Who not How and The Power Of Peer Mentoring

Welcome to Payrollin'. If you own, operate, or work for an independent payroll company, this is the show for you. We talk to the brightest minds to learn what people are doing to create payroll companies that matter and share those tips and best practices with you. I'm looking forward to learning alongside you and finding innovative ways that we can create the future of independent payroll and HR companies. Thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoy the show.

Most people get into the compliance space, you know, they're attorneys or they're CPAs, or, you know, in my business, you know, the legacy business is we print posters. You know, we're more of a SaaS-based company now than we are a physical product-based company. You know, I got into the business with a very basic business plan, and the business plan was a filing cabinet that had lawsuits, and it was all the lawsuits and fines that I had to deal with when I was running my bagel business, which was part of our family business. So prior to founding, you know, which is Elite Business Ventures, and Poster Elite is a division of it is, you know, my family at that time, there was 100 restaurants between Burger Kings and I did the bagel business, which was Brugger's Bagels. Actually, they had some Brugger's Bagels in South Carolina as well.

Yeah, my wife's a huge fan of Brugger's Bagels.

Yeah. And, you know, so I was the sweat equity partner in the family business after working in the Burger Kings and so forth. At the age of 29 and brought— and we signed up and we got the development rights for San Diego to build out Bruegger's Bagels. And, you know, it was 15 stores in 5 years with a production facility. And so, you know, the family was the money, I was the sweat equity. And basically, it was a great experience. I mean, it allowed me to understand real estate because of all the leases involved with it. You know, when I left or sold my shares, we had, you know, over 1,000 employees in the Bagel side of the business. Collectively, there were several thousand. And, you know, my job at the end was really dealing with, you know, just employee-related issues and landlord-related issues. And it's just the— I mean, California, right? So at that time, California was the only state, or one of the only states, that had all this litigious environment. But it seems like that's spread around the country right now. And I think governors in New York and California and even Texas now, which is crazy, you know, compliance has expanded. But So there's two things that I think I would share. The one is being a minority partner, sweat equity partner in a family business. And that touches a lot of nerves, right? So one, there's a lot of, as you know, we founded these different groups, these payroll groups that we help and we coach to run their businesses based upon our experiences. And one of the groups are all, we call them the YPG, right? The Young Payroll Group.. And, you know, a lot of them are— we're sweat equity partners. We brought on investors and how to deal with that. So, you know, I've taken that experience and I help our payroll clients deal on how to buy out partners or how to work with the transactional side of business. And that's a lot of fun. And then there's the dynamics where there's succession. There's a lot of our payroll clients that, you know, basically their dad founded it or their uncle. Or family member and they're working in the business and there's a succession issue. So I have experience in that part of it. But the main experience of the business model is all the lawsuits and fines that I, that I had to deal with running the business. And, um, you know, I founded this company 15 years ago and the vision of the company was 100% to simplify compliance. That was the number one thing, is how do we make it simple. And became from the story of how it got started is we had a production facility that we, we, um, you know, a commissary where we created the, manufactured the bagels, um, the bagel dough. And then we had trucks that were transported to the various locations. And, um, the— we had a worker that was cleaning one of the bagel machines. And as they were cleaning it, another worker was mopping the floor in the factory and saw that, you know, don't want to get water on the socket, so plugged in the machine while the other employee's hand was in the hopper and chopped off a finger. Oh no. So, you know, so at this stage, and keep in mind, you know, we're, we're probably close to 100 restaurants in the family business. So it's a pretty large company. Franchised as well. So you would think that, that there would be a playbook on how to deal with this. You would think, right? So I thought what I did right is I also have a military background as a combat medic. So we, you know, we did perform a little bit of first aid, everything was taken care of, put the finger in a little Ziploc on ice. Yikes. Of course, you know, we may have made cranberry bagels that day. No, I'm just joking.

I know I'm not I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to laugh about the missing finger. I'm hopeful that enough time has passed that this is okay.

