Unfiltered Retail Strategy with J. Jordan Thaeler

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to the B2B Vault Podcast today. B2B Vault brought to you by Nationwide Payment Systems and our new product NPS One, the smart invoicing solution for businesses. So if you invoice, contact us and book a demo and check out our invoicing solution. Today's guest Jordan Thaler, somebody that I've followed for a really long time, and we got him to come on the podcast. Jordan has a website, Reforming Retail, where he talks about all kinds of stuff going on in the payments business. And he's also an author, an entrepreneur, and we're going to dive in and we're going to talk about what's going on in the payments business today. And he likes to write about like who the— who's, who's being naughty. I don't know if he ever says who's being nice, but he definitely points out—

Well, look, we're fair. It's just that I think more people want to hear about the guys that are naughty. We did a piece on SumUp a couple of weeks ago that was pretty impartial and showed the pros and cons, and I don't think it was too negative on those guys. So, but look, there are, with all the acquisitions, Allen, and the fewer options that merchants have for payments and a lot of these legacy companies being public and losing just tons of market share to Audien and Stripe, there's a lot of naughty for Santa to look over for Christmas. I mean, there's just, you know, they're not growing at all organically. They just, you know, they raise the rates. That's how they keep, keep in business and keep investors happy or not happy, as Fiserv did 2 days ago.

It's, listen, it's, you know, Fiserv, that was an interesting situation because I remember they came out with a report that they signed all these new merchants, and then it was uncovered that they actually didn't sign any new merchants. There was a gateway that they closed down.

Correct.

They moved tens of thousands of merchants over to the Clover gateway.

It took credit for the growth. Yeah.

Oh, we signed up whatever X number of new merchants, which was not true information. Yeah.

It's, it's, uh, as somebody who deals with the capital markets, at some point you kind of reach the asymptote where you really can't keep growing at a Rule of 40 company, you just have to— you're out of market and you have to keep acquiring to keep investors happy, right? There's only so many new businesses that open every year that need payments, and the growth of the economy isn't 40% a year. So if you're not winning market share from competitors, then your only way to keep growing is to increase the costs on your existing merchant base.

Like Yeah, because like I write in the Green Sheet, so some of the articles that I've written that I've talked to people about is, you know, agnostic software versus, you know, the antagonistic companies who have basically performed the residual robberies on the agents and ISOs out there. Yeah, software is the new ISO. Whoever controls the software is now controlling the payments, and they, they're taking market share in this business. And the other thing I wrote about recently is for ISOs, it's time for them to go fintech, because the fintech, fintech is winning, you know, versus traditional merchant services.

Well, we don't have to jump into it this early, but, uh, this is a thesis for why we built the company Post, right? Like, this is we— you can see the first gen of, of the embedded payment companies that have gone public and it's like, oh my God, I'm, I'm toast. I'm making, you know, 2.5 times on payments what I should be making in terms of a fair market rate. It's because the merchants are trapped, right? And, you know, Toast still makes a ton of money on software. It's not like they give software away for free. Like merchants are paying more for POS now than they ever paid in their lives. And it's way outpaced the growth of inflation. So It's just this hostage dynamic that merchants get into when the software runs out of, out of TAM. Right.

Well, I think the POS business has changed. So like in 2001, if you were a restaurant, you had to put a 10-station point of sale in. You probably spent anywhere from $40 grand to $80 grand and put it on a lease.

Yeah.

Today it's hardware and software as a service and then elevated price on your merchant account.

Yeah, but even like, so take the, let's take 10 stations that you said, say $50 grand. Is that the number you want to stick with? $50 grand?

Let's just say probably average back in the day, maybe even more. Micros used to be like $80 grand for something.

Okay. So $80 grand for 10, 10 stations. Let's just say, right. $8,000 per station. Toast's average merchant, which is like $1.3 million of processing volume. So kind of the average Micros merchant, they make $10,000 a year per customer. Perpetually, right? So like it's substantially more expensive to have a Toast system now than it ever was to license or lease a Microsystem, even with the support contracts and everything else. We, we did the math, I don't know, a year ago maybe, and it was like 2.4x was the numbers, right? It's just Toast makes so much more on payments. Like if you think about 10 units stationed on Micros paying $80 grand, a fair market rate for payments was probably somewhere around 20 basis points. Right. Right. And Toast is charging $55, going to $60. Yeah, that's the delta. That's where it's coming from.

