[SaaS Series] How To Achieve Success Through Forms Automation With Richard Walker

Richard Walker is the CEO of Quik!, a provider of forms automation and management solutions for companies looking to maximize efficiency and productivity. He started Quik! in 2002 to help people spend less time on paperwork and more time on what they do best. Before Quik!, Richard was a business consultant with Arthur Andersen. He is a published author of two books and a father of three boys.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Richard Walker gives us the backstory of Quik!
• Who are Quik!’s ideal customers?
• Richard explains the “customer experience”
• Quik!’s newest features
• Richard explains why his company forms are popular among Salesforce
• How CRM and customer service make the perfect pair
• Richard talks about Quik’s pricing strategy
• Richard’s favorite software

In this episode…

People lose focus on what they are best at because they spend so much time designing, managing, and filling out forms. So, how can you automate forms to save time, reduce effort, eliminate errors, and improve revenue?

According to business consultant and entrepreneur Richard Walker, “forms” is not a career. So, to maximize efficiency and productivity, people need to spend more time working with clients and not filling out forms. In this episode, Richard shares how he provides forms automation and management solutions, reducing the time and hassle of paperwork and empowering firms in the financial industry to improve their bottom line.

Tune in to this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast with host Dr. Jeremy Weisz as he sits down with Richard Walker, the CEO of Quik!. Learn more about the backstory of Quik!, including its ideal customers and customer experience, why its forms are popular among Salesforce, how CRM and customer service make the perfect pair, and their pricing strategy.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn
• Quik!

Special Mention(s):

• Skience
• Practifi
• Arcus Partners
• Nest Wealth
• SIGNiX
• DocuSign
• TextExpander
• SaneBox
• Knote
• Sembly AI
• Copy.ai
• Paragraph AI
• Jasper
• Pictory
• Nick Francis on LinkedIn
• Jordan Gal on LinkedIn

Related episode(s):

• “Help Scout: How to Run a SAAS Business & Lessons Learned -With Nick Francis [Sales & Revenue]”
• “Help Scout: Are You Too Proud to Beg? How Did They Get Users and Customers -With Nick Francis [Sales & Revenue]”
• “[One Question] Tips to Help Your Ecommerce Business Grow With Jordan Gal Founder of Carthook”
• “Cart Abandonment Solutions That Work With Jordan Gal Founder of Carthook”
• “[SaaS Series] Link Building Simplified With Farzad Rashidi, Co-Founder of Respona”

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:15 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of Inspired Insider, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Richard Walker of quikforms.com. Rich, I’m going to introduce you formally in a second. But I always like to mention other episodes, people should check out. And since you have an amazing SaaS company, I’ll mention some other SaaS interviews I did. I did one with the founder of Help Scout. And I did one with the founder of CartHook, which helps with Shopify, and also with responding all great episodes. So check out those and many more on inspiredinsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25 and, at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships. And how do we do that Rich? Well, we help you run your podcast, we’re an easy button to help launch and run your podcast and we also are big proponents on strategy, accountability and the whole execution. But the number one thing in my life, which is relationships, I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, I found no better way to do that over the past decade than to profile the people in companies I most admire and feature though and what they’re doing. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, go to Rise25.com and I am super excited. We have Richard Walker, Founder and CEO of QuikForms.com. He started Quik! in 2002 to help people spend less time on paperwork and more time on what they do best. And their mission is to streamline the customer experience with forms automations and solutions for you. So check out QuikForms.com He has started 10 companies since the age of 12, published two books, and the most impressive, Rich, really, father to three boys because those are like major startups and each child is a ton of work. And prior to Quik!, Richard was a financial adviser I was consulting with Arthur Andersen. So Rich, thanks for joining me.

Richard Walker  2:29 

Hey, pleasure to be here. And you’re right. I think my three boys are one of my proudest achievements. And my sister gave me a shirt when I had two boys that said, you can’t scare me, I have two boys. I have to get a shirt that says I have three boys.

Jeremy Weisz  2:42 

How old are they now?

Richard Walker  2:44 

They are one, four and seven. So I’m still in the thick of it.

Jeremy Weisz  2:48 

Wow, that’s amazing. So well to talk about how do you run the company and balance family life too. But first start off with Quik! Forms and give a little bit of overview of what you do.

Richard Walker  3:04 

Yeah, so it actually starts way back, 20 plus years ago, when I became a financial adviser, I worked really hard to earn the trust and respect to my client. And the reward was I got to open their account. But the real reward was I got to handwrite their paperwork. And I thought, Man, this is dumb, who likes filling out paperwork. So I built software that fills out my forms and applications for various mutual funds, life insurance, annuity brokerage. And we’ve actually gone out to the industry, we’ve built a library of over 38,000 forms, we build them all the exact same way with the same field definition. And then we provide software solutions so that our customers can find the forms easily bundle them together prefilled them with data from the data they already have, sign them with partners like DocuSign and SIGNiX and process their paperwork really efficiently.

Jeremy Weisz  3:54 

Who are ideal customers?

Richard Walker  3:58 

It’s a great question. We see a lot of different types of forms automation out there, if you’re building a website, you go to forms.com or Wufu, or things like that. But where we shine is when customers have static, repetitive forms. So think paper based forms, that they cannot change the content, whether that’s because they get them from third parties like US government, or they design them themselves for legal and compliance yet they still need to be able to automate the filling of them the processing, the validation, etc. So we work best when people have 10 or more forms, and they’re repetitive in nature. And just put a finer point on it. We can do any form in the world, but we tend to attract customers that are trying to automate their revenue generating activities.