So anyhow, we, uh, so you call, you know, you do what you think is right. You call the, um, you know, the ambulance, you call workers' comp. I knew that well enough. And, um, and thank God everything worked out. The work, you know, she, uh, had the finger reattached. And, uh, but the emergency room notified OSHA that there was a serious injury in my facility. So I get a call from OSHA, um, this is Cal/OSHA, but similarly, you know, first cousin of OSHA. And, uh, and the guy says to me, hey, you know, I want to let you know that the emergency room notified me, asked that you had a serious injury, and now we, you know, an obligation to inspect your facility to ensure that it's a safe environment for your workers.. And so I said, yeah, come on in. You know, I got no problem with that. And the guy comes in the following day and introduces himself. And in his introduction, he's, you know, gives me his name, his badge number. He says, are you aware— and this is California-specific what I'm mentioning now— that you're supposed to notify OSHA within 8 hours of a serious amputation. I'm going, I've got to be honest with you, I didn't know that I needed to do that. He takes out his ticket book and he starts writing me up. He says to me, as a matter of fact, you should have these posters that are posted in your workplace that actually shows that. So what I'm going to do is walk around your facility, where are your posters? And I had a wall that had all these little pieces of paper on it and I didn't know what the hell I needed or didn't need. You know, who checks their freaking posters, right? So that was a fight. That was the first $5,000 citation. He actually pointed out on the poster where it says you need to notify OSHA.

Oh wow.

And if you don't have it, and so kind of long story short, he walked around my facility and he cited me over $40,000, you know, in violations. And we had a first aid kit, but when he opened up, it was empty because there's no— nobody checks their first aid kit. So we had a forklift. This is another interesting one, you know, when you're looking at if you're in the payroll business and you're helping an employer and you go to that employer's warehouse and you see a whole bunch of forklifts, more than likely, if it's an entrepreneurial warehouse or manufacturer, that guy bought the forklift from his neighbor or somebody down the road on sale.

Right? Right.

And guess what? He didn't know that everybody has to be certified to drive the forklift. We just— we didn't realize we needed a forklift until we needed a forklift. Right. Yeah, the factory. So I bought one from the neighbor, right? You did one of those deals. And then the OSHA guy goes, well, are you certified? Okay, no, I need to be certified. So nobody tells you this stuff, right, man? Nobody tells you.

So something tells me that he went through a lot of tickets in that book that day.

