Three Keys to Expand Your Payroll Business

Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to today's webinar presentation regarding the payroll relief and Guru HR integration, 3 keys to expand your payroll business with HR tech and services. I wanted to introduce myself. My name is Tom Provine. I'm a marketing coordinator with Accountants World. I will be emceeing and hosting today's webinar along with Matt Vadie. We'll get to him in just a second. I just wanted to let everybody know that at Accountants World, we are committed to not compete with any of your accounting and payroll firms. That's why we bring in our partners like Guru that can help Payroll Relief customers like yourself add more related services that can help you better serve your existing clients. It may even get you new clients that are looking for additional services and benefits. So we're doing this just for you guys. We want to make sure that you have the best information out there on how you can best utilize payroll relief. Our speaker today will be Matt Vadie. He is the CEO of Guru, and I'd like to welcome him on right now. Matt, how are you today? How is everything down in South Carolina?

Uh, sunny and beautiful. Thank you so much for having me, Tom. I appreciate it. Absolutely. And I'm going to go ahead and get started. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you to Payroll Relief. Thank you to Tom and the rest of the team up there. And thank you to those of you on the line for spending a few minutes out of your day with me today. We're going to share a little bit about our story, talk about some of the lessons learned in offering HR software and services, and really share where Guru may or may not fit into your stack going forward as you look at what you're going to do in bringing HR services to market and technology. But Back in 2014, I started my own payroll and HR outsourcing company, ERG Payroll and HR, headquartered down here in Columbia, South Carolina. And much like everybody else listening in on this call, every single day we're going out and fighting the good fight, if you will, against the titans of our industry— the ADPs, the Paychex, the Gustos, the Zenefits. And the great news is that we are able to win that battle a lot, and much like most of you are, for the simple reason that many small businesses, a percentage of small businesses, would prefer to work with a local provider. And so we will always have that benefit of being the local provider. You know, the challenge is that you still have to have great software to be able to meet the needs of your clients and compete. And when we started, we started with payroll relief, um, back back in 2014, but then after a while, we started realizing that we needed some HR services. We were seeing the demand from our clients, and it was part of our vision as well, is that we wanted to offer a more comprehensive HR solution. And so after a couple years with Payroll Relief, we left and started using some other tools. We used another enterprise software system that touted its fully integrated solution, which were all of these things you see here on the screen. Of which we shortly realized after getting started that these things weren't quite as integrated as we had hoped for. And, you know, it kind of starts here, and I've had conversations with some of the folks on the line, I'm sure. I don't see the guest list, but, and I'll have conversations with some of you when we get off of here, I'm sure, as well. But there's a lot of things that your clients are gonna ask for, or one of your clients might ask for, or two or three or four of your clients might ask for. And when you start to say yes too much, this is kind of where you end up, and this is where we were. We had one system for applicant tracking that was integrated— I'm using air quotes right now, wish the camera was on— with the employee onboarding system via an acquisition. And then the onboarding system had an integration with the background check system, and then the onboarding system also had an integration with the payroll system. Which had an integration with the timekeeping system, which that timekeeping system acquired a scheduling company and they had an integration there. I'm still using air quotes every time I'm hitting one of these, uh, with, with this system. And then the core HR system was something that the payroll company acquired as well. So now if you're counting code bases here, every one of these is a different code base, even for the ones that were under one roof. So we had a core HR system a benefits administration system. And we had clients at this point, so this is back in, uh, 2016-17 timeframe where I remember one client, their managers had 6 to 8 different usernames and passwords because they were having multiple for some of these, one for their employee, one for their management. And all these different systems, even though they were integrated, uh, required so many different logins and really created not only a terrible experience for our clients, but also for us as an agency And it all came to a head. We lost our biggest customer. We had a customer that was using pretty much everything on here. We lost them. We lost several of our other customers over the course of a quarter, and our employees were just getting so frustrated. I mean, think about the call comes in from an employee or from one of our clients and they say, "Hey, I'm having trouble logging in." Well, it might take you 5 minutes to figure out which system they're having trouble logging into, let alone actually help solve their issue. So I say all that to say, don't be scared to say no. That's kind of the first key that we found when it came to HR was that we were saying yes to everything because we thought that just because a handful of our clients needed every piece of this, that we had to start offering it, when in reality we needed to start saying no and getting better at what we were doing. And some of you might go through this and go, you know what, I'm just going to say no to HR services altogether. Maybe I just want to offer payroll and accounting or whatever it has that I've been doing. And that's okay. You just have to stay true to what you're doing because you know, the grass isn't always greener. At the time when we went to roll this out, we were running less than 100 payrolls. And when we brought this back to Payroll Relief and started developing our own software, which is kind of how Guru started— so we transitioned from, from ERG, which still exists, which is our payroll and HR company, and started spinning up the Guru software— we were running less than 100 payrolls. And when we came back, we got rid of the equivalent of a full-time job's worth of administrative work just because of all the maintenance required to keep up with all these sort of legacy legacy systems that we had let folks get us too far off course with. So be conscious of the cost of these things. It's, it's not about capturing opportunity. Sometimes it can mean employee turnover, it can mean client turnover. But ultimately what we did when we said, okay, hey, we're going to make this big change and we're going to figure out what the right thing is for us and for our