The Challenge

The Challenge Spun out of a 40-year-old parent company, a Boston-based wealth tech startup was revolutionizing how enterprises managed finances. With an incoming contract valued at over $100 million annually over a 20-year period, this startup’s future was looking bright. But with great opportunities often come great challenges. At the time, the startup’s SaaS platform could support 1,800 financial advisors; it had to support 16,000 more users in 18 months to accommodate their new customer. If they could achieve this, the startup would secure a $10 million monthly retainer — a substantial increase over the $4 million monthly retainer during implementation. With only 200 employees, the wealth tech startup could not scale its software infrastructure quickly enough to secure the new monthly retainer. It required 100 to 200 more employees to get the job done. Considering that Boston has a near-zero percent unemployment rate for its IT workforce, this feat felt impossible. Fortunately, Curate Partners was here to help.

The Solution

We interviewed the SaaS startup’s key stakeholders to understand their operations and needs. We then evaluated how these insights aligned with the tech labor market’s current constraints. It was clear that this startup needed a more opportunistic approach to hiring. Besides permanent employees, we worked with our client to also consider contract and contract-for-hire team members. This let us connect them with more promising candidates who could add instant value. Our wealth tech client’s hiring procedure originally took at least two weeks and required four team members to conduct three in-person interviews. We optimized this into a one-week process with only one phone screening and one in-person interview. To ensure each candidate was of the highest caliber, we personally met with 80 to 90 percent of applicants over coffee. These efforts paid off. Our SaaS client onboarded 208 team members from our pool of 400 recommended candidates, thus adhering to one of Curate Partners’ core quality assurance principles: For every two candidates interviewed, our client would want to hire at least one. 22% of the new contract consultants have become permanent employees, and 94% of the startup’s hiring managers said they would hire the same candidate again. Not bad for the competitive job market in Boston! To set our wealth tech client up for long-term success, we educated their hiring managers on current best practices and implemented a new onboarding process to keep up with the rapid-fire pace of hiring. This ensured that each cohort of new team members understood our client’s company culture and was ready to hit the ground running.

The Outcome

In just eight months, Curate Partners quickly scaled our SaaS client’s team with exceptional people who embraced their culture. As a result, this startup successfully met critical implementation deadlines.

Thanks to Curate Partners’ unique methodology for hiring and recruiting top talent at scale, our wealth tech SaaS client is on schedule to meet all implementation objectives for their new customer. A return of $2 billion from the initial $20 million investment proves that this partnership was well worth it — that’s an increase of 10,000%. With Curate Partners by their side, this startup is on track towards attaining unprecedented profitability and unicorn valuation.