At 75 years old, how can a business owner stay on trend in the digital age?

Welcome to The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. This show will tell you how to get the recognition you and your business deserve.

Our guests share their practical insights and tools which you can use straight away.

Your host is international entrepreneur, podcast host, and author Jim James.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. I feel like saying yeehaw really because We're going over to Dallas, Texas to meet with Charles Reed, who's built a company called GetPayroll. They have over $1 billion worth of payroll that they manage every year. Charles, welcome to the show.

Jim, thanks for having me.

It's my pleasure. Can I say yeehaw for Texas, or should I be— is that Wyoming and Idaho further north?

It'll work for Texas.

Okay. Lone Star State. But we're going to talk about how you've built getpayroll.com from humble beginnings, originally with your wife, who was your partner at the time. And over 30 years, you've built this business up to be a national company serving other businesses with their payroll. We're going to talk about issues like loyalty. We're going to talk about how you've got a system to reward companies that give you referrals, and also about one of the lessons you've learned about getting professional staffing. So, Charles, Tell us first of all about getpayroll.com.

Well, GetPayroll services clients across the United States. We provide payroll services and payroll compliance services. We pay their employees, we do all the filings, all the tax payments, and then we solve all the compliance problems that arise because the Internal Revenue Service makes millions of mistakes a year. So we fix them.

So thank heavens for bureaucracy, right? So Charles, you've built this business previously non-internet era and then internet and now sort of mobile era. So do you want to just maybe take us through, first of all, some of the early ways that you were building the brand for getpayroll.com? Because some of the principles that you apply in the sort of pre-internet years are probably still valid today, aren't they?

Well, yes and no. I mean, we did a lot of door knocking, handing out brochures, talking to people, network meetings, all that kind of stuff. Most of which is no longer effective, but it worked at the time. It built us a few clients. We were local at the time. And so we were only in the DFW, the Dallas-Fort Worth area, because it was, that's the way the world was at that point. And when we moved into the internet, in the late '90s, we became a national firm almost overnight. And that, that was a change because I had drawers full of state tax stuff that I had to learn and all the things that went with it. So that was an interesting time.

Yeah. And how did you manage that? Because presumably one of the points one would have thought about, for example, payroll is, is quite intimate people-to-people business, even if it's serving a customer that's a business. How did you build the relationships and the brand? I know now you have customers On the West Coast, the East Coast, up in the North. How did you go about building the brand on the internet then, Charles?

We just tried to explain who we were and what we did. Tried to be not the major faceless people like our major competitors. And the fact that we always made the point that you could call Charles. I mean, you can pick up the phone, any of my clients, anybody who's interested, can pick up the phone and call me directly. If I'm in the office, take the phone call. That was one of our major things is that we are a small business, that we deal with small businesses. We're not a faceless, huge monolith. And if you got problems, Charles, who's the compliance expert, the CPA, the later the US Tax Court practitioner, pick up the phone and call him. He'll answer your questions. So that was one of the major things, our compliance capability and the fact that you can talk to the guy in charge if you need to, just pick up the phone and call him.

Yeah. And I think it's wonderful. Now look at your website, you've got over 5,000 customers and you are giving people 30-minute consultations. So how have you managed to scale that, Charles? Because plainly that volume of customers mean that while you're still very much at the head of the business, you've had to, if you like, personalize at scale. So how have you done that?

I've got a great staff. I get very few phone calls because my staff is long-term, very effective, very customer-oriented, and takes care of the problems. They just do. It's very seldom that it has to come to my desk. And that's because I hire good people. I don't hire jerks. I hire good, competent people who do excellent work and have great customer skills. And that keeps my clients happy and allows me to do my work.

And I think we've talked before about now your work really is building the company as opposed to delivering the service. So do you want to just tell us a little about the influence and how you've managed to sort of step from being in the business to working on the business? Because that's a key psychological change for most people.

Years ago, I've been in business probably 7 years and I was at my wit's end with things going on. And a friend of mine gave me Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited. And I read it. As I told you early on, I buy that book by the dozen and give it out to clients and potential clients. And it's required reading for every new employee because it teaches you how to work on your business and not in your business. And if you're going to grow an entrepreneurial business, you have to treat it as a business, not a job. And you have to do the things necessary to grow the business. And that is, you're right, it's a key psychological point that an entrepreneur has to come to and say, this isn't a job. This is a business. I need to manage the business.

And Charles, one of the things we talked about before we started recording was you took that book, read it as I have, and it was transformative for me too. What was one of the sort of realizations that you had when it came to marketing? Because I think that was Also similar, wasn't it, to take the business to where it is today?