Oh, he— it was the best one was he says to me, do you have your, your injury illness prevention program, your 'Your IIPP.' And I go, 'Of course I do.' And I pulled out my employment manual, and you know, that basically you're aware of, I mean, in the payroll industry. And I proudly give it to him. He goes, 'No, no, your safety manual. You have to have safety meetings.' I mean, serious? By the way, again, I want to recap. This is a franchise, okay? This is a— we're a big company. We've got CFOs, we've got, you know, district managers.. But we didn't even know at our level that we needed to do this. And that's when the light came on. I said, if I ever start another business, I'm going to make information readily available to other employers, small and medium-sized businesses, to make sure they don't have to go through what I'm going through. And then I basically pulled out the OSHA— I got subscribed, I got the OSHA manual. Started reading the OSHA manual. I'm going, oh my God, you got to do all of this stuff. Nobody told me that. So then when I, um, you know, in another podcast we'll talk about family businesses and, and how to deal with the sweat equity. And but what came out of this is I, I really didn't want to be in the family business anymore. And I started this company 15 years ago based upon that experience that I had that nobody told me what I needed. Nobody told me what I needed. So where this comes into play now, I'm going to talk a little bit for a payroll company. I want to— I want payroll companies to know that they're servicing an employer. So that's one of the things, Matt, in just pivoting the conversation slightly, you know, we help payroll companies book appointments using very creative ways of booking appointments. We have trusted advisor training We just did work now with the most probably the fourth largest payroll company on how to maximize webinars that they have in order to help their salespeople get appointments. And one of the reasons we're so successful, and this has got nothing to do with posters, right? It's got nothing to do with compliance, is again, is to explain to the sales force that they're not there selling something. You see, I wouldn't have experienced the pain and suffering of not only my worker getting injured, which was terrible. In addition to that, you know what a distraction it was having to deal with this OSHA thing. If I had a good sales rep that came into my business and said, hey, I'm going to do your payroll for you, but in addition, I've got all these other services that are going to help you run your business, they would have saved me. And Matt, what I find is most salespeople in the payroll industry and all over the world, you're going to have your super salespeople that are amazing, but the majority just want to sell payroll and run out the door and run out the door hoping that the client is not going to cancel the contract. Instead, instead of looking at the client and going, great, let me show you how else I can help you. And that's one of the messages that I want to really, you know, impact today is the, this, the payroll industry is talks a lot about software, and this is what my software does, and these are the reports that you can pull. That's great, you have to do that. But no, you're really helping an employer pay their workers on time. You're really helping an employer avoid fines and lawsuits. By providing them up-to-date employment manuals. You're really helping an employer by giving them a time and attendance system that's going to prevent them from dealing with Department of Labor wage and hour issues. You're not selling the employer. Now I'm getting back to my story. I suffered because no great salesperson came to me. So, so what? So that's the, that's the how we get— how this whole mindset of how my company runs is 100%. We service the employer by providing that employer solutions that help them avoid fines and lawsuits. Our niche is in the labor law notice business. Um, Matt, we just launched today eposter-service.com, and, uh, it's a remote worker platform for label or postings that we patented. So we patented the platform. We currently have over 100,000 users on it, but this is the first time that we've done a direct piece on it. So we specialize in helping employers. So let's take the remote where we are today in COVID. Most employers don't know that they at risk of having workers no longer in their office but working in a remote environment. Could be a different city, different county, different state. Well, there's legalities involved, and the payroll industry right now could be unbelievable heroes to those employers, and their businesses can grow tremendously by helping employers deal with these complexities. Hmm.

Well, let's, let's pause there for a second. And I want to come back to what you guys do because I think it's important. But, but you mentioned a few things in there that I want to visit. And first and foremost, you kind of touched on something that I love that happens in this industry because it means more business for us, but hopefully for the folks out there that are listening that are regional and localized payroll and HR service providers, is that Too many sales professionals go out and they do what I call wee-weeing all over yourself, right? Like, it's, we are this, we are that, we are great, we are an awesome solution. And to your point, you know, if I'm an ADP rep, they process that payroll twice and then I run for the hills because I already got my commission check and I know that they can't claw that back from me and I'm very happy. And so I'm not worried about upsells. I'm just worried about getting what I can and getting while the getting's good. But, you know, for us to be strategic partners to our clients and to be trusted advisors, we have to have their best interests in mind and the client has to be the hero, not us, right? And that's when we start getting into more you phrasing instead of we phrasing, which is something that we talk a lot about. And I know your team does a great job when you're training, you know, Brittany working with the team. Quick shout out to Brittany out there. She's, she's a grinder. She's awesome. And I know she does a great job training folks on how to sell better and how to use your tools as a way to gain access and all that great stuff. But what I really want to do is kind of fast forward back to today. I think for our Payroll Service Bureau owners out there, you know, you have a really great philosophy around how you run your business. And it hasn't always been this way from what I understand, but I know you're really hyper-focused on the who, not how. And you've also gone through a massive transformation in your business over the last few years. Why don't you share with us a little bit about some of the changes you've made and the impact that's had on your company?

Absolutely, Matt.

You know, no different to a lot of what's probably the listeners or friends of yours in the payroll industry or business owners. You know, when you, when you start your company, it's like having a kid, right?

There's no manual, right?

You never know when the kid needs a diaper change. And it's just a winner's gonna get sick, or it's just, uh, it's a baby, and, uh, and you try to do it all. And, um, so I, um, you know, my first 5 years, um, you know, I, um, it's like painting moving cars. I mean, just the, the one thing that— and, and just, it, it's really stressful because you've got cash flow problems, um, you don't exactly know what your message is. You're having a little bit of fun because you're making some cash selling stuff, but it's just you don't have any structure, okay?

