What if? | Innovation and Leadership in the Payroll Space - IPPA Summit 2023 Takeaways

Welcome back to another episode of Payroll In. My name is Matt Vadie and I'm your host. In today's episode, I'm going to break down my key takeaways from the IPPA conference out in Las Vegas last week, March of 2023. This is a conference where payroll industry veterans, executives, vendors, key players all come together for about 2 to 3 days out in Vegas to share best practices, learn what's new in the industry, and really just connect and learn from one another. So it was an exciting time and it started out with the first night. I was really fortunate. We had a little welcome reception. The event was at the Paris in Las Vegas on the Strip, and there was a cool reception, a lot of old faces I've seen before. I've been a member of the IPPA for, I guess, 3 or 4 years now. And a bunch of new faces, which is great. But I had several people come up to me and say, man, I listen to the podcast. Oh, are you that guy? I see you on my player on my phone or in my car every day. And I talked to my wife later that night and I said, oh, it's really neat. I talked to a bunch of people that listen to Payroll. And she's like, oh geez, your head's not going to fit in the door when you get home. And I started laughing and then I took a step back and I thought, I said, well, you know, not one of them said that it was any good. So hopefully, uh, some of y'all do think it's good. And, and a little bit kidding there, some folks were, were definitely giving me a shout out on the next day talking about some of the episodes they really enjoyed. The demo episode was one that came up a lot. The sales process one was one that came up a lot. The interviews with Jeb Blount, Anthony and Arino, definitely one to go back to if you're newer to the show. And definitely go back and revisit last year's, um, recap of the IPPA Summit. I'm going to make this a little bit of an annual homage. This year, I actually lugged all my equipment out there. I was planning on recording some live interviews at the show, but the break times in between sessions and just the amount of great connections that were happening, all the, all the cool things that were going on, it just didn't really warrant— I did not think it was worth the investment of time and energy. I rather wanted to stay in the moment with the people around me, and I think that was a great use of my time, and I'm sure anybody that was there would agree. So what I'm going to do in this episode is walk through. I'm going to start with the keynote from Mike Rayburn. There were, just to give you a layout of the event, so I got out there on Monday. Um, the actual core of the event was Thursday, Friday, full day of planning, uh, full day of, of content on Thursday, half day on Friday, welcome reception Wednesday evening. But they did an owner's track, um, I think it was Tuesday and Wednesday. And I'm, and I'm blessed to serve on the board, so I was there Monday for some board meetings, or maybe the board meetings for Tuesday. I might have my dates all screwed I am just getting back from a week in Vegas. So yeah, so I was out there for a long week, got to learn a ton of things, got inspired, met new people. If you're not going out to this conference and you're listening to this podcast, these two go hand in hand in my humble opinion. So make the homage or make the trip out next year. You will definitely find it to be worth your time. I didn't talk to anybody who didn't think it was worth the trip out, but I'm going to break down some of my biggest takeaways from the event and, you know, I'd love to hear yours and how they compare. And then this may actually take 2 episodes just because I can probably get through this keynote and maybe a couple more big takeaways before, you know, maybe bumping into some time limitations. So first off, we have this keynote the first morning, Thursday morning. His name is Mike Rayburn. This dude plays guitar. Gives a keynote. It's a little kind of squishy of what bucket to fit him into, but the topic of his session was What If. He's written a book with the same title. He's played at Carnegie Hall. I admitted to the rest of the board that in the planning, I was actually on the planning committee and I led the sales track at the event. So if you like the sales track, let me know. If you didn't, then don't let me know. Uh, no, seriously though, if there were things we missed, you know, one thing that we missed particularly on the sales track that I'm booking somebody to do an episode on is sales training for new reps and ongoing training for your reps. So look forward to talking through that in more detail soon. Had some great notes from some individual conversation I had out there, uh, that helped facilitate that. But so keynote Mike Rayburn, you know, he talks about this what if. He opens up with this concept that time breaks everything. So whether, you know, you were using a typewriter at one point, we used to use cameras with film, we used to all get on MySpace as our social channel of choice. Vines used to be a big thing, those 6 or 7-second videos. You know, iPod broke the music distribution industry, how music was distributed, and then it got destroyed and replaced, right? So failures to innovate and complacency are what kills all companies and all concepts. And so the premise of his whole talk was to fix things before they break, to leverage that question or questions that start with what if, uh, to fuel innovation inside your organization. And I had some really great takeaways that I