So, no, it's just, it's changed. Like, instead of like you're paying for hardware, then every year you're paying for a software update, then you're paying a service contract. Now you're paying for some money for hardware or no money, and you're doing hardware and software as a service, and then elevated, you know, rates on credit card processing. And I tell my agents all the time, I'm like, you guys have to stop trying to sell credit card processing to people and you need to start selling software to people because people want to buy products.

They don't—

they're not worried about processing.

People want problems solved, right? Fundamentally, it's like, hey, I hired you to solve a problem. It's just like with a lot of the way— well, no, with the way that embedded payments in its current embodiment is going, period. It's like, hey, I hire you to like paint my house and I come home from work and the house is painted, but you've also decided to like eat all the food in my fridge. You've, you know, had made my dog breed 10 puppies and you're selling the puppies like, and you've pulled up all my flowers and you're selling them. So it's like they just totally take advantage of the merchant. They own you like they own you like you can't lifting and shifting off of a point of sale system is challenging or an ERP or whatever it is. It's a lot of work. It's very painful. And the ERP and the software, they know it. They just got you by the nuts.

Oh yeah, even trying to get a merchant, like we're dealing with somebody now and they need to move. They're like, oh, we need to move off Stripe. Stripe gave us our marching orders. So I'm like, okay, well, it's not that hard to do, you know? And they're like, oh, well, they won't give me the data. I'm like, they're not going to give you the data. They have to transfer from their gateway to a new gateway.

No, there's actually, they're required to according to Visa guidelines. And I've seen with some large Shopify merchants, who use Stripe that Shopify just— these are big merchants with 9 figures of volume, right? Shopify just ignores the merchant's request when they move processors, and the merchants had to write legal letters referring to the language in the Visa agreements, right? The guidelines. And Shopify's, oh shit, right, we got our stuff together, we have to actually do something here. But otherwise they won't, like they just drag their feet and have no desire to help their own customers.

Yeah, Stripe actually has on their website, if you Google it, move your data, there's a button. You have to do a bunch of paperwork, send it to them, and they— then the gate— you have to give it to the new gateway, and the gateway contacts them, or one of the recurring, uh, recurring transaction companies, Recurly, Chargebee, what have you, right? And they'll transfer— they do an FTP from them to the new gateway, but they're not giving it to the merchant.

That's what—

that's what I try to explain to them.

Oh, you mean— you mean, yeah, it goes vault to vault, it doesn't go Yeah, hey, give me my raw pan, please. I'm in a massive PCI.

That's what confuses merchants all the time. They're like, oh, they won't give me the data. I'm like, they're not going to give it to you. I don't want a new provider.

So I, I know a— it's a private equity-backed, let's just call it a medical business. It's probably, I don't know, $10 to $20 billion in revenue. Yeah, they just store, they store raw PAN. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable what these guys do. Like, I do. Do you have any idea what you're like? You're just like one whistleblower away from receiving like an 8-figure fine from Visa. Like, what are you doing?

Yeah, we had a client years ago when, when, when Gateways first started to do like, you know, vaulting people's transactions. And we went to this company and they were doing like $3 million a month.. And I went over and they brought this, oh, we want you to come to our office. We're in Atlanta. I flew from Florida up to Atlanta, went to their office. They took me in this, they took me down, down the hallway. There was all these locked doors. People had to put in codes to get in. And then they showed me this room and I go, what's that? And they go, that's our payment server. I asked them, I said, are you out of your mind? And the owner of the company said, what are you talking about? I'm like, You know, how much money are you spending to like upkeep this whole area back here? And they say it was costing them about $200 grand a year plus the employees. And I said, well, you can just eliminate that. We can put you on a hosted platform.