clients, we put all of our customers into a spreadsheet and on the top on the columns we put each of these different features and along with a couple more, we said, what are people actually using? What do they actually care about? And what we started to realize is very few people cared about applicant tracking. Very few people cared about benefits administration. One client out of 100 cared about scheduling. And so, you know, we started to say, what are the actual must-haves for our clients? And we realized that was pretty simple: payroll, employee onboarding, paperless employee onboarding, online HR to manage all their employees' files and go paperless, and timekeeping. And then everything else, especially in the market we serve, which is under 50 employees, was just kind of a nice to have. And so I'm going to walk you through today our relationship with Payroll Relief and, and where Guru has gone over the last few years. So we started developing Guru back in, uh, 2017, 2018, and started working with partners, uh, last year in 2019, just providing it to other firms like ours so that we could help you to grow and leverage some of the same things we've done. And With that, I'll share just a bit about me. If you want to learn about me, you can Google me. I have a pretty uncommon name, so I'm an easy guy to find. But I'm a family man. I'm very blessed. I have a beautiful wife and two amazing children. I live here in Columbia, South Carolina. I'm an HR nerd. I get really excited about helping folks find ways to leverage technology and expertise to create the type of workplace that people want to come back to every single day. And I, I I like to do that. I like to help other bureaus do that. I like to just kind of roll up my sleeves and get as involved as possible. And I will kind of give a quick plug to the Payroll and Podcast. If you just search that out or you go to our website under resources, we've been interviewing some of the most successful payroll bureau leaders around the country. And I have been learning a ton about how to grow a successful payroll and HR business from these folks and people with the fastest growing companies in America, best places to work, just millions and millions of dollars of sales. In payroll and HR represented there, and I've just learned a ton in every one of those episodes. So I highly suggest you check it out, and I've been hearing good things as well. I'm obviously biased because I'm involved, but, uh, so, so important to know, I'm going to talk a little bit on this webinar about Guru, which is the white label HR software that is available to you as a payroll relief partner. And I'm going to talk about it sometimes from the lens of ERG Payroll and HR because we are the biggest customer of Guru and we use it to serve our clients all over the country. So, yeah, and please connect with me on LinkedIn. I love to network with other folks that own bureaus and, and just kind of talk shop. So what are the 5 pains that we typically solve when it comes to an accounting firm or a payroll bureau coming to us, somebody that offers payroll and/or HR services? Really, the biggest thing right out of the gate is that they're, they're kind of losing deals to the competition. That could be because of lack of features. It could be because of lack of knowledge, just ability to perform and execute. A lot of the folks that come to work with us have an existing book of business that they're either doing payroll for or is it under their accounting arm, and they just realize they're missing out on revenue opportunities. People are asking them for HR software or for HR support. And we're going to talk mostly today about the HR software side. We have 3 buckets of our offerings. We have HR software, which is what we'll talk about because that's what everybody cares about, how it integrates integrate with Payroll Relief and how it's going to continue to integrate with Payroll Relief. But we also offer some HR support, and that would be directly for your clients. So it's people they can call and talk to when they have HR questions and develop their handbooks and all those fun things. And then we also offer a full-service digital marketing agency. So I'll try to draw some pretty clear delineation throughout the conversation so that I make sure that I'm clear on which bucket things are in when we talk about those services. So The third thing is the software piece, just operational inefficiency. I can't tell you how many calls I have in a week where people are just tired of dealing with these supposedly integrated pieces of software that, you know, require multiple logins, multiple administrative backends that are just almost impossible to navigate and actually figure out where things are set up while they're trying to cobble these code bases together, creating this bloated piece of a system from, you know, multiple multiple pieces of code and also just the operational inefficiency of CPAs who are, you know, have kind of become HR for some of their clients. I'm gonna give you guys a clap and a shout out for some of you that have stepped up and done HR work when you haven't even been getting compensated for it. I can't tell you how many people I talk to say, hey, we're getting new hire documents, they're scanning us over W-4s and I-9s, we're creating files online. Well, this system was actually built for you to do that and at a pretty low entry point from a cost perspective, you can actually just create a whole lot of operational efficiency for your firm, let alone for your clients. The knowledge, the HR know-how, we have a lot of conversations with people. Once again, clients are calling them, asking them HR questions. They don't really have that knowledge, but they want to be able to provide some support. And then, you know, a big challenge for all of us is making sure we're getting seen in the marketplace. And we're going to talk a little bit today about some of the differences between inbound and outbound marketing and how you can position yourself as an industry leader. So these are the main pains when somebody comes to us. If any of these resonate with you, Guru might be worth the conversation. If they don't, then probably not. So I want to take a look at one of the things we did in preparation for another webinar we did with Payroll Relief last year. We talk about growing through HR services is we, we kind of tore apart our client base and we said, okay, what's our average monthly recurring revenue by solution set. So our customers that were only using payroll with us, so just Payroll Relief only, they averaged about $189 a month in recurring revenue. Our customers that were using HR software as well, so that's Payroll Relief plus Guru, they started to average up closer to $487 a month. And our clients that we were adding Payroll Relief, Guru, and HR Support into the mix, well, that's where we started to really find, you know, some, some substantial growth in revenue opportunities. And, you know, we at our, at our bureau, we've created kind of a secret sauce around how we deliver that HR support model. And we're able to share some of that with some of our bureau folks as well. So, so for us, we look at this and say, hey, seems pretty