Particle 41 brings elite web development, quality assurance and development operations to a non-profit organization (NPO) in the entertainment industry.
Anderson Business Advisors
How Anderson Business Advisors turned its client portal into a revenue stream without adding headcount
Anderson Business Advisors
Anderson Business Advisors helps private real estate investors protect their assets, cut their taxes and plan their estates. After a private equity investment, new clients started arriving by the hundreds each month, and a 12-year-old WordPress client portal couldn’t keep up. Anderson chose Particle41 to build a new portal, starting with online ordering. On the Particle Accelerator podcast, Head of Product & Client Experience Aaron Videtto said the marketplace added about 5% to top-line revenue, and self-service features have added 4–5% of EBITDA so far, with about 11% expected by 2028, without hiring the roughly 100 people that growth would otherwise need.
Challenge
A 12-Year-Old Portal and Hundreds of New Clients a Month
Anderson is “first and foremost an education first organization,” as Aaron put it. Most clients hold day jobs and are building real estate portfolios on the side. Anderson sets up the LLCs and holding companies that protect those properties, does their bookkeeping and tax returns with “a whole team of tax lawyers,” and builds living trusts for the next generation. Clients stay seven to eight years on average. Aaron’s view of the business shaped everything that followed: “The experience is the product.”
The PE investment went into sales and marketing, “and boy did that engine rev up.” Clients started “flowing in hundreds per month, quite literally,” and the systems behind them began to show their age.
The client portal “was built on WordPress about 12 years ago,” Aaron said. “Boy was it state-of-the-art 12 years ago.” When he talked with clients about how they wanted to work with Anderson, the portal “didn’t support that at all.” To buy anything, clients had to pick up the phone. Service response times were slipping.
The mandate from the PE firm was clear: keep growing clients and lifetime value, but “we don’t want to continue to add humans in order to service that growth.” That left two levers: automation and client self-service.
If I didn’t have to spend time talking about what a registered agent was with the engineering team, that would save a month for me. We chose Particle because of their knowledge… of the space and what we do every single day.
Approach
Revenue First, With a Partner Who Knew the Legal Space
Aaron’s team defined five client self-service components for a new portal. Fully implemented, the goal is to avoid hiring around 100 FTEs. “We’re Anderson Advisors. We should be spending time advising our clients, not spending time pushing paper around.”
Anderson showed three vendors the same requirements and wireframes. Cost and time to market mattered, but domain knowledge decided it. Anderson chose Particle41 because its team already understood registered agents, LLCs and why clients deed property into them.
The work came together around a few decisions:
- Revenue first. Of the five problems, the team tackled the one that pays for the rest: an online marketplace, so clients could order an LLC without a phone call.
- A week of planning. Everyone got in a room for a week of program increment (PI) planning and came out with a roadmap, timeline and budget.
- One team, not a vendor. "I highly respect a vendor that says, okay, we are your team… If you have a team with you that is willing to challenge your assumptions… that's the team that I want to work with."
- Working through the hard part. The real complexity was Anderson's Salesforce back end: how products are named, bundled and fulfilled. Once Particle41's engineers sat down with Anderson's Salesforce team, the architecture was redesigned around it. "We released on time even despite all of these changes to our architectural design."
- Visible progress. A new demo every three weeks for the whole company and the client advisory board has given the organization confidence that "when we say we're going to deliver something, we're going to deliver it [and] it's going to work."
“This is probably one of the most advanced teams that I’ve worked with,” Aaron said. “We don’t have a lot of bugs, we don’t have a lot of tech debt, we don’t have a lot of rework… Things go to market and they just work.”
What’s next: Anderson is planning the portal’s next major features with AI in mind, for example checking that a client uploaded the right tax document for the right year before anyone has to chase it.
Watch the full conversation on the Particle Accelerator podcast.
Results
A New Revenue Stream Without Adding Roughly 100 Hires
About 5% Added to Top-Line Revenue
The online marketplace is "a completely new revenue stream that just simply didn't exist before," Aaron said. Clients now order in the middle of the night and on weekends.
4–5% of EBITDA Added
That's what the client self-service features released so far have added, as Aaron reported on the podcast.
About 11% of EBITDA Expected by 2028
Anderson expects that figure once the initial set of self-service features is complete.
About 100 Hires Avoided
Anderson is growing without adding the roughly 100–111 staff that growth would otherwise need to support it.
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