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Show Notes: Fortify Your Company for the Oncoming Recession with TCT Portal

Quick Take

On this week’s episode of Compliance Unfiltered, Adam Goslin gives a high-level breakdown of how TCT Portal can help compliance folks batten down their preverbal hatches for the oncoming recession.

The guys go in to depth about how TCT Portal can help organizations recover lost dollars, reduce staffing problems, and help generate additional income in uncertain times.

All these topics and more on this week’s episode fo Compliance Unfiltered.

Remember to follow Compliance Unfiltered on Twitter!

Read Transcript

So let’s face it, managing compliance sucks. It’s complicated, it’s so hard to keep organized, and it requires a ton of expertise in order to survive the entire process. Welcome to Compliance Unfiltered, a podcast dedicated to making compliance suck less. Now, here’s your host, Todd Coshow with Adam Goslin.

Well welcome in to another edition of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m here alongside a man who will hacky your compliance sack. Mr. Adam Goslin, how the heck are you, sir? Yeah, I’m doing good, Todd. I’m glad to hear it, man. I’m glad to hear it. Today, we’re going to talk about something that is kind of disaster planning, and doing so in a very proactive way. We’ve been hearing about a recession coming at a high level.

How does TCT Portal fit into the conversation? Well, this is just more of a heads up to the listeners. If you’re facing either leadership or the person that holds the purse strings of the organization, basically getting PTSD every time you’re trying to spend dollars to save the organization some money, this podcast may very well be the one to share with them. It’s going to be a plain English, high-level review of where their heads should be at.

So, honestly, whether your organization decides to leverage TCT Portal or something else for compliance management, the whole point of this particular discussion is use something. I’ve had the joy of living the hell of a crapstorm of either manual labor to hold a compliance engagement together, or pinning together several systems, some internal homegrown thing with something that I need to use for this, that, etc, or those poor organizations that need to perform hostage negotiations to be able to get a internally developed compliance tool. Somebody wrote something, and decided many years ago that we’re still holding on to desperately that needs to be patched every time that something changes, etc. The reality is using either manual labor, multiple systems, or the internal homegrown system. It’s literally the singularly largest waste of time for an organization in the long run. And we need light bulbs going on at leadership level on this particular topic. So, making the decision to implement the benefits of compliance automation, it honestly ought to be an absolute no-brainer, but it seems that there’s a bit of a struggle getting the light bulbs to fire, shall we say. So, with that backdrop in mind, the reality is there’s a lot of talk about, you know, coming recession. Is it gonna happen? How bad is it gonna be? Who knows, right? You know, those are questions for somebody that has their hand on more levers than I do. It’s looking like there’s a real possibility of recession, of an actual recession happening. And the other kind of corollary problem is that whenever the scuttlebutt starts about, oh, there’s a recession coming, you know, companies pay attention to that stuff and they will instantly, you know, kind of turtle up and, you know, try to batten the hatches and all that fun stuff. So, whether there is or isn’t going to actually be one, a lot of organizations are acting like there is going be one. So, if it doesn’t happen, this go around, it’s gonna happen at some point in your career. The reality is of businesses today, they’re suffering, high turnover rates. worker shortages, lacks of qualified talent, difficulty finding good employees, high inflation, increasing interest rates. All of these different arenas, you know, have the capability to affect an organization significantly as a full-blown recession. But the good news is, is that there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Certainly, TCT portal is one of those lights that’s not an oncoming train. So, the organizations that are out there definitively have options, if you will.

Now, how can TCT portal help organizations recover lost dollars? The reality is time’s money, you know, and that seems to be, it’s easy to say, but it’s difficult to make the connection with the ones that are steering the ship or in charge of the purse strings. Whenever you’ve got personnel that are involved in compliance activities, and they’re either forced to use one of those aforementioned, you know, approaches of manual labor to hold it together, multiple systems, or some not functioning internally homegrown system, then they’re expending unnecessary time and effort every time they have to be involved in compliance. And for some people, some parts of the organization, they’ll have the capability to basically lose more time than others. If you’re only ancillary involved in compliance, like you’re in HR, you’re in legal, well, the impact isn’t as significant. But if you are in IT, if you’re in networking, if you’re in the Compliance Department, the impact is substantially higher. And one of the biggest difficulty is those same people that you are basically wasting time, are also your most experienced, most precious, most critical, often most taxed individuals within the organization. Just stop for a minute, you might be surprised just how much unnecessary time the compliance team, or people involved in compliance are actually spending.