You just, uh, you're just really running your business, um, day to day without any real good vision or planning because you're trying to survive, okay?

You just really, you're just trying to survive.

You got small kids at this stage, you know, you're in your 30s or 40s, you know, you're newly married.

You've got all these forces that are around you and you just don't have white time, thinking time to really understand what you're doing and where you're going. So the first 5 years, I mean, we survived, we did pretty decent, but man, I gained weight, I lost my hair, I got sick.

And that's another thing, you know, you're a lot of illness.

I actually heard recently that most people with back pain are at the ages of 35 to 50, and it's not an orthopedic problem, it's a mental problem that manifests in back pain.

Most back surgeries are 35 to 40-year-olds. So it just, you know, the stress really causes physical issues, you know, sleep issues and health issues. And I just, after 5 years, I know there's got to be a better way. It's just gotta be, there's just no way that this makes sense. And then I joined Vistage, which is a peer group where you're with like-minded owners of companies and CEOs. And then I found that that didn't work for me because I'm a true entrepreneur and I didn't like being in a peer group with hired guns again. Because my brain works differently. I've got dyslexia, I've got ADD. I'm a typical entrepreneur, ADD, ADHD. I'm a founder that, that is the typical founder. And I sat in this Vistage room and they were, um, you know, hired guns, phenomenal, which are good friends. And by the way, they work for me right now, a lot of them in my company. But that was the, the other share is if you're a true entrepreneur, you, you need to be in a collaborative environment with other like-minded people. Because the one thing I found in my first 5 years, how lonely it was, Matt. I mean, my wife, I mean, I love her to death. And, you know, all of us engage on the startups, we bring our wives in, right? Oh my God, talk about another complexity, right? It's a— so, so just, uh, but it just, um, it— I realized I needed a community around me. I realized how, how frustrating it was. And, um, So I tried Vestige for a few years. It was great. It gave me an understanding of how things work. And then, funny enough, it was, um, a couple of payroll clients, um, I think it was Andy in, um, New Mexico, who I spoke to at one of the conferences. And I kept on asking entrepreneurial founders, what are you doing in your— how do you, how do you deal with all this stress in life. I mean, it's just too much. How do you— and, uh, the name, uh, Strategic Coach came up a few times. And, um, you know, so I decided, okay, I'm going to look into that. And I joined Strategic Coach. It's expensive. Okay, there's different, there's different levels. And, you know, um, it's a commitment. And, um, I just decided that if I'm going to make a change, I, I'm going to have to be coached. The best athletes in the world. And this is something that, you know, Tiger Woods, you know, when he won the first Masters, the next day he wanted to improve his swing, right? Top of his game. I realized, okay, I need a coach. I gotta learn how to do this. And, um, so that was the one thing, is I joined this, this, this community called Strategic Coach, which has done wonderful things. And the other thing is I started understanding that I'm not running my meetings effectively. I'm not running the business efficiently. And I came across EOS. You know, some people call it Traction, EOS. And I looked at both the models and I'm going, okay, EOS is an operating system to run your business. And I read the books and stuff and I'm going, okay, here's a formula, here's a system that I can bolt onto. And Strategic Coach is for self-development. And I didn't have a lot of money to waste. Young kids, colleges, be pre-saving for college. But I made the investment and it was a big investment. You know, collectively it was about $60,000 a year. Okay. But I looked at it, I'm going, you know what, that's what my kids' college is going to cost. I'm going to have to invest this in my 18-year-old whose brain's not developed yet. And I'm not going to invest it in me. And that was my mindset shift. I'm going, I mean, my kids need braces or whatever. We spend tens of thousands of dollars on our kids without blinking an eye, but I'm not spending any money on, on my self-development, on my business. So I made that commitment, and that's the first thing, was the commitment, right? If you don't, if you don't have the commitment, you don't have the courage to make the commitment, you're just never going to make it happen. And then we installed this EOS process And it just has changed my life. It just— I don't think that I could ever work as an investor in companies as well with any company that doesn't use a process or a system like EOS, which is based on the Rockefeller Habits. There are other ones. There's 3 or 4 other ones that are out there. There's individuals that use it, but it's all based upon Rockefeller Habits.. And, um, so that was the first thing. It gave me a platform on how to structure the company, how to have, how to take the vision and put it down on paper. Once we got there, Matt, then I looked at it and it became clear that there are some things we really shouldn't be doing. And that's another thing that happens when you're in the weeds and you, you're building your company. You still do things in your company that you did when you needed to do it, and 5 years later you're still doing it. So part of the EOS process is you have to document every single process and procedure. And what I found, and this is one of the shares that I'd like to share, whoever is listening to this, is most companies will have the person doing the task do the documentation. That is an absolute mistake. And I wasted a lot of time and money on that because what I realized is that person doing the task has all these shortcuts and tribal knowledge that if they left tomorrow and somebody else had to sit in their seat, the documentation makes no sense.