obvious. There's a nice revenue opportunity over here on the right side of the paper. But the thing that I really want to point out is that they're actually easier deals to win because your competition is defaulting to the commoditized left side of the bracket over here, where when you come in with a $1,300 proposal, $200 proposal, well, there's got to be a good reason for that, right? There's got to be some additional value you're providing and something you're seeing, and you're not, you know, pitching this on every deal, obviously. But, but there are opportunities for this, and I think that as we walk through this, it's important to know, like, okay, hey, where can we capture some market share, um, and some things that we can do to better run our agency? So let's talk about the software side of it and what Guru is and what it can do and what it does with payroll relief. So our HR Software Guru is an online human resources information system, an HRIS. It is a lightweight HRIS that is not built for every single use case in every single municipality, in every single locality all around the country for every industry. We built this thing to serve customers predominantly with 50 or less employees. Quite frankly, it works a lot better in professional services and white-collar and gray-collar types of environments than blue-collar types of environments. And You know, it does some core things really, really well, but what it will not ever be is all things to all people. We're trying to make sure that we stay, you know, one of the things again when you start to look at some of these more convoluted softwares is that they have buttons on top of buttons on top of buttons and setup on top of setup on top of setup. You know, we can get clients set up pretty quickly, you know, in less than an hour typically, get them up and rolling and ready to go, and they have a solution that meets their needs. So we've got the online HR, the timekeeping, and the employee paperless employee onboarding. And we're working on integrating that with Payroll Relief as tightly as we can via their API that they've made available to us. And so today, that is a one-way from Guru to Payroll Relief with our all new hires that get onboarded through Guru can be pumped directly over into Payroll Relief with the click of a button. We also have import/export every file we've ever made inside of Guru, whether it be import or export, is completely formatted to Payroll Relief. If there is nothing else you walk away from this conversation with, it's understand that we're very selfish in that we, we only work with Payroll Relief for payroll. And so we're not building our integrations with 16 other companies. We're not worried about how it functions with, you know, all these other different payroll providers. We just wanted to make it as tight as humanly possible with Payroll Relief over the coming year, and that's our number one focus. And so that's one thing that you'll continue to see in our— while our roadmap, we're not going to, you know, offer 4 million different things on our roadmap. What we are going to offer is tight integration that's going to be continually improved. So let's take a look at the actual application itself here. So when I log in, probably the most, uh, sort of highly utilized feature in the system, if you will, outside of the general just HRIS itself, just document management and all that, is, is the onboarding. So onboarding is very robust from the perspective that it can handle a lot of use cases. It's got paperless W-4, paperless I-9. All the documents flow directly into an employee's file as soon as they're completed. There you get rid of all this back and forth with the employer and the employee and possibly your firm. And we've even got some of these really cool features, like you can add these custom task lists and even drag and drop documents where you can upload any PDF and drag and drop, uh, signature fields onto it like DocuSign. But if you look at this screen of mine right here, I love this because I've, I can create a task, I can create a specific list, and I can have as many lists as I want, make a task. Hey, I've got to upload that certification that's assigned to the new hire. It's due 3 days after hire date, or I could have it assigned to the manager, or I could have it assigned to a specific person. I can change when it's due. So this gets to be about more than just like, hey, let's get new hire documents documentation done, it becomes about real onboarding, which is about creating an experience for an employee that is going to be memorable and is going to help to assimilate them into the team and is going to help to engage them and retain them within the organization. And that's where, you know, when you start to add HR support on top of this software, you know, if you do that internally or lean on some folks for help like ourselves, then you can really create more of a holistic vantage point for your clients where they're not only just getting some of the automation, but they're also getting really great advice on how to leverage the automation and how to create an amazing place to work as a result. So onboarding, and onboarding of course is the piece that's sort of the, the cornerstone of the integration today. And right on the dashboard, when you flip the integration on, we simply pull the API key out of Payroll Relief, put it into Guru, and when you click sync users, that pops up a little box that you can check which users you want to send over to Payroll Relief. And it sends them over to payroll relief. And I can tell you guys, I am a— I'm not only the HairClub president, I'm also a client. So I do our own internal payroll, and when I add a new employee like I did, uh, 2 weeks ago, and I had to put them into payroll relief when payroll was ready to be processed, clicking that button and having them just show up on the other screen in payroll is a magical feeling, y'all, and, uh, I love it. So So the integration for onboarding is up and running and working great and, uh, really valuable. So now let's talk about timekeeping. So timekeeping does a handful of things. So we've got the ability to— for employees to clock in and clock out. We can have them clock in and out of jobs, departments, locations. We can have them clock in and out from mobile. They can request time off. Just this week we added sort of a pseudo kiosk feature in here where as soon as an employee— you have the option as an employer to turn on a feature that will log them out automatically if you want. So you can use it in a kiosk-style environment. So if you've got a health club or you've got a, any sort of environment where an employee is not going to be sitting at a desk and you want to make sure they're logged out when they walk away, and now you can turn that feature on. And when they hit clock in, it will start a countdown on the screen that says, "Hey, we're going to clock you out in 10 seconds. If you want to stay logged in, click 'Stay Logged In,'" and it will allow them to stay logged in. And when we look at this, our role— we talked about it earlier— you look at that time-off request, our role is to further complement and supplement Payroll Relief's capabilities for what our