Traditional approaches for compliance management will typically require hundreds to thousands of man hours that you could effectively eliminate from being part of your annual engagement. There’s a ton of different activities on a compliance engagement where there’s wasted time. Those range from, you know, understanding their roles and their responsibilities, going in and actually collecting up their evidence and understanding what it is that they need to supply, having ready access to whatever they supplied for this particular item the last time around. It sounds easy, but when you’re dealing with these manual systems where there may be four or five or six different submission channels, then geez, I don’t remember, did I send that to the compliance person? Did I put it on the file server? Did I load it up to SharePoint? Did I put it into our, you know, secure Dropbox for the organization? Did I email it to them? Did I yell at them in the hallway? Did I hand them a USB in a work meeting? I don’t fricking remember what happened a year ago, it’s little things like that that start to add up. Members of the team having to hound their team members to get their stuff done. Even just the simple things. We’ve talked about it several times on various episodes of this podcast, is like, I forget what you called it, the helicopter flyby, where leadership is just like, hey, where are we at? It sounds like the easiest question known to man, but that means that somebody’s got to stop what they’re doing and spend multiple hours just trying to figure that answer. Even holding of your weekly meetings, being able to get through them in a consolidated system, it’s different from when you have to do it all manually. The periodic reporting that has to go to upper management, workflow communication on your engagement between your organization and your consultants, your organization and your vendors, your organization and your assessors, things along those lines. whether you want to do QA activities, going in, reviewing documentation. Whether it’s an internal QA review in advance of it flying up the workflow toward your assessor or consultant, or the assessor going through and doing it.

I had a conversation with somebody earlier this week where they were wanting to have a workflow step after the assessor had completed their reporting responses, then the target organization wanted to do a final review of that. All of those things create areas and realms where there’s drop time, wasted time, inefficient time, etc on these engagements. The automation capabilities, which honestly are inherent to leveraging a true compliance management system. The minute that you turn these systems on, well, a lot of these things will just disappear. And it’s actually pretty fun watching organizations realize that elimination of time and effort that can be better spent on other business priorities, and just being able to inherently take advantage of the capabilities of the system, the benefits of the system that we’re talking about.