think are applicable, particular to our industry, and some things we're going to continue to work on here internally. I haven't even broke a lot of this down with the team yet. Um, you know, the thing that we all have in our lives, and even inside of our companies for that matter, inside of our bureaus, are naysayers. So people are going to say, you're going to say, what if we did X? What if we could do Y? And you're always going to have people that are going to say, yeah, but yeah, but, or, you know, oh, that won't work for X reason. The thing he gave you and sort of equipped you with in that circumstance, which I really liked was, yeah, but what if we could do it? What if we had to? And he called this conditional surrendering for naysayers, which allows you to move on. And I think a good parallel to that, and as I was thinking and listening to him, was, you know, COVID. If you'd have told us the measures that we had to get Americans and, and people nationwide, or worldwide for that matter, to go through as it relates to COVID response, you know, everybody would have said that it could not be feasible to shut down, you know, uh, public places the way we did, to get people to wear masks. You know, leave your political opinions aside on this. That's not what it's about. But you know, had you proposed such a solution to people beforehand, they would have said no way that's going to work. So we've, we've just kind of lived through one of these mass what-if moments, and I think that it's— it, it helps you if you use it in the right context to think like, hey, there are big things that can happen if we pose the questions what if. Uh, he told a really fun story about, you know, magic coming from getting fed up There was an artist named Kris Kristofferson who couldn't get people to listen to his music. He was a writer and a musician, and he stole a helicopter. So once he finally got fed up, he stole a helicopter. So he, I think he flew helicopters in the Navy or something or other. He flew it to Johnny Cash's ranch. He landed in his yard and handed him his tape. And Johnny played his song and ultimately he ended up, Johnny ended up playing one of his songs that Chris had written on national television not too much longer after. This is just how fed up this dude was. He had hit so many roadblocks, so many nos. He just kind of, you know, he was like, look, the guy was drinking, he was flying, you know, stole a helicopter. Like, don't follow that blueprint per se, but there's a blueprint there with being fed up and taking things into your own hand and saying, yeah, what if we had to do this thing? What if I had no other choice but to make this happen? What would I do? And this is an exercise we've gone through in the past. I've heard it phrased a similar way where it's like, what if I had to accomplish my 10-year goals in the next 10 months? How would I do that? And so it's not saying you can necessarily accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 10 months, but what if you had to? Yeah. What if you found out you were you're going to die in 10 months and you had to accomplish all the things you had planned on doing in your bucket list over the next 10 years, how would you go about accomplishing those things? And so there's, you know, or if you just, hey, you want to accelerate growth, what's going to come out of those conversations? That thought exercise is really critical to your growth as a person and a professional. So his whole shtick was he, would go and play. He was just sort of a normal musician, the keynote Mike Rayburn, that is. And he would go into bars. He lived in Nashville for a while. He'd start playing a song and then he'd get a bunch of requests from the audience. And sometimes they were specific requests. The first thing that came to my mind was Freebird, right? Everybody's been in a bar and had somebody, well, maybe I'm dating myself now, but somebody from the back yelling, "Freebird!" That was always kind of our joke back 20 years ago when I was in school. But he'd start playing a song and then between, people would make stupid requests and not stupid requests, but a bunch of songs he didn't know. So what he started to do were these mashups. So if somebody was in the crowd and yelling country, he'd start to play a song he knew in a country tone. So in his example, he played, and you could find this guy online on YouTube, there's a bunch of videos of them. Him out there, but he started playing a, uh, the song Free Fallin' by Tom Petty in a very twangy country version. And then so what happened was he eventually became known as this guy, and so people would come into his shows, they would request songs or, you know, or genres, and then he would play a country version of that song. And now his club dates started to fill up because he had kind of his thing, his niche. Um, And, you know, he, he phrased it as the only way to manage change is to create change. And I like that a lot. So the only way to manage change is to create change. Now, if your organization's anything like ours, I mean, change is the only constant we have here. It's something we talk a lot about with new hires. If you're somebody that just wants to come in and be a part of the same old, same old every single day, this is probably not a great place for you. And that's going to dovetail back into here in a little while. Uh, you know, one of the other sessions I sat in on was this leadership session on hiring and recruiting top talent. And, you know, that transparency in the hiring process of what kind of an organization are you, what