chad Franzen: Tell me how can operations kind of drive sales or differentiate you guys from somebody else?

Carlos Amaya: That’s a great question. So, it’s one of the things that we take pride in Corvia. We really try and ensure that our operations is a differentiator for our sales offices. So Chad, if you’re a sales office out there today, and you’re trying to merchant accounts, it is a highly competitive business. It’s really, really difficult and cutthroat out there. So we try and do the as best we can to assist our sales partners by providing really good clean information on what is required in order to board a merchant account, really proactive information when those accounts are actually with us in trying to go into retention efforts to help our partners keep as many accounts as they can with us and on the books and keep them active and keep them healthy. So what we try and do is really be that support staff on the back end for our sales partners, so that they understand when they have a partner in Corvia, they have someone who is going to look after their clients, just as much as they are.

Chad Franzen: At what point does operations become a real part of the sales process, right at the beginning?

Carlos Amaya: Very much at the beginning. Even before the sales process has started right, Chad. So what we try and do is we are very, very closely aligned with our independent sales offices. We have regular touch bases with them, even though they’re independent from Corvia, we do the best that we can to look at it as a real integrated partnership. If we’re successful they’re successful, they’re successful we’re successful. So, we’re involved very, very early on. We help out with the way the application is structured, some of the requirements that are needed and then ongoing support. So yeah, at the very beginning and then throughout the process as well.

Chad Franzen: Since you said most of the processes are kind of streamlined, how do you keep everybody on the same page? What’s kind of your communication process?

Carlos Amaya: Yeah. So we have an internal CRM, as most companies do, and we have various workflow technology that can help us bifurcate some of the things that we need and then kind of stack into our various cues. We have really, really excellent, talented technology team. It’s one of our four competencies, technology is one of our core competencies here at Corvia. And what we try and do is we try and partner with engineering, with our internal engineering team to create solutions that allow for just that, the ongoing efficiency of all the various different areas. And so far we’ve been pretty successful.

Chad Franzen: I have one more question for you, but first, how can people find out more about Corvia?

Carlos Amaya: Yeah. So if you just go on Corviapayments.com or go into Corvia Payments LinkedIn page, you’ll be able to find out just about all the information you need and there’s a contact desk page and of course you can always reach out to me.

Chad Franzen: My final question, what do you think are some action steps that people could take to start today to kind of allow their operations to differentiate and drive sales?

Carlos Amaya: Oh, wow. That’s a great question. The thing that I would see on that, Chad is what I have found to be effective for me is metrics. But not just metrics. Metrics is something we talk about in operations in various different facets. But if we’re measuring the right things, measuring the right metrics that really align to your goals overall in your sales environment, that really transform your operations.

Carlos Amaya: I’ve been a part of operations in the past, Chad where we did a lot of measuring. We’re very metrics-oriented, but not a lot of them were really geared to some of our stakes in the ground, right? Some of those goals that we really have as far as ongoing development of the staff, revenue, and then of course those sales, right? And that’s something that we take great pride in here at Corvia. We try and align our operational metrics and our goals specifically to the goals of the overall company and to our sales staff.

Carlos Amaya: So I’d recommend to any operations leader, if you’re looking to assist organization with improved sales, take a look at those metrics and ensure that those metrics are really driving those sales as opposed to driving some other areas that perhaps we were looking to adjust in the past.

Chad Franzen: Okay. Great advice. Sounds good. Hey Carlos, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Carlos Amaya: Chad, I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for the opportunity.

Chad Franzen: So long everybody.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Process Breakdown Podcast. Before you go, quick question. Do you want a tool that makes it easy to document processes, procedures, and/or policies for your company so that your employees have all the information they need to be successful at their job? If yes, sign up for a free 14 day trial of SweetProcess. No credit card is required to sign up, go to sweetprocess.com, sweet like candy and process like process.com. Go now to sweetprocess.com and sign up for your risk free 14 day trial.

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