So how did you overcome that?

I made it, I realized, I identified the problem. Okay. So the issue was I couldn't get documentation that was clear out of my team. So I identified the problem. How I solved the problem is again, I had to commit and I hired a project manager, cost me about $70,000 a year, that her one job was to basically worked with every division of the company. And we took our, you know, our most critical top 5 processes that we had. And we said, okay, you gotta go and see how do we do this. And the end result is that you have to document this thing that it is so well documented that I'm gonna hire a temp that can do the job without ever being in that seat.. So I outsourced it to a project manager that could go and understand how it works. And then we documented and we put it into a system called Process Street. What an unbelievable— I think we pay like $200 a year for Process Street and it runs our whole business for us. So that's important, is we first, we identified, so we optimize the process. Then we— and by the way, I learned this from a guy by the name of Ari Mezal. Ari Mezal has a podcast called Less Doing. Brilliant guy. And so he talks about automate— you have to optimize and then you automate. Okay, so using technologies like Zapier and, you know, basically moving data from one place to another is very affordable and simple, but you need the who, okay, to do this. So, Matt, if you think that you the guy is the business owner that has to do this, that's the other mistake I made. No, you hire somebody who's the who to do the how. So I hired somebody to make sure that the documentation is done. We put it into a system called Process Street. So for example, Matt, do you understand when a poster changes So if you take a look at the California label or poster, I think it's got like 21 different notices on it. There's 6 or 7 different divisions of the government that we have to track, etc. But when a poster change, we have to update, we have to do the research, we have to update the poster, we've got to do the artwork, we have to proof it, we have to throw away the old posters, we've got to update our systems. It's maybe 100 steps in doing it. With multiple people. On that one process, I used to have 6 people working on that process. We now have half a person. So we had 6 humans, average wage, probably making between, I'd say between $40,000 and $70,000 a year, individuals working on that process. That now I have half a person doing it. Because we have workflow management so well designed and it works. It works. And I know it works because I see a dashboard every day and the dashboard tells me what's off track. I don't care what's on track.

Where are you seeing that dashboard?

What's that in?

What's the dashboard in?