stage are you at in your growth curve. Like, you know, if somebody comes from corporate America, like we talked about in another session, you know, do you hire people with industry experience or do you not hire people with industry experience? You know, on our support team, we've had a couple of epic failures of hiring people that came from large national providers. Because their desk is so narrow, you know, they only do payroll and they only know the front end of the payroll system. If it's tax question, they can't handle it. If it's a timekeeping question, they can't handle it. If it's an HR question, they can't handle it. Well, in our world, you're going to have to know a little about a lot, and sometimes a lot about a lot. And so being transparent in the interview process, critical piece of this, understanding who your organization is, critical piece of recruiting top talent, not to fall too far off here, the path of what if from Mr. Rayburn. So he created this newfound success for himself. He also was playing some really interesting songs where I think his first what if was, what if you play the guitar in a different way? So normally use your left hand to hold down the strings on the frets, use your right hand to strum, He said, well, what if, what if you use both sets of hands to strum? And what if you use the top of the strings that are above the fretboard? And, and so he kind of played a song that where he was just hammering away with both hands up and down the fretboard and playing the strings that where they extend up to the knots. And so he, he was, he played a really neat song. He's got a very unique style on stage. He was kind of wearing like a I don't even know what you call those hats, almost like a fedora, I think it was, and a tie, but with an untucked shirt. So very kind of eccentric looking guy and, you know, very high energy, mixed in a lot of humor. So this is one thing that if you sit next to me, I'm going to be taking notes. Sit next to me at a conference, I'm going to be taking notes about everything, not just the, you know, the content itself. I'm going to be taking notes about the speaker. I'm going to be taking notes about the the room, the venue, just any idea that is flowing through my head. Because what happens is you walk away from these events, one like the IPPA is a great example. I've got a year's worth of action items from this event, and if I don't have detailed notes and context with it, then it's going to get lost. And I'm going to come back to this and go, what does that don't follow the curve, create it mean? Oh geez, I have no idea. That's a great thought, but I have no clue what that means. And so I add all kinds of context. I typed out over 20 pages of Google Docs during these sessions just with my notes so that I have sort of a playbook for going forward and some of the action items and just things I want to remember from the event. And now I also like to preface that with, you know, go back in— what I did on the flight home was I organized them, I set up the action items, I gave myself a playbook to leverage here going forward. So Can't recommend that enough. So if you're listening to this, I'm recording it just a few days after the event's over, go back right now and pull your notes out and start to really put together some more detail around them and some action items. So anyway, back to Mr. Rayburn. So he mentioned just a little bit on that innovation, the what-if piece. I like the reference that he brought up in the Dollar Shave Club. If you're not familiar with the Dollar Shave Club, They sold for over a billion dollars and basically it was, hey, we're going to send you razors in the mail for a subscription. Is that the most creative thing you've ever heard of? Not really. I mean, it took razors and the US Postal Service. They just saw a need for a few dollars a month. We will mail your razors to you. And he made a joke about not feeling like a criminal and having to go into CVS and get your razors unlocked from behind the cage where they store them as a man of razors apparently are, you know, very easy to steal. And so, you know, I thought that was an interesting example of like, you know, just where creativity is. Creativity doesn't have to be this huge zero-to-one thing that is just a brand new thing the world's never heard of. But I liked his style because if you think about it, he's the mashup. So how do they pitch movies? You know, what was the movie with Keanu Reeves where he's on a bus? Speed, I think, you know, it's It's Die Hard on a bus. Like if you look at Hollywood and how people pitch ideas out in Hollywood, you know, it's the Uber for dog walkers. You know, there's always these mashups. And so I think that usually a lot of creativity comes from taking two things. You know, we're the payroll company for nonprofits, like not super innovative, but niche down, right? And gives you an opportunity to live within some constraints, which Another thing that he touched on in this conversation is constraints are typically where a lot of creativity comes from. So if you just have open field on all sides and you can go in a million different directions, then it gets a little bit harder to innovate because you kind of get lost. There are too many options. Sometimes constraints are good for you and your business. All right, so he then started doing mashups of one singer doing a different song. So he did Bob Marley singing a Garth Brooks which these were, you know, once again, not high thing, highly challenging things to execute on. If you can sing a little bit