Biggest Mistakes and Lessons Learned in 2023 + A Dead Simple Leadership Hack

Welcome back to the first episode of Payrollin' in 2024. I'm so excited to join you again after a little hiatus. Today I'm going to walk through some of my biggest lessons and mistakes made in 2023. And man, there were a lot. So it was hard to choose from, but I've got some great nuggets for you there. Going to update you on what's new at Guru. And I've got a nice little leadership nugget tucked away for the end of this conversation that I literally just stole from one of our peers yesterday that I'm excited to implement with my team and my daily rhythm. So you're not going to want to miss that. Thanks so much for joining me. Welcome to Payrollin'. All right, everybody, thanks for joining me again. This is Matt Vadie. I'm your host. I'm delighted to welcome you to 2024. I'm not a big resolutions guy. I definitely use the time early in the year to revisit what my goals are, to look at my progress on them. I'm a vision guy, so I, I definitely, you know, when we come to one of my biggest mistakes of 2023, you're going to see how some of these things tend to, to be in misalignment at times if we're not careful. But, you know, I— my book that I would like to recommend today is one that I reread every year. I'm 5 chapters into it. We're reading it as an internal book club. It's called The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. So It's a big book. I think it's 52 chapters, something like that, 300-400 pages. But it is awesome. It has basically all the— I don't want to call it self-help, but all the kind of self-help stuff in one book. It's written by the same guy who wrote Chicken Soup for the XYZ Soul. But, you know, it's got how to create a vision, how to find your purpose, how to, you know, get what you want out of your life and just practical, tactical ways to do that. I reread it every year. It really helps to keep me centered and I go back and I've got these, you know, this list of 30 things I want to do before I die, this list of the things that I want to be, the lessons I want to pass on to my kids. My vision is clear. I have a vision board for what I want personally, professionally, financially. Spiritually, all the stuff. So it touches on your entire life. And I love it because it just keeps me balanced. I read, you know, I'm a little woo-woo with this stuff. Some of y'all might not believe in this kind of thing, but I read my daily affirmation where I talk about who I am, what I'm about, and it helps me just to get inspired. I read it on the way into work in the morning, and it just helps to inspire me to create positive energy throughout the day, even when I don't feel like it, which is Very topical because we're sitting here, it's January 17th. We're not quite out of the woods yet with year-end. And so it's been a slog. You know, we're talking about for us, our year-end basically started back in November. It's going to run through the middle of February. And, you know, I'm sure that's the same for most of you, but it's just, it's been a particularly rough one. We rolled out the PEO starting last year, 2022 through 2023. You know, 2022, not a lot of growth on it. We were just trying to find our footing. 2023, you know, substantial growth considering the size of it. And so it has been getting into all the new states, getting licensed, getting all of the tax stuff set up, and now, you know, managing our first big year-end on it. It has been a rather cumbersome process and the team has been amazing. They've been troopers, they've been warriors, but you You know, like all of us, we get tired after, you know, again, we're going on a couple months of stressful work. So I've gotta have those daily reminders of who I am, what I'm about. I'm a positive individual that's trying to spread positivity, that's trying to create an impact on those around me with that energy and allowing them to realize their own potential through my doing that in front of them and setting a good example. And so great book, can't recommend it enough, but it's definitely very topical as we look at some of these biggest mistakes and lessons learned. In 2023. So I'm just going to dive right into it. One of the first ones, kind of one of my mantras running out of 2023, is red flags are red flags. I just can't tell you how many times last year I got sucked into the halo effect of whether it be a candidate who we hire who had some things that just really shined and made me, you know, think they were going to be a great fit for our team. And I ignored some red flags along the way. Or whether it be a vendor, whether it be a big decision. We just had a lot of those things where looking back, even when we were very diligent, followed our decision-making process, and we have one for hiring, we have a multiple-step phase process there that's pretty diligent. We've added a couple things to that to account for some of these areas where we missed. When it comes to vendor selection, you know, we follow EOS. I know a lot of you listening, Entrepreneurial Operating System. We do the issue solving track, which helps us to go through, make better decisions. We did that with many decisions, but still just kind of missed on a few rather large things. And, you know, that was the thing in 2023. I was telling a friend the other day is the mistakes were, you know, the more you grow, the more zeros you add to the end of your mistakes. And sometimes that can be, I mean, sometimes, listen, it can be catastrophic. It can kill your business. It can kill your personal financials, whatever it might be. But Oftentimes it's just bigger, more painful lessons learned. And I'll never forget that first time, you know, we built an app, man, back in 2019, 2018, 2000, ah, no, it was probably more like 2017, 2018. And so we've known from the start we were going to build our own software. It's just been a matter of figuring out which lane to build in, how to build it, where's the missing piece? You