So, so that's— it's data visualization. I use a a product called Cyfe, cyfe.com. And what I love about Cyfe is you can create a dashboard from multiple technologies into one sheet. So for example, um, I have— we, you know, we use, um, Zoho as a platform, so I have some dashboards from the CRM inside. But sometimes we use a Google Sheet Well, guess what? It shows up in my Cyfe dashboard. It's again, very inexpensive, world-class technology that you get to see everything that you need to see. But it's in the setup. It's in the setup. You've got to know what you're looking for. None of these technologies work and none of these systems work, Matt, if you don't know what the end looks like. And you have to have the ability to articulate it to a project manager or to a who that will figure out the other who's potentially to do the how's, right? So Matt, we went from close to 50 employees and we were doing maybe 40% of the revenue we're doing now to where I have, you know, if I take myself off the payroll and my wife off the payroll and my father-in-law, who's an aeronautical engineer retired, who fixes our machines. I think we've got 15 employees. And, you know, we're a 7-figure company and we print and ship close to 700,000 posters a year. So I've innovated, optimized, and outsourced manufacturing. Matt, if you— today's the, the launch of ePosterService.com, the remote worker platform. It's an integrated platform that basically, if you sign up to this or your employers, your, your customer signs up to us and they load their— a, a list of their remote workers, it will populate the right notices, the correct notices on a federal level. A state level, a county level, and a city level for that remote worker in that remote worker's dashboard for them to sign off. And I patented that system, and I didn't hire one person. We just rolled out a— was probably the fourth largest payroll company. It was about 35,000 posters to their clients. It was over a million dollar deal. We didn't hire one employee. We shipped out 35,000 posters in 10 days from, from, because we private label it. And we didn't hire one employee.

I love that. You hit on so many great things in there. So, so I love the outside perspective piece, right? Whether you hire somebody, whether you work with a consultant, whether you— we've struggled with this over the years as well, right? Where it's, you know, we've tried to design processes for the last 7 years and with minimal success, we have reams and reams of things that are documented that new people don't even look at when they come on board. And, you know, it just sits there dormant and then the new person rewrites it. And then finally, you know, we bucked up like you and we hired some outside people to look at it with a new lens and to start to document things. And you can already see the difference in how they view a workflow from their experience of creating workflows for a living versus us who are just trying to make things fit in a way of all we know, which is only our business really at the end of the day. So, so the who, not how is so important when it comes to that. And that's just incredible. Results you guys have seen. And I want to come back to you because I know we only got a few minutes left here, the peer mentoring piece and the relationship with peers just in general. And I want to talk about it both from the informal and the formal perspective. You and I have a mutual friend, Matt Aumholtz. He's been on the podcast before and tremendous guy. And, you know, I met Matt, I just cold outreach to him on LinkedIn in 2015 when I started my business and said, hey, I just started a payroll company. It looks like you guys are doing some really cool stuff. Would you be willing to just share some knowledge with me. And I've known him ever since. We didn't meet in person until 2 years ago at an IPPA event. And, um, you know, I have several dozen of those stories at this point with people that I've just met across the country. And now some of them in person, some of them here and there and everywhere that we share information on the regular, you know, over email, over chat, over messaging, whatever it is, just to best practice share, system share. You, when you started talking about the systems, that's where I always want to dig in. Okay. What is Cypher? How do you spell that? Let me put that down. We're going to look into that. Process Street. Oh, this is the third Oh, there's a person who's mentioned Process Street. We better take a look at that. And some of those things are great, but it's also to your point, like, how do your workflows look? How much should we be paying for this type of role? There's so much great intel that can be shared just even in that informal capacity that has tremendous value from people that have been in this industry. And the one thing, you know, the reason we created this podcast in the first place is everybody in this industry is so willing to share. We're all fighting the sort of common enemies out there, right? We've all got the big nationals on our target list. We're not worried about fighting each other unless we're right next door to each other. And even then most of us are sort of, uh, coopetition for the most part. And so I urge people out there, don't be scared to reach out to others and don't be scared to even start some of these informal mastermind groups to start. And going back, for those of you that have listened to multiple episodes, you're— Paul's probably the third person to mention EOS, and literally every great business I am familiar with runs on EOS. Not everyone, but every one of my friends, peers, mentors that runs a great business, they use Traction, they use EOS. It is— you can self-implement pieces of it, you can get it up and running. And then to Paul's point, when you're ready and you have the budget and you can, you can pay for an implementer, then you can roll out the whole thing. And I've watched people go through the progression. We use it internally. We're in the process of— we've been using a bastardized version of it for years, or the process of updating it now, now that we have a more formalized leadership team in place. But, but let's go back to more of this formal peer mentoring group, because I love what you're talking about. The YPG group, tremendous people. The impact of people in our industry getting together and sharing best practices and benchmarks versus being in a Vistage or even just a generic mastermind group, which I'm in a couple and they're tremendously valuable. And it is great to get the perspective of people that are not in our industry. You don't want to get too isolated, but at the same time, you can't replace learning from people who have done what you're trying to do. I recently went to the YPG group and we were probably the— we definitely were the smallest company in the room. And I was happy about that because I was like, great, I have the most to gain by being here, right? Like, I can learn the most from these guys. I have nothing to share with them, but they don't know that. I'll just fake it till I make it. And so why don't you share a little bit about the peer mentoring?