and you can play a little bit, I mean, it definitely a ton of skill involved. I'm not going to minimize that, but it was kind of a neat thing and kind of the thing that a lot of people do when they're jamming out, but not too many people have turned into, you know, paid keynotes and, and gigs at Carnegie Hall and book sales and all that stuff that he's done with it. So All right. Let's see here. So the one big thing that I kind of took away from this is the— so this is a very similar formula to copywriting. In copywriting, we will often write headlines that say, Company A achieved X by Y date without having to do Z. So we helped, you know, Bob's Taco Stand reduce their, you know, HR expenses by 75% in 90 days without having to hire an HR person. So that's a really nice little framework for writing good hooks. And so I use that same framework with his what-if framework here where I say, what if we had to do X by Y? Without doing Z, how would we do it? So what if we had to handle 300 more new clients without hiring any additional staff this year? How would we do that? So I could feel, you know, Jason's tension sitting next to me, our director of client success, as soon as this question even thought passed through my mind, like the His stress was coming right through. And I verbalized it to him later and I saw the stress on his face. So that was fun. But the, you know, it's— does it mean, hey, we're going to try to do this? No. But it would really force us to evaluate our level of efficiency and how we handle our business processes around serving our accounts if we use this thought exercise. And what if we had to? What if we just had no choice? What if there was no conceivable way? How would we do it? So even just continuing to press that and not just using it as like a soft thought exercise, like, look, man, we got no budget. We've got to do this with the existing team. We're overextended. What are we going to do? And I bet you a lot of things would get automated. I bet you that we would rethink our business model as a whole, going back to the niching down thing. Well, you know, do the 300 accounts have to be 300 different industries or could they all be the same industry? Could they all be the same size? Could they all be the You know, so it's going to create a thought exercise that's really, really fun to do with your team. And it's not just, you know, 300 more accounts. I also said, hey, look, Zach, if we've got to sell $2 million in net new business this year, more than what we have on our quota, how would we do it with our existing team this year? So again, is that going to be, you know, what are we going to do? Is that going to be through partnerships? Is it going to be through, You know, are we going to have to increase our deal size because our current deal size just isn't enough? Does it mean we have to look at larger accounts? Does it mean we have to stop serving certain markets? Does it mean we have to, you know, hire in a vendor that's going to provide more? What, what does it mean, right? And so we can whiteboard out, we can go through all these what-ifs, um, and use those constraints to hopefully create some great ideas that will help us to push and innovate and move forward. I like this question: What if there's something good about your biggest problem? So problems are often part of the solution. You know, what do we do with our sales process? We walk people through the 5 biggest pains that our new clients are facing before they come to us, 5 biggest problems that they have. So the problems are always part of the solution, but right now you have to look at the problems inside of your organization and start to understand, you know, are we worried about money transmitter law? Are we worried about, you know, some of those things I just mentioned? How do we serve more accounts with less? Are we worried about compliance? Whatever it might be, all these problems are going to be part of drawing on the solutions and start to have the conversations, the very open-minded conversations with people inside and outside of your organization which once again is the tremendous value of going to the IPPA conference. I mean, I literally sat down with a CEO of a company, you know, probably 8 times the size of ours, and he just opened up his sales training playbook and just shared with me, you know, hey, here's how we structure week 1, week 2, that's 13-week program, and then we go to here. Go out and talk to your quote unquote competitors, y'all. Like, I can't say that enough on here. Most of the success that we have had has come on the backs of our, our peers. And it's the biggest driver behind recording episodes like this and starting this podcast in the first place, is that we all have so much to learn from one another. We have so many great best practices that live inside of our own organization that can help our peers who ultimately aren't really going to compete with us. And so unless you're, you know, literally sitting 2 blocks up the road from me, and to be quite fair, I think even if you're sitting 2 blocks up the road from me, I'd still have this conversation with you. Because you're just not my enemy. We've got a common enemy in the large national providers and we've got plenty of business we can take from them. And so there's no need to worry about the local and regional providers because they're not my competition in my humble opinion. But he gave a little piece of advice about writing that he got from Jack Canfield, which Jack Canfield's book, just a quick aside, I always get these questions around what