They're like, it's just, it's wild. It's, I mean, it's the Wild West. The whole, whole thing. Payments is just like, uh, um, there are the— there should be a cost for credit. If you need credit, there's a cost for that, right? That's a real cost. Someone has to underwrite you and extend that, and there's a risk you default. But the idea that like it costs to move money is kind of wild to me.

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And I get there's like some, some infrastructure needed to like have securities. Like I need a chargeback. There's fraud. How do I handle that? Right. But like that to me can all be ironed out in a way that's much more streamlined. It doesn't cost the merchant 300 basis points, or what's tantamount to 25% of their EBITDA every year, right? Like, that's just insane to me.

Yeah, there's a lot of merchants that are overpriced. I mean, I haven't seen like Stripe, you know, people think like we had a merchant come to us, they go, we pay 2.9%. I said, well, okay, well, pull up your report and then let's see what you really pay.

Let's see effective. Yeah.

And then they go, I go, you do realize like when you use the payment link, they charge extra.

You send 100 bips, they charge extra when you send the money.

They don't even— now I saw this thing where if you don't qualify from Stripe to get daily deposits, like you're a new merchant, they hold your money and you have to go in and say, I want my money. And when you click you want your money, there's a fee for that now.

Yep. It's, it's, uh, so the interesting thing that I see is with the with the, well, the venture subsidy of AI being the bubble that it is, all these companies are going to Stripe for simplicity to, you know, to onboard. And like, they're, yeah, yeah, I don't care that I'm paying 6% effective to Stripe, I'll figure it out later. When the bubble pops, all those guys are going to come off of Stripe if they're still around, right? It's just too, you can't have 6% effective rate to take a credit card. It's just, that's insane. That's usury. Yeah, that's usury. That's like the literal definition of usury.

And I, you know, some, and I've had people tell me, oh yeah, Stripe calls me on the phone all the time. I'm like, there's no phone number for Stripe.

Dude, they can't.

I don't know who's calling you.

Yeah, that's.

And you can't call them.

No, yeah, it's, look, great, well, it used to be a great developer experience. I would contend, Allen, that it's like a lot now very bloated. And there are companies that have built, what, abstraction layers, wrappers, right, on top of Stripe. That charge an additional 100 basis points. Because as an engineer, if I want to set up Stripe today, it's 300 lines of code, which is like, you know, depending on my focus, that could be 2 to 3 weeks of work. And that's like a lot of time for an engineer, right? So can I get going in half a day with 10 lines of code on top of Stripe? Yes, is the answer, but not directly with Stripe. You got to go to one of the other providers.

Oh yeah, there's a bunch of them now. And I saw one of them, one provider, uh, like a little over a year ago pushing $13 million a month, and then Stripe shut them down.

Yeah, they have— Stripe has some weird, weird policies, um, because when they— when you go to Stripe and you onboard, they don't really check who you are. No, it takes time, so they hold your funds anyway. You can process payments, but you know, you're online selling child porn, cannabis, whatever it is, it's obviously illicit.

They will—

you're never going to get the funds settled. Like they're just going to return them to the customers.

Yeah, but they also— I tell people like they don't underwrite you and your business, they underwrite transactions. And that's what they do when once you start trading, you know, you get boarded. But once you start doing trade, you know, as you start transacting, then they look and they go, oh, Yeah. What is this?

Yeah.

What is this? We don't see a website. There's no website up. Oh, do you have a website, Bob? What do you sell? And then, then all hell— then you see them on Reddit. Stripe's holding all my money. Stripe put me on the match list.

Yeah. Good old match list. Yeah. Love being there.

But, you know, but what's with, you know, like, like lately there's all these comp— I mean, You know, I've seen your posts about Global Payments and Worldpay and Heartland, and, and all of a sudden these companies feel like to every single merchant they have, whether doing $1,000 a month, $10,000 a month, or hundreds of thousands a month, they just keep filing out these fees of all kinds of crazy stuff. $400 annual fee, $400 technology fee, $400 just because we feel like it fee.

