Chasing Financial Freedom
Chasing Financial Freedom
Ep 312 | Empower Your Business with These Three Transformative Growth Strategies
What if you could transform your business’s payment processing while making a meaningful impact in your community? Join us as we chat with Jeff Maine, the visionary founder of Pay Proudly, who shares his incredible journey from a finance student to a powerhouse in the credit card processing industry. Jeff opens up about his father’s advice, the pivotal role in his entrepreneurial path, and the unique culture of giving back that defines Pay Proudly. Discover how Jeff and his wife, Renee, have successfully built and sold multiple companies and are now on a mission to bring clarity and intentionality to business owners and inspire others to do the same.
Transitioning from in-person support to digital services can be challenging, but Jeff reveals the secrets to maintaining a personal touch in an increasingly virtual world. From hiring the right team to leveraging technology like CRM systems and video guides, learn strategies to ensure your business thrives in a remote setting. The discussion also touches on the invaluable role mentors and business coaches can play, offering a glimpse into future episodes focused on this crucial aspect of business growth.
Lastly, we highlight the power of networking and mentorship for budding entrepreneurs. Jeff shares insights on the benefits of informal mentorship through regular interactions with industry veterans, offering fresh perspectives and solutions to common challenges. We also explore how AI tools can revolutionize payment processing solutions, fostering collaboration and building strong business partnerships. Tune in for an enlightening conversation that promises to equip you with the tools to navigate your entrepreneurial journey successfully.
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Hey guys, ryan Emmett from Chasing Financial Freedom Podcast. Hope you guys are having a great day. Welcome to 2025. We're kicking off the year with Jeff Main. He is the founder and CEO of Pay Proudly, which is a payment processing company which is near and dear to my heart. Since we're in this transactional space with our real estate, this will be a great conversation to kick off the year. So, jeff, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me today, ryan, looking forward to talking about such a fun topic.
Speaker 1:You are more than welcome. Thank you for the wait. I know it was a little bit of a wait, but I look forward to the conversation.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:So before we get to rocking and rolling and going down some rabbit holes, as I say, can you tell listeners a little bit about who you are?
Speaker 2:Yeah, jeff Mayne, I actually finished. I studied finance in college and got into the credit card processing world right out of college and it's one of those industries. I just fell into it. We were actually having this discussion last night with a group and I didn't go to school to study to sell credit card processing. But here I am, 25 years later, still in this industry.
Speaker 2:It's just one of those industries I fell into and always wanted to own my own business and I had a push from my dad to start my own business and to go with it before I had a wife and kids and many responsibilities. And so I took his advice and, pretty much out of college, started my first business and since then we've built and sold a few processing companies. We built and sold a check ACH, check 21 company which kind of round. I was in a partnership and about three years ago we were at a stage where the partnership was the two partners were ready to do different things and maybe in one of those, and so we had a mutual split and he started his own new company and I started my own new company and and that's where proudly came into effect and we were basically my wife and I were sitting at the kitchen table and we were talking about hey, what does the industry need? What are we going to do? We were so young, we want to own businesses and keep doing what we're doing.
Speaker 2:And I just said the biggest problem in this industry is clarity. It's just business owners don't understand payment processing. They don't understand why they pay what they pay. They don't understand there's more options than just one the rates, the fees, the interchange, the categories, the different point of sales, the different abilities to take credit cards. They don't understand it. And so I said I'd like to start a company that were more intentional with our customers, that we know them, they know us, they have a place to call, knowing that we're never going to grow as big as we would on the alternative of just going out and signing everybody that we can sign, but being more intentional and signing those and being more of a consultant with our customers. And so that's what we sought after to do and we started writing our mission statement that day, and the first part of our mission is bringing clarity to our merchants and then the pay proudly the name came from.
Speaker 2:The second part of our mission is to support our local community through payments and we do that by our business or paying proudly, and that was a value to Renee and I. That's something we want to do. We want to do it from the day one of starting this business, of giving back and doing something different than what other industry, other people in our industry are doing, and so that was going to be more, but just something. Obviously we were going to promote it and market it and tell people about it, but we it wasn't our intention for it to become as big of a deal as it has become. We have employees today that want to work for us because of what we're doing in our giving.
Speaker 2:We never saw that. We never saw that happen. It gives you a really good outlook on humanity today and where we're going and and other businesses that looked at what we're doing and saying, hey, why don't we do this? And so it's been fun. I don't like and my employees would be the first ones to tell you I don't like the recognition for the giving, because I just think that's something that we should all do. But obviously it comes with it and I wish we could do it behind the scenes and never tell anybody, but it's part of our company.
Speaker 1:It's part of our company, it's part of our DNA and it's who we are. So when did you found? When did when I got more coffee? When was the company founded?
Speaker 2:So we're in our third year.
Speaker 1:We're just finishing our third year of pay probably Nice. And from the time you started to now, are you on your path where you want to be in trying to make that difference in this space, or do you think there's more challenges ahead?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we were pretty intentional. We wrote a vision statement out at the beginning of the business of our growth model and how we were going to grow. And I had been at a level of sitting at a desk most of the day and not back into sales, and so my vision was to grow the business organically. I didn't want to just throw a lot of money at it and go hire a bunch of people. I wanted to get back out and get my feet wet and go listen to merchants and actually do the sales. And so that's what we did and I hired my first person year one to sell with me.