Now, give me some type of an idea of the amount of savings that we’re actually talking about here. Sure. So when we talk savings, we’ll use an example of a small aspect of compliance management to kind of talk through how TCT Portal would help that organization fortify themselves for recession. Because this is real world stuff. As the team is going through and working on their quarterly responsibilities for maintaining compliance, it’s usually necessary to have weekly status meetings as you get toward the end of each of those compliance quarters. So on average, organizations will typically meet for about five weeks in a row for maybe a total of 20 status meetings just for the quarterly stuff every year. Each of those meetings typically will last for an hour. So if you’re going through and you’re using manual compliance management, it takes a good amount of time for the preparation. So, the leaders of the organization, one suggestion I’ll give to them is do me a favor and seriously, just go sit down and have a conversation with whoever is your centerpiece for compliance and just ask them, hey, when I fly by and I ask you, hey, where are we at? What exactly do you need to do? just tell them to go walk you through the process and explain where they need to check, what all they need to look at, you know, blah, blah, blah, just to come up with the simple answer of hey, where are we at? Because the hey, where are we at is the same thing they need to do when it comes to getting prepped up for the meeting. They’ll typically say, it’s taking them somewhere between two to four hours for each of these times they’re either asked for status or where they’re having one of these weekly meetings. because they’ve got to go through and check all of these various locations, review things in order to come up with the answer. So there’s a whole bunch of work that happens there. So just the compliance manager alone is putting in, let’s call it maybe four hours every status meeting, that they’ve got to go in and that’s just the prep time. Now you’ve got compliance team members in and on that hour long call, so if we go ahead and throw it all together and say, there’s a 10 person team that needs to attend each of those 20 different sessions, then in totality, you’re talking about, 260 hours just for meetings. If we go with an average salary of 60 bucks an hour, then guess what, you’ve now spent $15,600 per year on 20 meetings. And, That’s the piece that people don’t seem to grasp is, the time value of the money. Quite literally, Todd, we’re only talking about status meetings, talking about the amount of time that each of those 10 people needed to spend on their own, trying to put things together and wasted time trying to find last year’s evidence and, blah, blah, blah, blah, having to wonder what things they’re assigned to them. The reality is, that with TCT portal, because of the fact that it’s live status, I don’t need to go and consult 18 oracles, I don’t need to put my hands around three crystal balls, you know, etc. I just literally log into the portal, take a look and go, okay, here’s where we’re at right now, in terms of actual status. Now that you know, four hours I would have had to spend for every status meeting, gone. I’ve experienced it myself. I’ve seen others go through it, if you can kind of jump your way through it, you can go jump in five minutes before the meeting, to get your arms around who did what, who still has what open, da, da, da, da, because you’re seeing it live. I don’t need to go and look anywhere. The meetings themselves, now, instead of a whole bunch of back and forth about, gee, I thought I submitted this. Geez, I thought I punched this button. Gosh, didn’t I give that to you last week? You know, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now you’re literally going straight to brass tacks. So your hour long meeting, now is shaved down. Most of the status type calls, etc, that I’ve seen with the use of a compliance management tool, they’ll take, I don’t know, maybe 15 minutes. Every now and then you’re going to get into a topic where you need to talk about some stuff, you know, etc. But for the status meeting itself, 15 minutes, and boom, you’re off. Now you’ve saved a whole bunch of time.

So with those two changes alone, now we’ve got a whole bucket of time every single year, in terms of the totality. And, if you just implemented something like TCT portal, you’ve now saved the organization like $12,500. And that’s just the status meetings, you know? And so it makes me struggle, given that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to efficiencies and benefits that an organization can have. So as you’re going down and you’re conserving this time across the entirety of the engagement, you basically saved wasted time, let’s say to the tune of about an $80,000 salary when all said and done, you know, now I got choices as an organization. Now I’ve got people that I don’t need to spend that time on, I can now technically take that 80K. How do I want to allocate that? Do I want to allocate that to additional throughput with the existing people I saved time from? Does that save me from not having to go in and hire somebody new that I thought I was going to go in and have to hire etc. The reality is that in tough times, it’s best to get the most of what you already have and something like the TCT portal, it’s literally a time saving machine.

I love that. Now on several occasions, you’ve emphasized that TCT portal should not be viewed as a cost, but a profit generator. Now I appreciate that, but tell me more about why that’s the position you’re taking here. Well, the reality is, is that in the face of a recession, the CFOs, they have some unenviable choices they need to make. There’s business objectives, revenue, targets, etc, their top priority is to minimize spending and to maximize revenue is their goal or their objective. And oftentimes they have limitations at both ends of that spectrum. It’s very tempting. In fact, it almost always is the way that it works, is that somebody goes, oh, geez, why in the hell would I spend fill-in-the-blank on a tool like TCT Portal because it’s just another cost and we are in cost avoidance mode type of deal. And it really comes down to how they look at the usage of the tool. Because if they look at it correctly, some of the stuff that we’ve, already gone through here, examples of ways the organization is saving money, you know, and thereby saving dollars, the investment into a compliance management tool, it’s not a cost. It’s not a freaking cost. It’s not a cost. You know, you, you literally are going to have a net gain in profitability. If you really look at it in the way that you should look at it, you know, not only does the compliance software pay for itself, literally in the first year you’re using it, but it’s actually making money for the organization by recovering those otherwise just blown operational costs. I’m not pouring money into this pit of, you know, of meeting preparedness, of coordination and orchestration ,of inefficient workflows, etc. You the organization will be able to make the most out of their resources to be able to help the organization achieve its goals. When organizations are looking at these kinds of recessions feelings in the marketplace, the reality is, is that is that they’ve got some tough decisions that they need to make, you know, they’re trying to make the most of what they what they have, they’re, you know, just trying to hold things together, it’s often difficult to expand revenue. And so, you know, looking at inventive opportunities to, to really take advantage of ultimate cost savings internally, it’s a huge way to be able to navigate the waters.