It's Friday fee, the sun shining fee, right? Yeah, it's 5 o'clock fee. Do you want the reason for that or do you want my—

Yeah, what's the, what's, I mean, you, I mean, the reason for it is they're probably losing money and they need—

Well, yeah, they're public. The public investors expect them to grow. They can't grow because they're losing as payments embed to the softwares. The softwares say, hey, it's much easier for me to write to Stripe's API. And have all these features at my fingertips than it is to spend 9 months in hell trying to figure out what Global's APIs mean. And so they go to Stripe and they probably pay up. Well, they know they do pay a massive premium for that convenience, right? But they're like, yeah, whatever, I'll just like shellac my merchants. So if I'm paying 5% to Stripe effective, like, yeah, my merchant's going to pay me 7% effective or whatever it ends up being. Well, in that world, if you're public and you're global, you say, okay, well, I can't win the new business, I can't win merchants because merchants now are tied to their software and that's where they're getting payments and I can't intercept that. So for me to meet my, my growth metrics, all I can do is take my existing base and turn the crank and pray that a small number actually notice and leave and the rest eat the cost increase. And my numbers, my revenue grows by 20% or whatever it is to make investors happy. And that was like, we, we saw this happening a couple years ago as some of these guys like Shopify, Toast, et cetera, started to go public, which was like, yeah, these merchants, you know, in business, everything's a bundling and unbundling cycle. You think about cable used to be all these different channels and cable companies came together, they bought 'em together in a bundle and then the internet popped up and started unbundling and you could get like whatever Hulu had different channels or Paramount Plus or whatever. And now they're all getting bundled again. Disney's buying Hulu and all that stuff, right? Yeah. It's just a natural business cycle of the bundling and unbundling. And so where we are in the business cycle now with payments is the software companies are now embedding payments. They're doing the bundling. But at some point people will realize, holy— wait, what? Can we cuss on this podcast? What's— what's PG? What are we?

PG?

Okay.

We don't— we try not to cuss.

Okay. So the merchants at some point will realize, oh my goodness, this is way too expensive to, to use, you know, Pick a software and they're going to try to find something else, right? This was the catalyst that had us build Post. And frankly, like merchants don't really self-discover, like they've never self-discovered. Maybe some of the B2B do, uh, but it's an ISO agent product for most of it, which is, hey, I'm on Pick a Software, Allen, that's embedded. What's your favorite one?

Not my—

you're on— well, okay, so you're on Shift 4. You're paying, well, Shift 4, you're paying 99% effective. So you've been bankrupt for, you know, 2 years. You just don't realize it yet. And an ISO says, hey, great, I can use this thing called POST. You merchant can keep your Shift 4 solution, let's say SkyTab, and we're going to allow you to run payments through me and everything is still going to be integrated to SkyTab. So your reporting will work, your accounting will work, everything will work. The difference is you're going to have better support with me as your local ISO. We're probably going to upgrade the features because Shift Forward can't spell R&D. Andrew, great news. You no longer have to sell your kids to, you know, do illicit things because now you're going to be solvent and you can have a family again.

Well, I know companies like Toast and other companies have things in their contract that restrict you from not doing payments through them. And then you're in breach of the contract.

I've only ever seen two companies that actually have that language. Toast doesn't, as far as I'm aware. I haven't looked in a while.

Toast does have that. If you put inside machines and try and don't process through Toast, they will come after you.

And go after who? The merchant?

Yeah.

And what's the merchant— what are the damages the merchant has to pay? Do you know?

The damages are the missing— they won't charge them the interchange, but missing profit.

I've never— I haven't seen that language on Toast.

It's been a while since I've looked, but I've seen it with Toast and I saw a merchant do that at Revel. And they contacted a local attorney and the local attorney sent me over the contract and I read it and I said, hey, it says right here and they're being sued for like $50,000.

Yeah, well, there is a—

Switch back to Revel.