clients need. And one of the main reasons we come to market and come with reseller partners like yourself is so that we can build the system that each of us needs to meet most of our clients' needs, not all of our clients' needs. And it's kind of interesting, I watched a— I watched one of the recent webinars that a partner did with Payroll Relief, and they did a poll at the beginning where they asked what percentage of the people on here thought that their clients were interested in HR services. And I think the most of them landed between 10 to 25% and 25 to 50%, and that's 100% spot on and that you have to understand that not 100% of your clients are going to want timekeeping. Not 100% of your clients are going to want HR. Like, you, you have to make sure, on average, what I found, and this is just sort of anecdotal, this isn't industry metrics, but about 25% of your clients are going to need HR timekeeping software and be good fit for, you know, and then you're even going to take that down a little bit lower for those that are going to be interested in the HR services side. So you just have to be realistic, right? Like, when you roll something like this out, You're not going to roll it out to 100% of your client base and they're all just going to come with their wallets open. You have to understand like, hey, here's who my target audience is and this is when it makes a good fit. But I say that because we're supplementing some of the features like the request time off, the PTO accrual feature, something I'm really proud of. We really struggled with some of the other systems we used in the past to get multi-level, easy-to-set-up accruals that didn't require custom coding from our provider. Ours are very simple, very easy to set up, easy to follow, and they just do the job. It's very gratifying to actually have people log in and see accurate balances and not spend 16 hours setting them up. So clock in, clock out, do it from anywhere. You know, some of the features we don't have— I like to be crystal clear on what we don't have— we don't do GPS pinpointing or geofencing or any of those sort of things. It's just not, you know, well, it's a fine solution for anybody who wants to clock in and out mobile. If people are worried about you know, GPS pinning where their every move is. This is not currently a good fit for that. It is definitely something we'll be putting on the 2021 roadmap, just unclear at this point which quarter that'll be. So timekeeping, pretty basic standardized functionality, easy to use. Integration currently in testing, so we are in the process of— the integration is working. We have had one pesky little bug that won't go away that keeps creating duplicate entries on the payroll when we're exporting ours over. So today that is still something that is handled, and quite frankly, we've got the most clients of anybody on this, and most of our clients don't— honestly, I get more complaints from resellers that the integration is not working than I do from our clients when it comes to the fact that the integration is not live yet, which we're totally fine with. We're doing our best to get that thing live as quickly as possible. It could be as soon as days, but we'll definitely have it done inside of this quarter where hours will automagically populate inside of payroll relief with the click of a button from inside Guru. So that's where we are at with timekeeping. Now, Online HR, this is probably the most undervalued from a sales perspective but most valued from an actual administrative perspective when we look at our clients. So the online human resources, and I used to call it Core HR, but really it's just the ability to go paperless for an employer, to have all my documents in one place, to have all my notes, all my stuff for my employees in one spot. So you think about it, many of you on this phone line are employers. Like you think about getting rid of, you know, the folders in your email or in your, in your share file and in your desk and all that and just having them in one spot I know every month I do performance reviews with my team. I keep all the notes in here. It's very simple for me to keep up with. We also have light performance management capability inside the system as well. As you can see, when I log into the employee file, I see everything I need right here in one spot, and you can upload documents, add tasks, add notes, even hide the notes from the employees so they can't see them. We have a really neat little function. It's just one of these small things that matters. We can add an expiration date to documents so you can track when things are coming due, like certifications or licenses, and run a monthly report that shows you, "Hey, these 16 certifications are coming up due next month. We need to make sure that we're keeping up with these employees and getting them recertified." So lots of value, lots of great things that come in the paperless HR environment. And finally, one of the last things as we talk about the actual software itself is the branding. So Obviously, we, you know, we spun this thing off as Guru because we didn't want anybody else to— as soon as we realized we were going to try to help out some other payroll bureaus with it, we said, hey, we know that you don't want to send people to ergpayroll.com. You want to send people to a URL that, you know, is ambiguous. Interestingly enough, I actually just had for the first time ever this morning somebody book a demo with us who was a client of a payroll relief company and was looking for an HR system to use with it. And I told them, I'm like, look, we don't sell direct to market. Go back to your payroll company. If they're not willing to offer Guru, that's totally fine, but it's— I'd be happy to talk to them. We'll get their blessing to set them up with somebody who sells Guru so that you guys can use it, because they were really interested in it. So, um, definitely even some kind of a new and unique opportunity there to possibly spread some leads around the country. But From the branding perspective, when I look at this, I say, hey, Dunder Mifflin, this is the end user, this is your client, is Dunder Mifflin. And so this is gonna be branded completely to them because at the end of the day, Dunder Mifflin doesn't care about Guru, Dunder Mifflin doesn't care about your payroll firm, they care about Dunder Mifflin. They want their employees on their first day to see, welcome to the Dunder Mifflin HR portal. They want them to see you know, their branding, their logos, the everything when they logged into that portal. And so that's how we built this really with the end user in mind. Let's talk about the integration roadmap. Think that we are typically pretty conservative when it comes to making promises related to integration or any features for that matter. So as mentioned before, the Q4 of this year, we're going to have the timekeeping API done. That's kind of on the doorstep right now, just ready to go live. Which means that we're going to be able to send timekeeping data over to payroll with a click of a button. In Q1 of next year, and this is already under development, we're going to have a pay stub API, which means that we're going to be— your employees