You know, the one thing that I’ve always said to folks is this, TCT portal, or a compliance management solution, etc. The cool part is, is that they tend to shine, whether the organization is watching their purse strings and trying to do what they can with what they got. Or if everything’s banging, right? Oh, my God, we got so much work to do, and there’s so much money pouring in the door that we just don’t quite know how the hell we’re going to do it all. Well, guess what? You still need to take the best advantage you can of your internal resources. So, you know, whether your driver is to free up time so that you can make the most effective use of your resources to handle this stream or fire hose of inbound dollars, you know, type of thing, or the inbound dollars are hard to get. Now I’ve got to watch my P’s and Q’s ,and cut back on the costs and take advantage as best I can of the existing resource that I have. Either way, something like a TCT portal, is the way to go about being able to cure the problem from the kind of the dollars and cents perspective, if you will. You know, in the way that some of the leadership look at the numbers of an organization, especially when they’re contemplating approaching a recession.

Sure. Now, in what ways can you use the TCT portal to help with the reduction of like staffing issues? Well, because TCT, you know, portal makes life a hell of a lot easier for the compliance personnel. And not only that, but for, you know, for others within the organization, you’re increasing their quality of life. And, you know, honestly, if you ever get the opportunity, if your organization’s doing things primarily manually or pinning system together or whatever, do yourself a favor and go and have a sit down conversation with whoever the poor soul was that had to be the eye of the compliance hurricane. Go have that conversation with them right after they announced that they just finished this year’s compliance run. And what you’re going to run into is you’re going to run into somebody that looks like they’ve been mowed over by a Mack truck, you know, it is astronomically tough, stressful, tons of hours. It’s miserable, man. It is absolutely miserable trying to manage these things. I’ve done it for a long time. The misery the compliance hurricane has to go through, as well as those that are around it, it’s making their world better and easier and less stressful, etc.

Guess what? You’re now reducing turnover rates. You thought it was hard to find people out in the marketplace. Well, imagine you’re in that mode and now people are bailing from the organization because it’s just frickin’ miserable. So that’s the one side of it. The other is that, especially when you’ve got a tight labor market, or difficulty in the labor market, that means that, yeah, finding resources are tough and there’s oftentimes the turnover that you end up having is typically the turnover that you can least afford, shall we say. And so, whether it’s through layoffs because your organization is feeling the need to trim in anticipation, and trying to improve the health of the organization, or those people you can’t afford to lose decide to jump ship for something that they feel is more stable. The TCT makes it a lot better to be able to continue productive for movement, even when you’re losing people. You gotta understand as a leader of the organization, when you’ve used TCT Portal in your 2022 compliance run, you have a rock solid, absolutely detailed history. Who did what? When did they do it? What did they supply? Did they submit that up to the assessor and it failed their review? Whoa, what was the problem? What did they supply then? You can see everything about , I’m just gonna use the generic Bob, you know? So Bob was on the team last year, now Bob’s no longer there, right? And so now, you know, oh my God, now we had to go out, we had to go find somebody else to go replace Bob. Bob had been with the organization for years. Bob knew where everything was hidden etc. Now you get some noob that needs to come in. or some other poor soul that you decide to nominate up to Bob’s job position, type of thing, whoever steps into Bob’s shoes, whoever has to do it, or oftentimes there’s multiple people that have to step in to make up for somebody that was really good. So when you do that, now the new person that’s coming in, they can go into the TCT Portal 2022 track, they can see exactly what did Bob do? What did Bob provide? What were the screenshots that were provisioned? Did they work? Type of thing. You’ve got… all of it right at your fingertips in one spot. So we were talking earlier about, you know, there is multiple communication methods, you know, in a manual style organization system. Imagine what Bob was doing last year. Bob was dropping some stuff on the file server. He was telling, you know, so-and-so in a meeting, you know, information. He was emailing stuff to them. He was dropping things on the Dropbox and, you know, he was directly loading straight to the assessor site and not really storing anything with any consistency on the organization side. There’s all sorts of different scenarios, right? You imagine you go walk in and you’re, you know, you’re trying to piece together what the hell did Bob do last year? I mean, in fact, what you end up with is you end up not only having to spin somebody up on what is needed and, you know, and all that fun stuff, they’re trying to get their arms around the job in the first place and they’re having to basically run into every single wall and probably more. Well, if you think about it, right? The number of barriers that Bob ran into would have been mitigated because Bob had experience. Bob had been with the organization. Maybe he’d already been down this road a couple of times before, you know, type of thing. The poor noob, oh, they’re just running rampantly. Wall, wall, wall, they’re gonna run into every Bob wall and about 80% more walls because they haven’t had the experience having to run this gauntlet before. So, you know, the fact of the matter is that the use of a system like TCT Portal, it really fortifies the organization for those turnover events or layoff events, etc. Because now you’ve got direct access to exactly who did what and all that fun stuff. It’s immediately accessible right at your fingertips.