Well, it's just like what happens. I can tell you from precedent that a lot of the ISVs don't want to be in a reputational position. ISV being the software, right, for your listeners. The softwares don't want to be in a reputational position where it's like, hey, my customer is getting better service, better economics, better whatever, you know, features that we don't even deliver from a third party. And I think that's not fair. And my customer should pay me a lot more money to have fewer features, worse support, and higher rates. It's a, it's a really, it's frankly, it's a bad predicament for the softwares. They don't want to fight that. And you can go talk to Rectangle Health and learn what they did and how they overcame some of those obstacles. But the software's usually like 19 out of 20 times capitulate and they try to be hard to change.

The medical software seems to be the ones that, that kind of like don't really care when, when the doctor's offices leave them and go to something else. They don't seem to be fighting with anybody, although some of them probably put out new contracts now and you're tied to their, And they put stuff in place so no one can access their system, you know, which I've seen a couple of times already recently.

It's a, it's a war on fraudulent inducement. Frankly, that's how these merchants get into these Shift 4 contracts. And I've seen it. I've seen it at the largest levels in writing from VP titled people at Shift 4 where they tell the merchant, hey, if you sign up with me, your rate's X, you're going to save Y. They sign up, their rates are 10x and they save negative 10y. And then the only recourse there is to sue, so litigate, right? It's just, it's, it's, it's whole things of, it's fraud. They, Shift 4 knows their game. Uh, Toast knows their game. These guys, they, they just are not truthful about how they make money and the merchants get screwed every time.

Yeah, I've had merchants tell me, oh, I'm going to get $5,000 from XYZ company. We had a client of ours that left us. They got $25,000. And they say they don't pay for their point of sale system either. We've asked them for the bill to see like what's on their bill, but they won't show it to us.

I mean, look, I've had, I'm not kidding, I've had multiple merchants look me dead in the face. And say, I pay less for payments than Amazon. Like, okay, man, you're right. You got me. So that's the problem with merchants as well. That's why they don't self-discover. They just need a lot of help because they are, uh, it's classic Dunning-Kruger. They just think they know everything and they—

yeah, no, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a whole, you know, we're dealing with like a whole game because it's the You know, when you try to be— we just offer people, we say, hey, our pricing is transparent. We don't raise your pricing. If you're on cost-plus, you're on cost-plus. If you're on flat rate, you're on flat rate, and that's it. We're not increasing the cost to you. You know, we, we have— we've figured out where we need to be to be where we need to be with you, and that's it. And, you know, you know, the thing is also with, with, um merch, you know, I saw a survey, two surveys, and they said somewhere between 35% and 40% of merchants today are passing a fee to their customers. You think that's low or that's about where it is?

I think it's about a third in SMB. We see a lot. We see it more and more common upmarket with the private equity guys. They're kind of finally realizing like this makes sense because when they go out to buy an asset, the assets they want to buy now are dual pricing or surcharging. So they have, they have to absorb it somehow. Well, this— yeah, I'm not stupid. Then I have to pass that cost model to my customer when after I buy the asset somehow. Right. So whether you want to do with the dual pricing or surcharge or you want to raise your prices by 7%, you know, pick a number. But we see it. It's becoming more and more prevalent. Certain industries obviously like are almost all exclusively surcharged, like automotive. AutoNation, the biggest guy, they're rolling out or have been rolling out since I think like June or July, surcharging in the automotive dealership space.

So what's your thought on— here's another big thing I've seen you write about— free POS systems?

Well, it's, it's, uh, look, there are people that obviously don't have the money that are starting a business, and they, they need a way to, uh, get a system to run the business, and they probably can't qualify for bank financing or the terms are too high. And so the free POS is, okay, we'll just get the— we'll get the we'll pay for your system out of the credit card processing and we'll get kind of first claim. And so, you know, maybe you do well and, uh, you can make that math work. And if you don't, then you're in trouble. But again, a lot of these merchants, unfortunately, like most of them actually think it's a free POS and actually think they've outsmarted everybody and you can't help 'em. Like they're too, you know, they're too smart to help.

Yeah, that's, that's the, the myth I tell 'em. There's no, there's no free lunch. Just like there, you know, there's just no, it doesn't exist.