I'll pull back again into the why I created this peer group, why I founded it. You know, Matt, if you're— if you look at your customer base, your— the lowest level of relationship you're going to have with them is you're a vendor, okay? They're just buying your services. If you want to upgrade your relationship, then you'll have a consultative partnership with them, and you'll help them run their business more efficiently and effectively. I help them avoid fines and lawsuits and, and deal with their business. That's another level of relationship. The highest level of relationship you can have is to mentor them to run their businesses and their lives better. The moment you can put yourself into a position where you go from selling a widget as a vendor to being a coach, you've all of a sudden become a thought leader in your industry organically. But the most important thing is you're really helping your clients succeed. And that's why you need to wait. If you don't wake up every morning with the why you succeed, why you want to be in business and what is your passion project. You see, for me, Matt, nothing makes me happier than seeing young entrepreneurs taking a little bit of risk and helping them avoid going through what I went through. That is my purpose. That's what keeps me going every day. I love it. I'm currently mentoring, I think, about 15 different of my clients right now. And when I say mentoring, I'm no freaking professor. I'm just showing them this is the AI you need to use for copywriting. This is the conversational AI you need to use for, um, for your email marketing. This is the Cyfe dashboard. This— I'm just sharing my innovation that I'm working on. So how this came about is same as you just mentioned, what a community this payroll industry is.. And, you know, we've been in it now for 6, 7 years, maybe 8 years, and they're friends. I mean, most of my clients are friends, and they, they, um, and I'm talking about big companies, medium companies, small companies. There's some fabric in the— there's something in the water that the payroll industry drinks that allows this community to share, to be open, and, and just really amazing.. And of course, the two associations, IPPA and TPG, hold everything together. So this was 4 years ago. So Jeff Garrison, we mentioned Traction. Jeff has his own model, which I think for the payroll industry is better than Traction. He calls it Results on Purpose, where he's taken the best of EOS, he's taken the best of other models and platforms, and he's created an EOS type of a model to help payroll companies succeed. So I hired Jeff initially to help me with my company, and he did such a great job getting us started that I sat down with him. I said, I'm so blessed that I have this business. I love my— I mean, I surround myself with the smartest. You mentioned Brittany, right? I mean, you know, one of them. I have I, there isn't one employee that I have that's not an A-player that I, I wouldn't— I mean, I'm just blessed every day to work with the team that I have, and I'm blessed every day to work with the community of clients that I have. So I said, how do I give back? And, um, so I, I said, okay, there has to be a commitment. With every commitment, there's an investment, right? So you, you're seeing a theme here, right? So I said, okay, well How am I going to put some skin in the game? And I realized that this community was necessary. What you just experienced, one of the groups that we have that we put together. And I basically said, okay, I don't want to be the who to do this. I'm not a great facilitator. That's— I'm not that guy. I'm a great visionary and a connector, and I make things happen. So I sat down with Jeff, and I actually financed Jeff for the first year. So I made it worth his while not to go look for another job because he's in a transition stage. And I compensated him for the first year out of pocket to be able to build enough members to be able to support the concept that you, you know, visited a few weeks ago. So, you know, looking back at it right now, so I'm not I don't monetize it. I make no money in it. I'm not involved in it. It's a total who, not how, right? So I did put some cash up front to get Jeff up and running, but basically it's sponsored by Poster Elite. Okay, so my brand is out there because let's talk about the branding side. So everybody in these groups— look, Matt, you didn't get to know me and didn't know everything that I did until you were in this peer group. So yeah, I don't spend money in traditional marketing. This is how I invest my funds. Okay. This is how we go to market is we trusted advisors to this community and we've built a reputation of being trusted advisors. It just happens that we're in the label or poster business. So that was the vision. Now, if I go back 4 years, you've seen, you know, you look at that group that you were in the room with. Look at the transitions in their lives since they— you should interview each one of them and ask them what was their lives before joining this group and what is their lives like now after major decisions. There's been transactions of buying out founders, buying out partners, merging with companies, dealing with different software issues, but the The group is connected. There's trust, there's communication, there's texting going on. It's a board of advisors of like-minded. And that, if you ask me what makes me happy, that we have hundreds of thousands of subscriptions, or do I have these groups? This is what gets my energy up. I have an amazing team that helps run my business, but this is what I want to do more of, man. Is just to help, you know, in particular this community, business owners, managers. So I love the salespeople. I love the loneliest— the next group I'm going to found that I'm going to help are the sales managers. They got the loneliest freaking job in the world, worse than the entrepreneur. And they can— they never— they, they have the toughest. And I want to create a group of non-competing sales payroll company sales managers to connect the way that we connected, you know, last week with you. That's awesome. That's what Posture Elite wants to give back to this community.