Jeremy Weisz  4:45 

So let’s talk about a few examples because I know I can see this applying to wealth management financial law firms. Let’s just take each of those for a second and what would be an example of a use case so like wealth management and financial. What are some use cases you’ve seen?

Richard Walker  5:02 

Yeah, actually one of the hottest segments of our market right now is the RIA space: registered investment advisor. And if you’re not in the wealth management space, you probably recognize names like Charles Schwab or TD Ameritrade or Fidelity Investments. And these firms are custodians, were on a registered investment advisor will custody the assets of their clients. So the adviser is providing advice, they’re putting the assets with somebody like Schwab. And guess what has to happen, they have to fill out paperwork to make all that transfer the assets, open the accounts, etc. So what happens is an advisor who’s working with lots of clients, the average advisor has 100 clients 350 accounts or so they’re generating a lot of different types of forms over the cycle of a year. And they have a challenge to keep up with that paperwork. Not only do they have to fill it out, but they have to have the correct version of the document at all times. And while companies like Schwab are very tech advanced, and they’re providing a lot of solutions, it’s not always enough. And so a company like mine can step in and help fulfill some of the gaps in the paperwork process.

Jeremy Weisz  6:06 

So that’s the example of the RIA. What about some other spaces?

Richard Walker  6:13 

Yeah, we have a customer that’s in healthcare. If you went to the hospital and you got transferred over to another hospital, for example, they have a kiosk that they use with forms from our system to fill out the data coming from the ER to say, an acute Recovery Center. Another great example is we have a partner in the immigration law space. So if you’re not from America, you probably don’t realize there’s over 200 forms related to immigrating to the US. And their company is actually like the fifth largest user of our product in terms of forms volume. They’re a software company, which is a great partner for us. And they’re out selling to their clients and using our technology in the background to make forms part of their workflow and their business model. So that to us is like the ideal type of partnership that helps us move into more industries, which is one of our goals.

Jeremy Weisz  7:05 

We’ll talk about partners for a second, I know, for sure, I can speak from personal experience. And I hate to say this, but like, I’ve had people vendor send me a PDF to fill out and I just didn’t work with that company. Because it was so cumbersome. I’m like, forget it, I gave up. So I totally get the pain point and the pain point of someone using yours, I probably am like, oh, this is super easy. I’d to like download and then I fill it, it’s just a pain in the butt, so I get it.

Richard Walker  7:35 

And we make that so much easier. My complaint about a PDF on PDFs a powerful tool, obviously, but my complaint is, if it’s on a computer, if you don’t have an Adobe Acrobat paid product, you can’t save it. And even on a Mac or an iPad, which is super popular these days, you can’t even fill it out without a another tool. So when you tell a customer, hey, you got to go get a tool in order to do business with us on our website. That’s just counterintuitive to a good experience. Right? And one of the things we enable our customers to do is put an HTML based form that looks and feels like their actual document out on their website, free, no software to use other than your web browser, fill it out, sign it, submit it printed, if you want to keep a copy all those things. I mean, I just don’t know why Adobe didn’t do this a long time ago, they should have.

Jeremy Weisz  8:24 

I mean, that’s exactly when I talked about your mission of streamlining the customer experience. That’s exactly what turned me away from this particular company by sending me a PDF like you’re making me do more, I just want to make it easy for me to do business with you.

Richard Walker  8:42 

You didn’t want to, let’s say save it, reattach it or print it, scan it. Come on, right.

Jeremy Weisz  8:49 

I don’t even like using a printer. I mean, I don’t even like using a printer, I should be able to fill it out online, in my opinion, right. And that’s what you help people do. So I want to talk about two topics, one partners, and then you mentioned the customer experience, right? So talk a little bit about how you think about the customer experience because it kind of led you to forming this company.

Richard Walker  9:13 

Oh, it absolutely did. I hated filling out forms and in 2001 I’m thinking it’s the year 2001 people why are we doing this? And ironically, before I worked at Arthur Andersen, I was actually in financial services. I worked at John Hancock, I worked at Paine Webber, and Transamerica. And I learned that the financial industry is just always behind on technology. So it wasn’t that big a surprise to me when that happened. But yeah, I mean, look, I think I’m inherently lazy. I want a computer to do the work for me. And when I can make it do that work, I’ll have it do it and I think that plays into the customer experience. Customers have become accustomed now to electronic signature. You do it at the grocery store. They’re accustomed to scanning complex barcodes they watch ups do it all the time, and that required no collection of data by the UPS driver. Doesn’t have to ask for anything just like scan a QR code. Let’s go. We’re used to a lot of automation as consumers these days. So why is it, you go through all of the stress and pain of trying to figure out your financial situation? Like doing life insurance is a pretty tricky thing, because you’re talking about your death. And people don’t like talking about death. And you get to a buying decision, like, yes, I’m ready to buy this life insurance contract that you’re recommending. And then the agent says, okay, here’s 75 pages to fill out. Like, what? And Jeremy, I’m sure you’ve bought a house, you probably feel the same. You’re in love with the house, you’re so excited. And what’s the last step, a ream of paper that you have to go through for two hours.