books you recommend. Jack Canfield's Success Principles changed my life. I've read it easily 5 times, read it once a year. It's the type of book that you can read a chapter, execute, read a chapter, execute, you know, a ton of stuff in there. You already know around, you know, having a vision for your life, how, you know, how you should behave as a human being. Just like, there's just a lot in there. He's the guy who wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul. It's a little bit, hey, look, if you don't want to improve and you don't want to get the most out of your life and you don't believe in that kind of stuff, then it's not the right book for you. But if you're the type of person that's always looking for ways to improve, always looking for ways to get better, then I can't recommend it enough. But Jack told him, Jack wrote the foreword for his book, said, pay attention to your first sentence. And he talked about making it very short. And it's interesting because on the way out, I was reading a book about copywriting., and the same thing came up in the first sentence of your copy. Make it short, make it very concise, but really compelling. And we talk a lot in copywriting. It's just, to me, it's a topic I've been on a lot lately. I, I like to write and I like to write better copy. I've written a book and I want to write another one. But in his book, his first sentence was, you are a creative genius. So when I read that sentence, Obviously it's focused right at me. It makes me feel good and it makes me want to read the next sentence. So whether you're writing an email or you're writing a, you know, blog post or you're writing a LinkedIn post, you're writing whatever, you know, think a lot about that first sentence and look at the sentences of the things you're reading. So as many of you know, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I pay a lot of attention to that hook, that first sentence that somebody's going to see when they look at a post, because it's going to, it's got to entice them to read more. And so, you know, writing is everything. I feel like we as a society, you know, are generally pretty poor writers. We stick more to what we were taught in school as it relates to writing, whereas I think there's just so much more to be learned when you look at marketing copywriting and advertising copywriting that is much more valuable to achieving what most of the people listening to this podcast are trying to achieve. And let me see, I'm going to look up the name of that book I'm reading right now. It's a little, it's a lot. It's full-on copywriting and it's a big book. You know, I like my books small. I like them fast reads. I like big text and lots of pictures. I live in the South. No, but it's a great book and the name is escaping me for some reason. So I'm looking up at my Amazon account here while I, before I lose the thought. But I read that and I read Marcus Sheridan's book, They Ask, You Answer, again on my way out there. And I'm going to probably just do another— I know we did a recent episode with Marcus. We've been implementing more and more of the They Ask, You Answer framework inside our organization, and we're committed to doing more and more over time. And so I'm going to do a full episode on that and would love to hear y'all's questions, thoughts, feedback on that. And try to do my best to summarize some good takeaways without infringing on any of his work. So that book was the Adweek Copywriting Handbook. The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy. It's really good. I, you know, it's the type of book I think it's perfect for a flight where you're kind of— was it one I would've read at the house and sat down and powered through the way I did on a 5-hour flight? Probably not. But I, finish the book on the flight there and the flight back. So, all right, let's head back into our notes here from Rayburn. You know, just looking at it also from a speaker's perspective, you know, both of the paid keynotes— there might have been more than one paid keynote, more than those two— but one thing that I noticed was they sat in on earlier sessions. They did a really good job of calling back to the earlier sessions. And so, you know, you hear about a callback, it's a widely used technique among, you know, comedians. As an example, they, they'll tell a joke early on in a set, they'll do a callback later in the set. These guys were doing callbacks to things, you know. He mentioned what Lori did. Shout out to Lori from Paint Northwest. She did a tremendous job opening up the show. She always does. Had good jokes, great stage presence, really well prepared. And, you know, he did a really good job of calling back some of the things she had to say. I like that. So for those of you as a speaker, make sure you're absorbing and preparing. And he definitely catered everything to the industry, which doesn't take a lot. He didn't have to know a lot about the payroll industry to talk about the payroll industry. Don't be the guy that gets up on stage or gal and talks about, you know, I just love being here in Detroit when you're not in Detroit. You know, we've all seen the jokes about that. But so, all right. I like this nugget takeaway. The best way to inspire someone is to jump into their world. And so how can we really inspire someone or really help invoke any change if we just don't understand their world? And that kind of goes back to that, like, understanding the, you know, if you're on stage at a payroll conference, understanding the payroll world, understanding what the challenges