know, naively I thought when we started this, I would come on, use some other white label payroll software, like almost all of us do, and then figure out what everybody else is missing. What does Gusto not know that I can figure out with my 100 clients in Columbia, South Carolina? And then I quickly realized like, hey, you know, the reality is bureaus just need easy-to-use software that is, you know, it suits the 80%, not the 20% of fringe cases. I know most of you hand up, when you work with your vendor, you start to realize like, oh, hey, this thing can split an atom. It can handle every single fringe case under the sun in every jurisdiction in America. And then it gets feature bloat, then it gets hard to use, then it gets cumbersome. So we just didn't want to do that to our clients. And that was it. But anyhow, I digress. So we built a— we started, we realized that one of the keys was employee onboarding. And so I had built an employee onboarding app. Back then, again, 2017-ish, probably even before we opened in 2014, 10-year anniversary this year. Need to get a little more energy going around that. I haven't quite got there yet, but, um, so we had built this app that at the time it was me and another guy in customer support. And every time something went wrong, we didn't know what to do. We had to try to wait for the developers to fix it. We had to try to navigate the employee who couldn't onboard right there in the moment. So all of a sudden our service calls spike and we've got an app that's not working as effectively as we had hoped. And eventually we had to make the decision to pull the plug on it. Now, thankfully it was kind of a lightweight app. I'd had some offshore developers build. I think I put about $15,000 all into it. I just had to pull, I mean, that thing is dead. That's a $15,000 project I just let die and the code is just sitting in wasteland in our hosting platform. You know, that was one of the first times I had to really learn that, you know, you can't dwell on these mistakes. You can't dwell on those, you know, no matter how many zeros are at the end, unless it's a death blow, you can't dwell on it. You've got to just find a way to move past it, learn from it. And so that's why I do this recall at year end is just to make sure that I'm not consistently making the same mistakes. And some of these mistakes are things that I should know better and we should have done. But again, when you look at the red flags, the red flags, the halo effect piece, We had gone through the paces. We thought we had made diligent decisions, but then looking back, realize like, man, and again, hindsight's 20/20, but we had some pretty big red flags in some of these situations that we should have ignored. So I'm going into this year with that red flags are red flags. If I'm going to hire a candidate and they're making grammatical spelling errors, you know, not, not writing well, which as a quick aside, If I could interview an employee, and for those of you out there who are listening that maybe are not owners or leaders, and even leaders, I would interview them purely off of writing if I could. Email exchange, chat exchange. Clear writing is clear thinking. And so people who can write and articulate ideas well, be thoughtful, not write walls of text that don't have a point. They can drive home points succinctly, tell stories, and really just converse in a very natural way in the written form, tend to be great thinkers to me. I am, I can unequivocally say that people that I know that write well have almost always been great hires. And so anyways, 2023, red flags are red flags. I'm going to stop with the halo effect. I'm going to look at some of those things that are red flags a little bit deeper and make sure that I'm being conscious of that, not only in the hiring process, but throughout the vendor vetting process, the, you know, decision-making process, and just make sure we're being a little bit more thorough in that respect. So that was one of my first biggest mistakes. And this next mistake pains me to even say. Yeah, it really does. So I think we prioritize sales a little bit more than customer success in 2023. And so the— we had taken on a little bit of outside money heading into 2023. Obviously on a spreadsheet, you've got to show growth. You've got to show what the organization's going to do. It's got to be up and to the right nonstop. The only way to do that is with salespeople. It becomes a bit of a chicken and egg issue where how many additional CS people can I hire when I've got, you know, this number of salespeople out there that are still in their 3 to 6 month ramp time and aren't selling anything yet. And, you know, I think as much as it created some headaches on the support side of, you know, once those reps finally did start clicking and deals started coming in and we, you know, implementation started flowing through. And like I said, the PEO is still a little bit new and we made some updates to that, which caused a little bit of chaos. I think the biggest thing was it sent the wrong message to the team. No matter how many different ways I tried to articulate the plan, where we were going with it. It just, I never had buy-in from the CS team. And so looking back, I think that, you know, making sure to continuously communicate that and make sure that they understand that, you know, our customer success, our ability to be responsive, deliver an experience, you know, provide the tools and resources that our clients need is the number one priority. You know, even though I sort of live by the mantra of, you know, nothing happens until somebody sells something, which is very true. There's just, you know, there's no business done without sales. And it's hard to sometimes educate people on, hey, look, salespeople out there selling is great for you. It means raises. It means more customers. It means more opportunities for you to get promotions. It's not, you know, the more static we are, sort of a referral-based founder-led