Matt Vaadi makes the case for independent service bureaus to join the IPPA conference. Instead of competing, bureaus benefit from sharing operational practices like ACH file handling and tax processing. Michael Young leads a compliance and money-movement session.
The idea that us service bureaus are competitors is, is a false, a false idea in my mind, right? I'm not worried that you and I are going to be up against the same client. And even if we are up against the same client, they're going to pick one of us and then we'll go after the next client and they'll pick— they might pick you the first time and the next client will pick me, right? Like, I'm just really not worried about that. I'm not losing clients to other independent service bureaus, and I don't think any of us really are. We're losing clients to the big guys. So that being said, if I tell you how I do my tax filing, you might gain some efficiencies or I might gain some efficiencies, but nobody loses, right? Nobody loses. So why would you try to invent that wheel on your own? And that's the kind of thing that the IPPA allows you to do, is to build those connections in the industry so that everybody wins. So why it's important to go to the conference is you're going to be in a room of people that have the same business challenges that you have, that are doing the same thing as you're doing. And if you share with them how you send ACH files at the end of the day and they share with you how you process taxes and each of you shave 5 minutes a day off of your processes, everybody wins. Nobody loses. I don't get more clients from you because I now do your tax process. Right? If I assign clients to my CSRs the same way that you do, that doesn't cause me to get more business from you. That does— you don't lose anything by sharing that with me. And that is the spirit behind the IPPA. And those are the things that you can gain. People are just— all of us service bureaus are kind of sitting in these independent ways. And like you said, you, you want to be different. That's, that's cute, but there's no need to be different, right? You might be different in the way you service or your culture, but in the base layer of what you do, why reinvent how to send ACH files, right? Why reinvent how to print and distribute checks? Like, what check stock do you use? If I share with you my check stock vendor and you save 2 cents a paper, I don't lose anything by sharing that, right? Like, you win. And so that's the idea and the spirit behind it. And you can really only get that by being in a room with people and having conversations. Independent of those types of conversations that kind of happen organically when you're in a room with that many people that do the same thing you do, there's some amazing content being delivered both on the sales side and on an operations side. We're facilitating some of those conversations so you don't have to go up to strangers and say, "Hey, how do you— what CRM do you use?" Right? There's some facilitated conversations around that. And the another big thing that we're going to be talking about at the conference is the upcoming regulations and the tax movement or the money movement state by state. So Michael Young is going to be doing a— sorry, doing a presentation on that compliance thing. And that's information you're not going to get anywhere else.