And really, the last piece of this that I’ll say is that with TCT Portal, if the organization licenses it themselves, so I’m the one that’s going through compliance, guess what? Hold the license of TCT Portal for your own organization. That way, if turnover doesn’t only happen with your internal personnel, but maybe you’ve got a consultant in the mix and you decide to change consultants, maybe you’ve got an assessor in the mix, and for whatever reason, decide to change assessors. When you go in and make those decisions, similarly, you have the rock solid repository from last year of what all occurred. When you go to switch to the new assessor, new consultant, you’re not losing the compendium, one single compendium of rock solid evidence because it’s your license type of thing. So, it’s just… The leveraging of a system like TCT Portal for compliance management is just effing huge.

Now, parting thoughts and shots for the folks this week, Adam. Well, if you’re preparing your organization for possibly going through a recession or standing in a sea of people that are treating it like it’s about to happen, then you need reliable solutions today. You want something that you can go ahead and get, have on hand, start building that repository. You know, and in some cases, whatever, if the recession were to all of a sudden come and hit tomorrow in full force, quite honestly, the companies that didn’t go down this path already, they’re kind of stuck. They can start building that repository with the TCT Portal, but certainly for the organizations that have it together, that see the light on this, go ahead and get moving on it. You know, the reality is with TCT at least, once we get the inputs from a client of what all do they need, how do they need to be configured and set up, all that fun stuff, once we’ve received those inputs, no joke, I can have them up and running. If they gave it to me today at one o’clock, I’d have them running by five. Yeah, we can do it within a day, within one business day. So this isn’t some system that you need to hope and pray, oh, maybe we’re gonna roll this out in 12 or 18 months. Some long lumbering never-ending story of deployment. Quite literally, this is the type of thing where we can go ahead and get people running. right now, if you’re in the midst of going through a compliance engagement, bolt it in wherever the hell you are. If you’re in the midst of your compliance cycle, you’re going into the end of compliance Q2, great, dial it on, you know, that way at bare minimum you can capture and record the information that you’re provisioning for your compliance quarter, two, three, and then four, aka the end of the year push type of thing. And you can gather a just absolute vast ton of data very, very quickly. So, the biggest thing is that the organization just needs to get their head screwed on straight. They need to pull the trigger on this so that you can start building that system in that rock solid repository we were talking about previously. When folks use something like TCT Portal, they can stop hemorrhaging internal costs almost immediately. A lot of people think it sounds too good to be true and blah, hey, listen, at the end of the day, every single organization is different. There’s gonna be different levels of savings for different organizations. Some of them do have it somewhat together, and some absolutely don’t have it together. But we’ve got ROI calculators and things along those lines that can help folks be able to kind of figure out what their organization could stand to save. But the reality is there’s a lot of soft savings to be made in the adoption of an end-to-end compliance management system.

That right there, that’s the good stuff. Well, that’s all the time we have for this episode of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow. And I’m Adam Goslin. Hope we helped to get you fired up to make your compliance suck less.