will actually just have a single login if they're using Guru and Payroll Relief because they'll be able to access their pay stub directly inside of Payroll Relief, or excuse me, inside of Guru without having to log into Payroll Relief. And then by the end of Q2 next year, We're going to have bi-directional sort of full-circle integration where changes, all changes, are flowing from one system to the other, and we're keeping up with a consistent and equal database of information on both sides so that no maintenance is required. And, and really, once again, I think to emphasize that point of this, our full interest is in integrating with Payroll Relief, and that's where we have the most to gain, and we know our partners have the most to gain because we're really only working with folks who sell Payroll Relief. So We don't have 60 other payroll systems to worry about. We want this to get as tight as humanly possible. So a couple things before I talk to you about some of the other elements of what we do, but, you know, kind of why us. Well, the technology, as you could probably notice from there, and you'll notice as you look into it, one of the things I'm really conscious of when I'm doing a demo of some systems, I mean, I own a payroll company, I'm a consumer of other softwares, and I see them getting demoed, and when I see them click to you know, oh hey, you just do that over here, and they click and another window pops open with a different user interface, and then they click here and another window pops open with a different user interface. And it's like, well, you have all those functions, but those are different code bases and they're just sinks of data. They're not really doing what I need. I, I don't need all that functionality for my clients. I just, I just need the basics, the core, so that they can get the job done. And the payroll relief focus, obviously we've talked about in And we understand your challenges because we own a payroll and HR company as well. And we're doing what we can to create this in a way and create resources and assets that will help you to sell more, will help you to better serve it, and really just give you one system with a singular focus and only one partner to work with when it comes to those things. So let's talk about some of the other things we do real quick before we are done for the day. So, so we've got— we also offer HR support. We give you the ability to offer. So we talked about the HR software. Which are— and I do like to draw delineation here because sometimes people will call and be like, "Oh, so when I set up onboarding, did they get a custom handbook when I set up onboarding?" Well, HR software is one thing. We're automating functions over there. But there is also this HR support element where your clients do want things like customized handbooks. They want somebody to call when they have a question. They want, you know, sometimes even a dedicated human resources specialist. And we can give you the opportunity to offer your clients those services as well. And so we have an HR help desk that's white-labeled that allows your clients to call in. Thank you for calling the HR team. They're not going to talk, you know, they're not going to be branded to us or branded to you. They can get unlimited custom documents, everything from job descriptions to handbooks to guides to forms to templates, everything you can imagine from an HR perspective that a small business would need. And I will tell you that Right now, for those of you that have, you know, either started offering HR services or not, this is the— this past year has been our Super Bowl of offering HR services. When it came down to all the different questions that our clients had, all the different needs that they had, we were able to provide incredible value and be able to really be a partner alongside of them because of these HR services that we offer. And I'm excited about the continuous sort of opportunity that happens for folks. One of the things that I see particularly with the accounting firms is that many of you are once again already offer— already answering a lot of these questions. It may be a little bit unsure. And there, there are several different ways you can roll this out. One of the points I will make going back to the very beginning of this conversation, I'm here to talk shop anytime anybody wants to. We kind of open our playbook, if you will, whenever somebody starts working with us. Just the other day, they had a, you know, one of our new resellers reach out and say, hey, how do you guys price this? How do you guys do this? How do you guys do that? I mean, we provided them with everything from our pricing sheet to marketing materials that we've used in the past that weren't even white-labeled to them. We white-labeled their marketing materials. We're doing everything we can just to help folks to grow the business. And, you know, we're going to ask you questions too. We've learned a lot from our resellers. I mean, we're not, we haven't grown some perfect payroll and HR company. Going back to talking about payroll. And we're trying to constantly learn, constantly get better. And really, because at the end of the day, we're all going to help serve each other. We're all going to help to knock down those industry titans we saw on the opening slide. We can each help to get each other better. And, you know, iron sharpens iron, as the good book says. So we want to meet you at your point of need. We know that HR support is a big piece of that. So we've got 3 elements of what we do. We've talked about the HR support side. We've talked about the HR software side. I want to talk about marketing. So when you think about marketing, we offer you some of the normal stuff you would expect when you sign up for the software. You're going to get, you know, a couple videos to put on your website, which are, are fine. You're going to get some, some slick, some email campaigns, some things you can use to go out and try to generate some business. But really what I hope to, you know, when we look at what are some of the keys to getting ahead and selling more HR services and what we've done as a firm at ERG, I think a really good job of is move away from the traditional outbound model. So outbound model says, hey, we're going to cold call, we're going to cold email, we're going to show up at trade shows, we're going to show up at network, we're going to show up at networking events, we're going to press the flesh, we're going to pay for ads. We're gonna do all these things that are interruption-based, right? Every one of these things here is about interrupting or their long-term, you know, relationship plays. They're things that are more sort of directed at developing relationship in what I might call more traditional ways, which are, you know, sometimes just kind of browbeating people with, hey, here's what we got, here's why it's better, etc., etc. I encourage each of you, if you haven't invested some time and energy into your inbound philosophies, for your firm and for your agency that you should. And, you know, whether this be with or without us, I think this has been the key to our growth over, particularly over the last 24 months, is just really