sales organization, the less opportunity it creates for you. And if you don't want opportunities, this probably is not the place for you. But it's still, you know, I think that the sales-first focus rubbed some people the wrong way and ultimately ended up in some poor experiences for some of our customers, which we've dealt with the fallout of that and/or just having to go back and fix a lot of things. And so that was a big takeaway from last year. And, you know, over the last 60 days particularly, I've sort of rolled up my sleeves, got back in customer success. I mean, they're answering tickets. I'm helping out the team. I'm kind of putting some elbow grease behind it. It's a balance of obviously you don't want to get too far down in the weeds as a business owner. But I heard something that changed my perspective on this a great deal a couple of weeks ago, and that's that the executives at Salesforce spend 30% of their time, are expected to spend at least 30% of their time talking to customers. And so what better way to talk to your customers than to pitch in and help your team? Than to have those, you know, quarterly conversations with the customers and make sure that they are happy and what can you do to help solve more issues. I think for some of us, and I know, you know, I'll admit this out loud, I know some of you probably feel the same way, is that whenever I know if I'm going to sit down and have that hour-long conversation with a customer, I know it's going to create hours more of work that they're going to say, hey, what if we could do this? What if we could do that? What if we could do that? So there's a little bit of hesitance sometimes depending on the level of service somebody's on to sit down and have those., which is unfair to the customer, but it's reality. And so I don't come on this podcast to lie. I come on here to talk to you guys real for those of us that are in the payroll industry and feel this burn every day. But I've worked past that. We found new ways to make sure that we're providing our, you know, keeping CS as the focus of what we do. As you know, as we've mentioned 100 times on this podcast before, it's the only way we can differentiate. I can't beat ADP, I can't beat TriNet, I can't beat Gusto on anything other than responsiveness, access to my team, access to us, access to me. And so, you know, that was a huge miss for me in 2023 of just how I prioritize that. And so moving forward, we've already course-corrected on that. I'm spending a lot more of my time customer-facing and getting back to it. And I love it because our clients are amazing. We just have so many, you know, if you're in this industry, one of the coolest things and why I've loved this industry, I've been in it since 2008 is because of the fact that I get to talk to such a diverse group of people with such a diverse group of businesses and goals and where they're at. And so it has been reinvigorating to get back into the daily conversations with entrepreneurs, even if sometimes that's— yesterday I think I closed 4 password reset tickets just to get them off somebody's plate. Everybody's— it's chaos right now, right? We're wrapping up January. Yesterday we were coming in off a holiday on Tuesday. Everybody's inbox was slammed. So I just jumped in there and saw how I could help them out. So, all right. So that's a mistake we will never make again. Um, and a blip on the radar, but next up was culture won't take care of itself. And again, this is one I know, and I think it's a direct correlation to that. I think we had our first ever sort of split between a CS team and a sales team and an implementation team and, and kind of the some of the things that can come from that of just like a, you know, oh, people kind of not being excited when a new client comes in, more of like a, oh crap, here we go again, here's another customer. And so that was tough and trying to again be very hands-on with the team, but also allow the leaders to do their jobs and be hands-on with their team. Most of my reports, direct reports are the leadership team.. And so it, it can be challenging for me. This is a new phase of our company to know where to dive in and be more hands-on daily with the teammates. And, and I think that when I get back to, you know, I talked about the, the leadership lesson that I'm gonna hit on the back end of this, this is the perfect simple summation of what I've learned last year. And so I'm excited to share that. And thank you, Sean Shanks, uh, for, for sharing that with me yesterday. And, and Y'all, let me just hit that pause right there and tell you how impactful and important it is to have conversations regularly, at least monthly, with others in this world. You know, I've had a couple of conversations this week with people in the industry, and then I'm blessed enough to serve on the board of the Independent Payroll Providers Association, the IPPA. If you're not a member, why? Don't be foolish. Go join the IPPA. Single greatest thing we've done for our payroll bureau. But having those conversations and understanding what's top of mind for other people is really, really important. And what you'll find is that, you know, A, there are things out there you didn't even know were— should be on your radar, which can be frightening in and of itself. But, you know, you don't want to get behind. But B, it's nice to know, like, how are you handling this? Oh, how are you keeping culture good during year-end? What are you guys doing to keep morale up? That's been a conversation I've had multiple times over the last 3 months, just trying to do best by my team, trying to make sure that we can create a mindset around here of, you know, hey, life is 10% what happens, 90% how you react. And, you know, customer success is the perfect embodiment of that, because if you come in and let what's inbound dictate your attitude for the day, then you're going to have a rough day because there's not a lot of people reaching out just to slap high fives on the