The fact that you have to to someone just tells me like you got bigger problems. Like that if you think something of value is actually free, you have some bigger problems.

No, that's true. Yeah, we get that all the time. They'll be like, oh, well, this company is offering us free POS. I go, do you actually think you're not going to pay for it? One of the biggest predators in our business today is Clover and how they've, you know, kind of like devclover.com now, merchants can go there, buy Clover without going through an ISO or a sales rep, right? And then Clover is kind of like also taking the, the app, the app fees, which we never got as an agent. We never get money for those apps that merchants are buying in the Clovers. And the, uh, you know, now they kind of split it up. So if you buy from clover.com, that the app— we don't sell Clover, so I don't care— the app fees are actually lower if you buy it directly from Clover than when you buy it through the ISO network.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of creative ways. The— it's channel conflict ultimately, right? What that is, we've seen with a certain segment of the market, not all the segment, but a certain segment of the market, usually the upper end that values their time, says, I need someone local to support this business. When there's an issue, I can't rely on a 1-800 number to like the Philippines to like resolve this that matters. Uh, and they're happy to pay for support. Now, most, 98%, which might even be low, 98% of merchants never want to pay for anything. And so they kind of get what they get. Like, that's, well, that's, you know, you want to buy some POS online, install it yourself, set it up, support it yourself, or rely on someone in the Philippines. What do you expect? Like, you know, that's, you don't pay for anything. So what else do you want to get?

That's what I tell people. I tell them, I say, we sell a really good restaurant point of sale system. System. If you want a really good system with 24-hour support answered on the phone in the United States, we can help you. We send techs out that know the software to professionally install it. We have a training program. But if you want the free POS, you know, go— I mean, there's nothing we can do. We can't give you what we have for free.

Yeah, correct. And that's the— that's always been— well, in total irony, that's why payments has become the money pot. For everything brick and mortar is merchants refused to pay for value. And so you had to steal it from them. And the only way to get the money and steal it from them today is through payments because no one knows how to read or audit a statement. They have no idea how to actually reconcile that, no way to adjudicate what's really happening. And so that's how you make the money because the merchant will refuse to— it's just the wildest thing. The merchant will understand like in their own personal life, oh yeah, like if I need a car, I understand why a Ferrari is worth more than like a used whatever, 1994 Mazda Miata. Right, right. Understand that. But when it comes to their business, somehow they suspend all rational, uh, thinking. And it's like, you know, the most— the best, most expensive, most performant system really should be free. Should be free. Should cost zero. It's just unbelievable to me, the cognitive dissonance I see with, with the merchants. Like, seriously, it's like wild.

Oh yeah, I mean, I see it every day, you know. We You know, we've lost customers because, you know, they go to the free solution and some of them survive it, you know, and then, you know, because they, but you know, when they have a problem, they'll be calling us on the phone going, oh, what do we do? We have a problem with this free system. You didn't get it from us.

Yeah.

It's just, why are you calling us? We got a phone call recently from a merchant. They're like, can you help us? And I'm like, We can't just go in there and take over their system. If you're enjoying the show, make sure you follow B2BVault, the Biz to Biz Podcast, on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple. We break down payments, point of sale, business trends, AI, and interview leaders from every industry. New episodes drop weekly. Hit subscribe and join the community. Link in description. You know, I like—

it takes two to tango. Merchants open the door to the payments avarice by just refusing to pay for anything of value. And so when that, when that happens, then people say, okay, well then what's the easiest way for me to actually make money to support you? Okay, well, payments. Now, just don't take it too far and get greedy and take advantage of the merchant entirely. Absolutely. But the merchants created this environment for themselves.

So the new thing that you came out with, the POS Plus, or you call it Post We just call it POST.

Yep.

So tell us a little bit about that.

The merchants will never— the private equity guys as merchants will actually self-discover this, but the long-tail merchants never will. It's got to be sold by an ICOR agent, someone in the channel, which is, hey, imagine using Shift 4, keeping your software, but then using whoever you want for payments, often with better features, and then have everything integrated so you can keep your system. You don't need to move Shift 4 if you're getting totally hammered. And you can still have your, you know, Bob down the street service your business and you get whatever the rates you wanted on your system. Right. So all of that is obviously caveated by whatever agreement they've signed with their lender or software provider on some of what they have.