putting a lot of our time and energy instead of into sales professionals, more into search engine optimization, making sure that in our target markets, when people search for our services, we are showing up at the top of the search list. Why? Because that is a person who is showing intent for what we do. So for the money that I invest on somebody who is actually showing intent to look for our services versus the money that I would invest trying to browbeat somebody into why they should consider our services, it's kind of a no-brainer, right? Thought leadership is another big thing. Making sure that people know in our market, if they have questions related to human resources, we are the first people that come to their mind because we are public, we are visible, we are putting out blogs, we are putting out videos, we are putting out content consistently, valuable resources. So one of the things that's probably a little unique about our mindset, and I've scraped across it earlier on, is like, we will give away the farm. I don't care. People— anything I know that I can provide to somebody, it's not going to hurt me to share that with them because they don't have the full recipe, right? That's just one ingredient in the recipe typically. And still, when it comes to payroll and HR services, Even if I share a great piece of HR information with them, I give them a, you know, a free template, a free form, a free guide, whatever it is, they need all the rest of the pieces for it to work properly. So I've kind of given up on, hey, let's give away as much as we can and let's really establish ourselves as industry leaders when it comes to the expertise. And then opt-ins. We give people the opportunity everywhere they sort of engage with our brand to opt in to get more of that information, more of that video, more of that quality content. That ultimately at the end of the day is about driving value for the individual that it is serving. And so I think when you get away from writing sales copy and get into writing materials based on what questions are your customers calling you with every single week, what do they care about, what are they asking you consistently, and you start to write content and share information that's exactly the same. Your, your customer already asked you the question. Now turn that question into a video, turn it into a blog, turn it into a piece for social. And share that information, and you will start to attract people to you instead of trying to force yourself on folks. And that is the difference between inbound and outbound. And it has created a monumental shift in our business, particularly at ERG. And once again, as with everything else, it's something that we're kind of sharing with other payroll businesses. And so we've created our Growth Suite, which is a full digital suite So one of the differences between this and other things I've seen is like, we don't just give you a library full of, you know, here's a bunch of templates and a page for your website and all that. We do the work. So this is more of a full digital agency where we're doing, you know, we don't just give you a blog post, we publish the blog post on your website, we optimize it. We don't just give you a, you know, a video, we post it on all your social pages, we embed it on your website, etc., etc. So So what we've done is started to open this up to payroll bureaus around the country, but we will not compete with any payroll bureaus. So we're only using one per city, and in some areas even broader than that, because we know we're trying to hit multiple regions. Uh, and we're sharing the secret sauce that we've taken to grow from, you know, once again, that sort of outbound model where we used to have sales reps who were out, uh, beating the streets every day to where now we get, you know, upwards of 25 leads a week coming into our website, social, and other channels. And so that's something where we, you know, wanted to be able to share that with folks and share it at a reasonable price, which was something that we were always looking for. But it took a lot of time for digital agencies to get to know our industry and understand our target audience and how they operate and how they do things. And that industry expertise is critical when it comes to marketing. So if you have any questions, need some support there, that once again is a paid service that is sort of, of in addition, the third pillar, if you will, of opportunities we have to work together. So our, our mission is pretty simple. We want to help payroll bureaus to grow, and most of those payroll bureaus come off of accounting firms. But really, we want to help you to win new business. We want to help you to do that in a variety of ways, whether it be with the service offerings that you have or just by learning something new or by it through the marketing. We want to give you the tools you need to grow. We want to help you improve the operations. We know what a pain it can be when you're using some software that's either lackluster or you don't have best practices in place to be able to understand how to best serve your customers. We want to be able to help you there, and we want to be able to help you to add services with the click of a button without having to really go through a whole bunch of hoops and be able to add services and follow a proven roadmap on how others have done it instead of just kind of going, "Yeah, everybody does it differently, and here's this and here's that." We really want to give you some sort of proven take them to the, to the streets experience, if you will, and help you to grow. And that's really our only mission. And because if you grow, it feeds the success of our product, which helps us to continue to grow the product and helps us continue to serve the market better, which is really what this whole thing's about. So, we've got 3 tools available to you. We've got the HR software, which is Guru. You can check it out at guru.co. It's important. It's not .com. I don't know what's parked there, but we can't seem to get them off that website. HR support is— and we have marketing. And if you just go to the website and you just click on— there's a bunch of buttons on there that say book a demo, and you're going to click right on a calendar that's going to let you grab a time on somebody's calendar and make it really easy to block out 30 minutes and just see if we can help each other and help each other grow. And really, that's all I have to offer today. I mean, the big 3 things that I want to emphasize are, hey, make sure you know when to say no, make sure that you are using tools that are kind of built for your clients and for your needs, and then make sure that you're kind of shifting that focus away from some of the outbound traditional ways of selling and looking more at being a person and a firm of value and, and finding ways to create inbound channels so that you can grow in a way that's more sustainable and will continue to provide value for you and your firm. Going forward. And so I realize I pulled up a little bit early there, Tom. So if you want me to, I don't know if any questions came in. I can't see the chat. Any questions you want me to hit on here at the end?