are, the people in the room. You know, Marcus, as an example, one of the other keynotes, he, he asked for a list of all the websites of, uh, your, or a list, a short list of websites insights of the groups that would be there. He asked for what are some of the challenges we're facing. He wanted to understand the audience and he wanted to understand what are some of the variables. But in reality, most of these things are always the same. And most of our goals are small steps and exponential goals happen by thinking about what's cool, not what's possible. And this is where something I think we really could He's got another sentence I tack onto this. Your goal should take courage to think it. Your goal should take courage to think it. So if I put that in with my exponential goals happen by thinking about what's cool, not what's possible. When he asked the room about ideas for innovative things in the payroll space, I mean, the ideas that came out, while good ideas, they weren't innovative at all. They were really honestly just things that already existed. Anything I heard were just like, you know, oh, that's just something they're not aware of that already exists in our space that they just need to run a quick Google search. Or hey, that's something that they could easily do, it just requires elbow grease, it doesn't require any technological advancements or advanced, uh, brain power to achieve. So, you know, when you talk about your goal should take courage to think it, it's, you know, we're thinking bigger, um, is, you know, what does pay of the future look like? Are people getting paid, you know, through technology? Are they getting paid, you know, in a more biometric way? How does it, you know, how do we remove bank accounts from the equation? How do we remove, you know, employers from the equation? Like, what do things look like if we just blow up the whole system and think about what the exchange of value-based value-based labor in exchange for payment could look like if we removed all of our current constraints and how do we track and measure those things. I think there's just a lot of different ways to start to have these brain and thought exercises and whether they be small things or big things. I think, you know, use Kennedy as the example. Kennedy did the moonshot. He said, here's where we're going. I have no idea how, So they were still, you know, he says, hey, we're going to land on the moon by X date. And, you know, they were still 4 or 5 technological breakthroughs away from getting there by the time he said that, you know, that was a 10-year horizon. He had no idea how he wasn't going to be the one executing, but he then got all the energy, all the focus pointed in one direction. You know, and he likes to say the universe will align once you get clarity on where you're going. And I agree with that. And that's going back to that Jack Canfield book, man. Once I put like a clear vision in place for my life on where I want to be personally and professionally, how I want to spend my time recreationally, what I want my relationships to look like, you know, the universe started to align to give me clarity on how to get there. People started coming into my life, or at least it was more clear to me once I had that vision on how, you know, these people fit into the overall puzzle. And, you know, I think that's a really, really important thing is just setting a vision that's not like one incremental step further than where you are today. Or it's not, you know, if I'm Guru Payroll and HR, I want to be like, you know, XYZ Payroll and HR. Like, think a little bit bigger, think a little bit more outside the box, be a little bit crazy when it comes to setting those goals. And he made a couple of other good points on this. Say your goals to people who will support you. Like find those crazy people in your life that support these types of crazy goals. And I'm happy to be one of those crazy people. If you're hearing this and, and you're looking for somebody who's supportive, man, I got your back. I, I, I love a good crazy idea and I love thinking outside the box and I'd be happy to sit down and brainstorm with you. And, you know, he asked the question and I'll ask the question to you is like, what are you going to do with this information when you get home? To do things you have never done, you have to do things you have never done. And I really love that. And I, I'll leave it there of like, as you listen to this episode, did it inspire you to think about, hey, what are some of the ways we can think differently? What are some of the constraints we can set on our organization? What are some of the ways that we can really separate ourselves from our competition by doing things that others are not doing? And don't think incrementally, think in big terms, and then back it down into the incremental change that you can execute on a day-by-day basis. I'm gonna follow this up with a— I've got, you know, dozens and dozens more, uh, nuggets in here that I want to share. If you really like this, please make sure you hit the, the 5-star or the, the like on YouTube or whatever you're watching it on. It was so inspiring to talk to people who love the podcast and you viewed this as a source of information for helping them to learn more about the payroll industry. Thank you all so much for coming up and taking a moment to share that with me. It really inspired me continue doing this and to make sure that we're putting out quality information that's going to help you and your team. Appreciate you stopping by. Thank you for your time.