customer success side. They got real issues, they got real things they need done, and they don't always take 5 minutes. So, all right, um, you know, next big thing I will say is— well, and kind of the dovetail on that, I guess I missed a bullet here— is, is also, you know, a couple of bad apples can really spoil the bunch. Old cliché, but man, we had some, some teammates this year that were just intentionally rowing in the wrong direction. And as soon as that was recognized, it, it became very obvious that we needed to move on and find new ways to move forward. And it was shocking, the impact that a couple of people can have on the culture when they are just really spending a decent portion of their day undermining the leadership team, complaining about the work. It is shocking. And the amount of fresh air that's breathed into the room, even when people have to pick up some of their work, it's funny how much their mentality changes. And that again comes back to the the culture not taking care of itself, of being able to recognize those things by having those daily conversations. And this year, for better or worse, we had more sort of daily, weekly conversations with our team. Some of those were not positive, some of those were incredibly positive and everything in between. But yeah, don't— it is amazing what happens when you remove some people from your organization that are just trying to actively destroy what you are trying to build, which is— they don't realize they're doing that when they're, they're just gossiping and they're, uh, you know, talking about people. But man, it is crazy how much of a relief it is. And they think everybody's with them is the funny thing, is, you know, misery loves company. People will always kind of join in with them, but you'll realize quickly thereafter that, you know, the other people aren't with them. They're just trying to be polite and they're just trying, you know, again, like, ah, it's fun to complain as a group. So A couple bad apples can spoil the bunch and they'll definitely impact your culture in a drastic way. Finally, the last biggest lesson I learned of 2023 was I need to focus more on the 6 inches in front of my face. And so what that means is, you know, we got hung up again. You take on a little bit of money, you've got big goals for your bureau, you've got big goals for your life that you tend to get big picture focused, which is great and an awesome skill that not most, or most people don't have, is a clear vision for what they want from their life, their company, their relationships, their, their service, their spirituality. Uh, I'm, I'm blessed to have those things and, and to be focused on those things. But at the same time, when you're living in a spreadsheet, when you're looking at it month to month, when you're not getting out there with your team, when you're not rolling up your sleeves, when you're not embodying the type of things that you should be doing. There's a balance there, and I haven't found it yet as far as big picture focus and sort of nitty-gritty weeds focus. But planning has its place. And last year I spent too much time planning, strategizing, big picture focusing instead of just really focusing on the stuff that was 6 inches in front of my face and making sure that we were executing on a high level on a daily basis. And ultimately mastering the basics, which I think is, you know, the most paramount thing in any business is that, you know, when I interviewed people and wrote my book, one of the, one of the things that was said a couple different ways, but it was basically said the same thing over and over in respect to organizational culture. And that was kind of, you have to be at least a B, a grade of a B across the board. So if it's performance management, you've got to get at least B. If it's hiring, you've got to get at least a B. If it's onboarding, you've got to get at least a B. If it's, you know, on and on and on all those different aspects, you don't have to be straight A's. You might have a C and an A, but you've got to get at least B's on average across the board or else you will fail. And I think that was one of the areas this past year is, you know, I just, I lacked in some areas substantially and as a leader, and I think it impacted our team and our business. And so that's areas where I'm trying to grow. Um, you know, 6 inches in front of my face is the mantra for 2024. Uh, and one of the things I, where I went to land that plane at the beginning about, you know, not doing, not doing resolutions necessarily is that I do have a word of the year and the word of the year is adventure. And so I want to come back to that because I think as it relates to adventure here, it is one of the things I don't want to lose in the spirit of all this is the mindset that we're going to try new things when it makes sense. I don't think we need anything new right now. We're about all full with the PEO, ASO, changing platforms, migrating everybody to our software now. We got enough going on. I don't need any more adventure in work, but just more adventure outside of work. Started the year off with a polar plunge on January 1st. Had a bunch of guys and gals over to the house and even some kids jumped in. And I know what you're saying, Matt, don't you live in South Carolina? How could it be polar? Well, listen, dude, the pool was 45 degrees. That's cold no matter how you split it. A typical cold plunge is 50 to 60 degrees. So I don't want to hear it from you Northeasterners and my friends in the Midwest and everywhere else that it wasn't cold because it was cold. And it's 22 degrees out here right now. And I'm thinking about moving further south because I'm tired of this. I moved to South Carolina to be sweating year round, not to have 22-degree days. I'm about to be the youngest snowbird down in Florida in the next couple years. Anyhow, all right, so big lessons learned, uh, halo effect, you know, red flags are red flags. Don't let one thing overcome, uh, any