Yeah. Well, firstly, very thorough and really good presentation today, Matt. We, I think everybody really seemed to enjoy it. We do have some questions that came in. So we'll answer those. And folks, if you're still with us and you have some questions based on the presentation, Please do not hesitate to use the questions tab and send those in. We got about another 10 to 15 minutes here where we can, uh, go for, uh, questions. Um, uh, Gene wants to know, um, are we going to address, uh, you know, the API integration with payroll relief, um, or contractors in the API integration with payroll relief?

Yeah, I thought we addressed the API pretty thoroughly through there, Gene, but, uh, the contractors are I know Jean's an existing customer is asking about a very specific question about whether or not contractors are flowing over with the new hires, and I know they were not as of a couple weeks ago. So Jean, that'd be certainly something you're welcome to hit the support info@guru.co anytime, and I'll be happy to check into it when the meeting's over.

Got it. So Seth has a question. It's C-E-F. I apologize if I mispronounce your name, but was asking, uh, can you use just the timekeeping part of Guru? And, uh, when do you expect the timekeeping module to fully integrate with Payroll Relief? I know you said that the timekeeping module was going to be in Q4, um, but is there going to be a further integration with Payroll Relief in that regard?

Yes, you can certainly offer just the timekeeping module. Uh, the— as far as the integration, that is literally like a day-by-day Oh, hey, game of whack-a-mole. And so certainly we're at the finish line there, and I wish that I had a better answer than, uh, I, I literally saw an email come through my inbox right before this of going, oh, hey, we got that duplicate entry again. Oh, going back and forth. So definitely be done inside of Q4. Can't make any promises other than that.