Yes. I thought I could market and I produced brochures and I talked to clients and I wrote articles early on. I wrote hundreds of articles. And then about 10 years ago, 8 years ago, we'd gotten big enough and so busy that I felt I needed to turn marketing over to somebody else. I didn't have time. So I hired a marketing manager. And I realized within a couple of weeks that I couldn't market my way out of a paper bag. That their level of knowledge was so superior, their expertise was so superior to mine that it wasn't in the same league. It'd be like putting a 10-year-old on a professional baseball field. Yeah, they both play baseball, but it's a whole different game. So that was a major realization to me. That was something that I had overlooked. I had delegated other things. that I knew I needed people that were better at it or more experienced or had a better psychological tilt toward handling. But I hadn't done that with marketing and that kept us from being a lot bigger than we could have otherwise have been at this point. That was a mistake.

That's so interesting. Yeah. So interesting is that as an entrepreneur, we would think that we're best at marketing of all the disciplines that we might have. What are some of the things, Charles, that you knew young sort of marketing team have been doing then that's transformed getpayroll.com into the size business that it is today?

Well, from my point of view, Facebook is for sending, uh, pictures of the grandbaby to grandma. Okay. We actually get hundreds of leads from Facebook. We get leads from LinkedIn, TikTok. Instagram, YouTube. It's amazing. I don't understand social media. I don't believe in it. I think it's a farce, but that's me.

Okay?

I do not have a personal Facebook page. I think it's a waste of time. I can't believe that people are interested in what I eat or where I go or who I'm seeing. I mean, you know, but it works and they're in tune with that in a way I'm not. And so it's very successful. Michael, who's my videographer, does wonderful videos. We have our own YouTube channel. We do serious ones. We do some that aren't so serious. We did one that was both. We did a, I don't know if FUTA is the Federal Unemployment Tax Act. Okay. But it also refers to a type of Japanese pornography.

So you got me on both of those counts, Charles. I'm glad to say I didn't know either of those. If I did, I would be—

Well, I didn't know, I didn't know the second one until we started getting comments on the video.

I'd be pleading the Fifth Amendment if I knew about that, I think.

Yeah. So it's a whole brave new world and it's a lot of fun. I don't understand a lot of it, but I have great people who do. And Michael produces a lot of fun videos, Halloween videos. We did a Star Wars parody. We did a 2001: A Space Odyssey parody. We do a Godfather parody. We do a lot of fun things as well as serious educational videos and webinars for clients, potential clients. The FUTA one was a serious video. So we're doing a lot of things that I never envisioned, but they do and they're effective because Most of my clients aren't my age. They're younger than I am and they live in a different world. So we need to be in that world. And I need people who are smart, experienced, and knowledgeable in that world. So I hire them. And like I said to you before, an entrepreneur doesn't need to be the smartest person in the room. He needs to hire the smartest person in the room. So you need to delegate things that other people can do better than you. Now there's going to be some core things probably that you do best and you need to keep those. When it comes to dealing with tax court and the IRS on complex problems, that's my job. I'm an expert at that. But other than that, my job is to make my employees' life as easy and efficient as possible. The more they can take care of my clients, their clients, our clients, The more they can keep them happy, the more work they can do, the more efficient they are, the more we can grow with the same salaries, which are very competitive. We don't try and underpay our employees. That's always a mistake. So we work very hard at being the CEO whose job is— the job of the CEO is to make the business better, not to do the work.

I love that. And I love the way that you're also bringing humor And the team bring humor into what people may not have considered to be humorous, actually payroll probably doesn't immediately lend itself to, you know, to space odysseys and, or Japanese anime. Um, but great you're doing that now, but you've also got another way that, um, you've got all of these customers. How are you inviting them to, if you like, become ambassadors and evangelists for your business, for getpayroll.com, Charles?

We have a referral program for our clients and for anyone, actually. If they send us a client or a potential client that becomes a client, we pay them a percentage of the revenue. And we pay them that on a residual basis. For as long as that referral is a client, they get paid whether they still deal with the person or not. We just treat that as a marketing expense. So we're paying out thousands of dollars a month in referral fees, which then generates tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue. So yeah. Okay. To me it's cheap. Yeah.

A referral program is a fantastic way, just from a practical point of view. Do you have a CRM of some kind that tags the referral to the customer?

Just from an admin point of view, sometimes that's the hardest practical So actually we give them a particular site to go to and they have their own page. And if they put in the referral and that's not in our system, that's tagged for them forever. And in our business, we have an old saying, it's never no, it's just not today. Because we get clients that come back to us that we've talked to that come back years later, referrals. They come back years later and sign up. We had one, I think it's the longest one. A gentleman called me one day. I'd done work for his father 14 years earlier. And he said to me, Charles, do you still do payroll? And I said, absolutely. And we have now picked up 5 large clients from him because we dealt with his father 14 years in between. I mean, it was incredible. But he's a CPA. And he's brought us 5 of his large clients because he didn't want to do payroll anymore. So we love it.