negative things that you see and, and really take your eye off what's in front of you. Don't prioritize, you know, there's a delicate balance of prioritizing sales and the customer success behind that and the product and itself. The culture's not going to take care of itself. A couple bad apples will spoil the bunch. And you really have to be, you know, one of the things is I didn't even, going back to that point, like I didn't even realize what was happening. It took me a while to unwrap and understand like, oh crap, these people are literally talking junk on half of our team and trying to get everybody else, the other half on board with that junk they're talking. And so he's just, man, you got to be careful. And focusing on that 6 inches in front of your face and realizing while planning has its place and while the big picture is critical, you've got to execute on a daily basis. And, you know, there are fires burning today. I think that's where I got tripped up is that, you know, I remember reading this book by Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling, and he said, you know, one of the hardest things about growth is letting fires burn. And, you know, so there were times where I was like, just understanding, hey, I've got to let some of these fires burn. I've got to get comfortable with that. And I think I just had too many going. And that was really ultimately the struggle that I had. So all in all, a great year. I mean, I don't want to put 2023 was a banner year for us as a company, you know, substantial growth. We saw some tremendous new teammates join our team. We saw, you know, we had to let some people go. We've had everything in between. It's been an awesome year. And I'm so excited about where we're going and the people we have in place right now. But I think it's important to do this, this sort of refresh of, all right, what were these big mistakes I made last year? And even I have this great platform to, to come out here and talk to you about them and just make sure I don't do them again. And especially at that level of scale, because as the zeros add up, man, the zeros add up. And I'm going to finish it up here with a little bit of a leadership lesson. I've been trying to do a quote of the quote of the episode, quote of the week, quote of the whenever the heck I get around to publishing. But I got another episode coming out next week. We're going to be doing an IPPA Spring Summit preview. So I know you're going to be excited about that, man. This— we just have a killer, killer lineup for this year's Spring Summit. If you have not gone out and checked it out, IPPA.net. If you don't know what it is, go check it out. It's an association for payroll for bureau owners and specialists. And I, again, can't say enough good things about it. But I was talking to Mr. Sean Shanks yesterday. We were talking about some of the programming for that spring summit. And I was just talking about the culture and how things go at year-end. And, you know, he told me a simple piece of leadership wisdom that he got. I don't remember when he said a few years back or so, but every day he says good morning to everyone on his team. He stops what he's doing, he goes and says good morning to them. And when he leaves for the day, he goes through and says goodbye to everyone on his team. Sounds like a very simple thing to do, but I can tell you I already see the value without even having executed on it for one day. It's just such an obvious, silly thing that to not be doing, especially for those of us that don't have 50, 100, 250 employees to go around and say goodbye to. And even if you do try to go around and say goodbye to as many as you can, You know, sometimes I have weird energy around this because I work 8 to 4. So I've been here, you know, it's 9 a.m. right now. I'm seeing people start to trickle into our office. I've been here for over an hour. And, you know, when I leave, I leave earlier than everybody else. I've got young kids, they're 10 and 12 years old. I leave between 4 and 4:30 every day. I got to start going, running kids around to practice or picking them up from church and doing whatever. And so sometimes I'll be honest, I'm a little bit like, I hate to say goodbye to people when I'm leaving before them. It just feels— I don't— as somebody who's, you know, worked his tail off to get where he is, continues to work my tail off, you know, evenings, weekends, all the stuff it takes to make the business run, I just feel this guilt of leaving before people. I like to be first man in, last man out kind of guy. So I got to get over it and just understand that that doesn't really matter. It's a personal connection that matters. And so I'm grateful, Sean, for that small nugget of advice and always grateful for our conversations because you are a wonderful human and I'm grateful to have you in my network and hopefully call you a friend one day. I know we haven't had maybe enough conversations for you to call me that, but a little love letter to a broski there. That's it for today. I appreciate you guys coming by and listening. Please make sure— it's been so long since I recorded, I almost forgot. I almost forgot the most important part. I got to put this at the beginning. It's the gentleman's agreement and the ladies understanding. If you found any value in this and if you made it this far especially, please, please do me a favor. Follow the LinkedIn Payrollin page and subscribe to our YouTube channel. It will collectively will take you 30 seconds. Go on each one and just search Payrollin and we'll pop right up. Hit that subscribe, like button, whatever you got to do. But please, it helps us to create more of this awesome content. It definitely encourages me. The more of you I talk to, I'm getting excited to see everybody at IPPA again. Come up with some new ideas and topics and things to talk through. But man, it's just an honor and a delight to, to walk alongside all of you, and I appreciate you. Have an awesome day.