Got it. Um, both Sean and Jim want to know, Sean wants to know the full cost of the digital suite of marketing. And, Jim says, we did not go over pricing. Can we try Outguru on our own downtime for a certain price point and then grow to a starter package? So I guess he's kind of wondering what the, you know, what the progression is there in terms of starting out with the package.

Yeah. I'll start with the HR software. And HR software is priced a little bit differently than some of our competitors in that we just charge a flat rate per month. For up to a certain number of employees. So there's no setup fees, which is also fantastic, no minimums. So up to your first 150 employees, you just pay $199 a month and then you can get started from there. When it comes to the digital marketing package, that, that's going to start at about $999 a month and that's going to be a full-service SEO, email, blogs, a full suite of things happening for you. Website updates, all that. So, and that's a pretty just standard big package. The software gives you a little bit more opportunity to kind of grow once you go past 150 employees. There's next tier up and next tier up after that. But yeah, we don't really hide from pricing. Pricing is what it is. We send it over, um, pretty quick right into the demo. So, um, if it makes sense, it makes sense. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

I, I made sense to me, so that's good to, uh, that's good to hear. Um, Yeah, it looks like everything— most of the questions have been answered here. And Jim, just following up, is then what then is the difference with the HR On Demand for $39 per month per client to $199 per month for up to 150 employees?

HR On Demand is HR support. And so that is setting your clients up with— and I'm guessing Jim has already talked to us at some point because he's looking at the pricing page. It's with which is not sort of poking out on the site. So $39 per client per month for HR support. So that's giving them somebody to call and to speak to and to get HR advice. The $199 for up to 150 employees is for the HR software, which does all the things we talked about, the timekeeping, the onboarding, the online human resources document management, all that stuff. So once again, kind of a difference there between HR OnDemand being the HR support, the People Help, and the HR software being Guru.

Got it. All right. Well, I am not seeing any more. One quick— other quick question. Does your timekeeping system support multiple pay periods?

Yes. Okay.

All right. I think that should be, should be it for questions here, Matt. Again, great presentation. Thank you so much for being so thorough and going over all of the things that Guru can provide. If there's any questions, is there contact information that you can provide for the attendees here?

Yeah. Of course. So like I said, if you go to guru.co, you can click on the book a demo button, or you can hit me on my email, which is just Matt at guru.co. Um, and a pretty easy guy to find if you Google my name, Matt Vaadi, V-A-A-D-I, you will find me. There's very few people with that name. So once again, I appreciate the time and happy to help in any way I can.

Terrific, and thanks so much, uh, Matt. And to everybody here, thank you so much for taking the time out of the day to learn more about Guru and Payroll Relief integrations. We really appreciate Matt's time, and we really appreciate your joining us today. Thank you so much, and we look forward to hearing from some of you soon. Take care.

Thanks.