Yeah, the real value of a reputation. And absolutely. You, so you've, you've sort of alluded to the use of channels, right? The existing customers. What about other channels? Because in your business, I'm sure there are other people that deal with clients. You've referred to the chap who came in whose father you dealt with. What other channels have you used? And how have you got them other agents and so on? Do you want to share with us about that?

We do. We're constantly talking to people. We're trying to set up referral partners. Frankly, the agent for Liberty National was in who sells supplemental insurance to my employees, and we talked to them. And so we're now setting up a joint marketing to market them to our clients and us to their clients. And at the same point, I'm now going after every Liberty national agent in the country. You dealt with one insurance company and we have a number of their agents. So I had my marketing manager went to Fiverr and for $50, he scraped every agent for that company in the US. That's about 12,000 of them. And we put them onto our email marketing system and we've picked up a dozen clients already in the last 3 or 4 months from that. And it was a $50 investment. That's the best $50 I ever spent in my life. Okay. It's bringing us in hundreds of times that in revenue every year.

Wow, indeed. So they're announcing it from a compliance point of view. They just went out and did a sort of a search for those agencies. Details are publicly available, I'm assuming, Charles, there's no sort of compliance issue.

Absolutely. There's nothing nefarious, nothing illegal. He went onto the web and found these people and assembled a list for us. He lives in Pakistan and for $50, he did the effort and we got 12,000 emails. All we could have got them ourselves, but he's got a system to do it. And $50 to him was a lot more than $50 to me or you. So it was a great deal and we've used him for several other things since. And we're building email lists. I believe in email marketing. So it works. Again, in our business, it's never no, it's just not today. Who knows? Once we start talking to these people, we keep talking to them. We send them weekly emails, updates, information, fun things, copies of videos, whatever. So we're on their desk. And as I tell people, if we have 5 million emails, maybe 1 out of 100,000 people is interested in changing payroll today. That's 50 leads. Okay. I'll take them. 50 leads a day. So it's just a matter of talking to that 5 million people to find that 50 that are interested today.

Yeah. So Charles Reed over there in the Lone Star State in Dallas, you say sales is a numbers game. And in your case, it's a numbers game about numbers, isn't it? So that's fantastic. Is there one thing, Charles, that you can say hasn't worked for getpayroll.com without embarrassing yourself in any way?

Oh, I don't mind being embarrassed. I was, hell, at my age, I don't care anymore. Pay-per-click does not work for us. We've tried it at least 3 times. It's been an abject failure every time. People keep wanting us to do pay-per-click campaigns and they don't work. We did it. We waited a few years, we restructured it and tried it again. It didn't work. We waited a few years, we restructured it and tried it again with some expert advice, and it didn't work. It may work for some businesses. It didn't work for ours. And this is one thing with hiring a professional marketing manager. He comes up with all kinds of things, some of which I think are not going to work, but we'll try them because he's passionate about it. And that's his business. That's his expertise. Some work, some don't. Some of the things I suggest, he goes, some work, some don't. So you try new things and then the things that work, you pound on them and expand them. The things that don't work, you go, okay, we may try it one more time. And if it still doesn't work, well, fine. We'll just put that on the shelf and try something else. You never know what's going to work in your particular field and industry.

That's really good. And you've been willing and committed to giving these young people, um, their mandate and to follow and support them. That's really empowering for them as well. I'm sure they appreciate that. Charles, my final question is always what really works for the fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs like me sitting here with your many years, decades of experience. What would you say really sort of moves the needle when it comes to getting noticed and building the kind of brand loyalty that you've plainly built for getpayroll.com?

It comes down to one thing as far as I'm concerned. There's no traffic jam on the extra mile. Go the extra mile for your clients. Go the extra mile for your employees. Your competitors won't do that. For the most part, you'll be by yourself out there and it builds loyalty. Both with your employees and your clients. And as I said to you earlier, I'd much rather have loyal clients because you can screw up with a loyal client and they're not going to go away. You can piss off a happy client and they'll become unhappy and leave. Loyal clients won't. So you want to build loyalty, not happiness.

Charles, and I can see why people are loyal to you over there in America building this amazing business. If you want to find out more about You, Charles Reed, how can they do that?

We're all over the web at getpayroll.com.

It's a fabulous URL. Charles, thank you so much for joining me and my show, How I Noticed Entrepreneurs, today on the show. Thank you.

Jim, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

So you've been listening to Charles Reed with me here in the UK. Views on how he's managed to build the getpayroll.com business up to a billion-dollar revenue business, which is just amazing. So I'm sure that you found this as useful as I have. So please share this with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. And if you've enjoyed it, please also review and rate it on your favorite player. This is one of many conversations that I've recorded and then tabulated and put into the book, which is now available on Amazon and also in bookstores. And so encourage you to check that out too. And until we meet again, I just do encourage you to Keep on communicating. Thanks for listening.