But who's going to support the software?

Well, the ISVs. You know, very few of these ISVs are actually giving the software away for free. Like, there's like Toast, go look at their revenues on software. They make a lot of money on software.

Oh yeah, there's a SaaS fee for everything. For every add-on too. Online ordering, correct? Gift cards, loyalty programs, this, that. DoorDash, they charge you $99 for every single plugin, payroll, everything.

A lot, maybe a lot of softwares, Allen Kopelman, like, and I would say over 99% don't mandate payments. They're actually fairly neutral, and you still can get support. Like, ServiceTitan does not mandate payments. Jobber does not mandate payments. Mindbody does not mandate payments. They have embedded payments. They'd like you to use their payments. They sort of assume because, hey, I have one, one option for payments, and if you want an integrated experience, you're going to use me. In theory, I could say, well, I'm going to hire an outsourced person to log into my system and reconcile everything for me manually. Okay, well, that's such a pain. We don't actually think you're going to do that. So you're welcome to do it if you want to, but it's painful and it's expensive and it's error-prone. AI and software generally just change that. So you can now ignore hiring a third-party person and you can have software do it all. So you can keep using ServiceTitan and use whoever you want for payments and everything will still work.

Well, I'm, I'm gonna have to— you're gonna have to show me a demo on how this stuff works.

I can send you some videos. Yeah, it's not a, you know, we've done hundreds, hundreds of these different softwares now. It's all the same.

So, so what if, you know, someone's a merchant and they're listening to us like chop all this stuff up, right? What's some good advice you would give to a business owner?

Admit you don't know things. When I have tax questions, I don't do it myself. I consult an expert. When my heart's not beating the right way, I go to a physician, specially trained in cardiology. Merchants need to understand that there's things that they don't know. They need to defer to experts. And it's okay to acknowledge that you don't know something, right? It's— that's, uh, not a flaw. In fact, that's a virtue. And merchants have to get out of their own way. That's like the biggest mistakes I've ever seen have been just merchants thinking they know everything.

Okay. And if people want to find you, uh, want to find out more about read the articles that you write, reformingretail.com.

reformingretail.com. The other one's POSPlus.org. That's POST. That's where we have the POST site today.

Okay. Any other final words and what we're talking, what we're diving into today?

I'll pray for your merchants because the, you know, a lot of these guys aren't growing. They need to show the market public public growth and there's more pain to come.

Yeah, I think merchants today, especially the restaurant business, I was listening to a guy who's a restaurant guru guy and he was like, when restaurants tell him they're not doing business, a lot of business today, and we see restaurant revenue going up and down, he says, don't look at all the restaurants around you. He says, start looking at the grocery stores. And all these third-party providers of meals, because that's what's starting to eat into the restaurant revenue.

Yeah, I think that's, that's true.

And what, and what about, and one final word on free POS. Give us one final tidbit on that.

If you think anything in life is free outside of your grandma's cookies, like, you got bigger problems, man. Like, I can't help you. Like, you're beyond help.

Yeah, you're not going to get the best technology that's out there for free, basically.

Good luck.

Good luck.

Good luck.

All right, well, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. It was an interesting discussion. I think we talked about a lot of different things that business owners can pay attention to, and, you know, I know business owners don't understand. Some companies make statements that are so difficult to read, or they just send you a spreadsheet, or there's just nothing to read and you have to just download things and decipher it. But it's always good to contact an expert. I am an expert. Jordan is an expert. You know, you can go to other experts and they can, you know, give you an analysis on what you're actually paying for merchant services. You know, especially if someone's been in the business for a while. And that's pretty much like the best advice I can give people. Peace out, everybody.

Gotta go.

All right. Thank you for joining us on B2B Vault today. You can catch us on Spotify, Apple, YouTube. You can find us on LinkedIn. Everybody have a great day.