When Jason Wilcox took over as CTO of Source Advisors, he inherited a lean IT team and a mandate to modernize fast. At the same time, a fast-growing sales team was losing close to a third of its selling time to administrative work. The specialty tax firm, backed by BV Investment Partners, was entering a growth phase and needed specialized talent to scale two very different functions at once.
Building those teams in-house would have cost roughly $1.43 million a year in salaries and taken 6 to 18 months to hire and train. Consero’s Flex Resources model onboarded new hires in about six weeks and delivered annual savings of more than $800,000 — while scaling Source Advisors’ technology organization from 5 people to nearly 40 and returning 30% of selling time to the sales floor.
Here’s the embedded-team model behind the numbers, the build-versus-buy math that made it work, and how Source Advisors scaled specialized functions without scaling overhead.
Partnership Highlights
Want the one-page version? Get the full Source Advisors case study as a downloadable PDF.
Two Bottlenecks Behind the Growth Plan
Source Advisors has spent over 40 years helping businesses claim federal and state incentives — R&D tax credits, cost segregation, and energy efficiency programs. Rapid growth created two operational bottlenecks in functions that had to scale at the same time, for different reasons.
On the technology side, an ambitious modernization roadmap was growing faster than the team could staff against it. On the sales side, as deal volume climbed, administrative work piled up faster than the supporting processes could keep pace.
| Function | The Challenge | What It Was Costing |
|---|---|---|
| Technology | A lean IT team built to run day-to-day operations, now taking on an ambitious modernization and AI/ML roadmap. | More transformation work than a small team could take on alone, fast enough to hit growth targets. |
| Sales Operations | A fast-growing, 30-rep sales team whose deal processes had scaled faster than its operational support. | Administrative work consuming up to 30% of selling time across the org. |
Neither problem had a clean in-house answer on the timeline the business needed. Building a full engineering bench and a sales-operations team from scratch meant months of recruiting, onboarding, and management overhead before any work shipped.
“We needed a dedicated team that could specialize and grow with us.”
— Jason Wilcox, CTO, Source Advisors
An Embedded Partnership vs. A Typical Vendor
A typical staffing vendor sends contractors to a queue of tickets. Consero’s team members participated in sprint planning, standups, and strategic reviews as extensions of the Source Advisors organization. That integration drove execution quality and team cohesion, a key difference that shows up in the results.
| Dimension | Traditional Staffing | Consero’s Flex Resources |
|---|---|---|
| Working model | Contractors work a queue of assigned tickets. | Team members embed in sprint planning, standups, and strategic reviews. |
| Hiring & screening | Résumés matched to a job spec. | Candidate screening, technical evaluations, and consistent hiring standards for every role. |
| Team fit | Filled by availability. | Screened for cultural fit and long-term retention. |
| Continuity | Rotating contractors; knowledge leaves when they do. | A dedicated team that specializes and grows with the business. |
| What you get | Extra hands. | An integrated extension of your organization. |
Getting there started with a repeatable hiring and integration model, built to a consistent standard across every role:
- Candidate screening: identifying the right technical profiles for each role.
- Technical evaluations: rigorous assessments aligned to real project needs.
- Hiring standards: consistent benchmarks applied across all engineering roles.
- Cultural fit: screening for team cohesion and long-term retention.
On the sales side, the same model produced a dedicated Deal Desk that grew organically alongside the expanding sales team, without disrupting existing workflows.
Source Advisors and Consero concentrated deal-operations expertise into a four-person desk that owns it end to end, so the wider sales team stays focused on selling. As Sheryl Nazzaro, Source Advisors’ Director of Sales Support, describes:
“Instead of training 30 salespeople on detailed operational processes, the Deal Desk specializes in ensuring information is entered correctly.”
— Sheryl Nazzaro, Director of Sales Support, Source Advisors
Four specialists absorbing the administrative load gave 30 reps their highest-value hours back, and gave the business consistent, accurate deal data.
Savings Breakdown
Across both functions, the embedded model delivered the same specialized capability for roughly half the in-house cost — more than $800,000 back every year.
| Function | Cost to Build In-House | Annual Savings via Consero | % Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engineering & Technical | $1,094,000 | $542,296 | 50% |
| Sales Support | $339,000 | $258,168 | 76% |
| Total | $1,433,000 | $800,464 | 56% |
Just as important is how quickly that capability came online. A from-scratch hiring effort can take 6 to 18 months to source, hire, and train a full team; Consero had new hires productive in about six weeks. For a company in a growth phase, that’s quarters of progress earned back.
It’s the same build-versus-buy calculus finance leaders run when they weigh an in-house accounting team against a managed alternative — the same variables of salary, ramp time, and management overhead, whether the function is engineering, sales operations, or the back-office finance function.
When Staff Augmentation Becomes Strategic Infrastructure
Over roughly 2.5 years, the technology engagement built a formal data engineering practice from scratch on Azure and Microsoft Fabric, expanded development support for both legacy applications and new AI/ML initiatives, and improved automation, reporting, scalability, and security posture across the stack.
That durable infrastructure outlasts any single hire.
Four things separated this partnership from a transactional staffing relationship:
| Success Factor | Why It Mattered |
|---|---|
| Clear expectations | Goals and outcomes aligned from the start, so the team built toward shared results the way an internal team would. |
| Strong integration | Embedding in standups and planning made collaboration seamless across teams and functions. |
| Early onboarding investment | A roughly six-week onboarding ramp set the foundation for long-term productivity. |
| Continuous refinement | The model iterated and adapted as the business grew, expanding scope as needs shifted. |
“It didn’t feel like an outside team coming in. It felt like one team moving faster together.”
— Jason Wilcox, CTO, Source Advisors
Scaling Specialized Functions Without Scaling Overhead
Specialized teams are hard to build in-house on a growth timeline, which is why so many sponsor-backed companies plug into a partner to skip recruiting from zero. Consero pairs a curated technology stack and AI-enabled automation with expert talent across finance, technology, and sales support — the systems and the people, integrated as one team.
For Source Advisors, that combination delivered specialized capability at roughly half the cost of in-house, and turned a staffing decision into a strategic asset.
See how Consero’s Flex Resources model can scale specialized functions for your organization with speed, confidence, and real cost savings. Start the conversation.