That's wonderful. Yeah, and I can attest to the power of the group. I, I defined it as an accelerated learning course when I got back, which I think Jeff really liked that explanation of what what took place in the room when surrounding yourself with other entrepreneurs who have done what you want to do or are trying to do what you want to do, and you're all working together. As a matter of fact, we saw one circumstance where literally the advice this individual was given inside that room could mean the difference of millions of dollars at the point of exit. No joke, millions of dollars in the next few years for this individual based on some guidance they were given in that room that they would not have thought about on their own. So the power of surrounding yourself with people who the right whos, right? We'll keep on the Dan Sullivan theme. And I just read the book, for those of you that haven't checked out the book, Who Not How. It's a tremendous reminder and a great little guide to keep top of mind that, hey, you don't need to learn how to do everything. You need to surround yourself with the right whos. And sometimes those whos are just the people that can mentor you. Sometimes they're the people that can do something for you. You can do something for them. Sometimes you're their teammates. It could be a variety of things, but, uh, really exciting stuff. So I highly recommend for those of you that don't work with Poster Elite, we're a Poster Elite client. We love them. They're fantastic to work with. They make it super simple to provide our clients with labor law posters. Team's wonderful, systems are wonderful. It makes it simple for us and we don't have to mess with it and keep up with all the different great stuff that Paul's built. We can just set it and forget it. And I don't even know what happens. So much like you, I got a who that handles that. It's not me.

So, so we, we, your who that does the how for your clients.

That's right. That's right. I got a who internally that makes it where I don't have to know what you guys do. But no, thank you so much for your time today, Paul. It was really a delight to get to, to share, uh, or learn, share your story a little bit more with, with some, some new folks and just learn a little bit more about you myself.

I love it. And Matt, you know, if we ever get to talk again, if you go to eposter-service.com, I, I launched that business, um, with so creatively using Who Not How. The speed, the time, and the cost will shock you. And if you go to eposter-service.com, you'll see how cool this thing is. And, uh, most probably other companies would take them half a million dollars and 2 years to build it. Um, I got it up and running in 90 days. And, uh, not the way— I'm not talking about the website, I'm talking about the whole experience of APIs integrating systems, making a front end talk to a back end with a, um, an opportunity for resellers and affiliates. 90 days.

That's tremendous. Who knows how everybody will check it out. I'm sure you post your service.com, and I know I will as soon as we're done. And I appreciate you, brother. Thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you. Cheers. Have a good day.