Speaker 2:After I built up enough residual to pay that person, I had the ability to not pay myself, which made it easier. Plus, I owned an office building, so we can office out of there. So I obviously had some benefits that other new entrepreneurs didn't have. But we were able to organically grow the business and now we're up to five people. We're still growing slowly, but we've been able to double our size every single year that we've been in business. And that's our goal. Right Every year is to double our size again, and obviously that's going to become where we're not going to be able to do that and we know that. But our goal is to continue to hire people and grow no-transcript medical, but dental is our big, our big markets.
Speaker 2:90% of dental offices throughout the country are run on one of three softwares, maybe four software packages, and we have full integrations to those software packages. So now we're hiring people within that space. We've got a new hire that's starting next month, february 1st we're super excited about and she's not local but she comes from the dental world and her whole focus is going to be dental sales, marketing to dental offices, going to dental conventions and working with dental offices.
Speaker 1:That's good, so I got to ask the question back up. So, from going from your local market now integrating outside of your local market, what are the challenges that you're experiencing and going through?
Speaker 2:Yes, obviously, your challenge is you can't hop in your car and run over to the establishment when they're having an issue, and so you have to support those organizations over the phone, and you have to learn how to do that and you have to hire staff and you have to have people that are trained and have a process in place to support those merchants without just driving over there and walking in and fixing a machine over there and walking in and fixing a machine. And so that's our challenge. Right Is just getting those proper processes in place and how we handle it, how we handle issues. And when do we take it to the level of saying, all right, just ship them a new machine or ship them this or handle it, just walking through that process?
Speaker 1:How has that gone since you guys have migrated out of that local? And the only reason I'm asking because I'm a small business owner, I know those challenges. I'm just curious to hear in this space how it's going when everything goes from. I have it in person, I can touch the person, I could be in front of them and now I'm remote and it brings other nuances in to get the problem resolved.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a couple of things with that right. So obviously, with my years of in this industry, we give that local support, walk into businesses and really know the owner and know the employees and the employees could call us, instead of going to the owner to call us if there's an issue, that we can take care of things. And what we found is by answering the phone and by doing we can do it remotely. We don't have to do it in person, but you have to train for that and you have. You have to train for that and you have to have a process for that and you have to know what you're doing and when you do it. And because that client needs to have that same feeling when you take care of them, that you're taking care of them as you're walking in the door. And I believe it's all in training. I believe it's all in the staff and how they answer the phones and how they treat the customer.
Speaker 2:And sometimes we're dealing with money. Right, you deal with money. People get very emotional about money, especially when money's delayed or machines won't process or there's a lot of emotion around that. So you can deal with people that you think are your friend and all of a sudden they're not your friend right now because they're upset, and so you have to learn how to deal with those people. And that's a lot easier to deal with when I'm standing there face to face with you than I'm on the phone with you, but it's you have to learn how to do that over the phone and it's hiring the right people, it's having the right environment to deal with that and those are challenges. We've learned how to manage people and even from a standpoint of us looking at disc profiles of people and what kind of personality tests they have and really going after people that can manage that kind of high level of stress and people being upset and having to walk them through it, and it's trial and error, a lot of it.
Speaker 1:On the shows. I ask everybody this question, and I think there's a couple in here, but I'd love to be able to hear your thoughts. What would be three nuggets that you could share with entrepreneurs, small business owners that are somewhat in the same position that you are going from a local to more of a outside of their local market space? What would be three things you could share with them to help them grow their business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the biggest things that we see and it really overlaps with your local businesses. The right employees are huge. It's the right people that are interacting with those calls. You're going to need a better CRM package, something that manages your business. I'm a big proponent and don't be afraid to invest in that if you're going to use it. If you're not going to use it, don't invest in it. But you need something from a ticketing system, from a follow-up, because if you have a phone call and you don't follow up with it, you're going to lose that personal touch. You have to follow up. You've got to make those phone calls. You have to and you need a system that's reminding you and how that whole process goes through, the ranking and really setting those processes.
Speaker 2:I can't stress enough we work with a business coach who's really instilled that in me is having a process for everything. It doesn't matter if it's as simple as a checking account change. Have a checklist of what you do and how you do a checking account change and that people can go look at that. And even if it's a video, if you do, you have a customer in our world right that called us and says, hey, my machine has the wrong time on it. How do I fix that? Instead of walking them through it, shoot them as quick. Here's a video of us doing it on a machine, if you just watch this video and you can picture this.
Speaker 2:And so we've been big on processes and videos and documents in our document library that we can just shoot over to people and that's made a huge difference to our customers and that we use that stuff. We don't use it as much on a local level because we almost baby those customers too much. We've enabled them to just think that we'll just run in and fix it when they're really capable of doing what we're doing. But we've just taught them to not have to do it. You know, my wife, if you go make the kid's bed, you're just. It's not that they can't do it, right, they can do it, but if you do it they're not going to, and it's the same thing.
Speaker 1:You said something in there that I think a lot of people talk about or actually utilize. You said you had a mentor slash coach. I do so. Can we talk a little bit about that? But then also I want to circle back on that and start from the beginning. Most times because I was there starting out as a business owner, entrepreneur, you don't have the extra capital for a mentor or a coach. Yeah, how do we work through that and get to that place? Because I 100% believe having a coach, having a mentor, is game changing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do too, and there's different realms of that right. So we have a coach that we pay and that we work with and they do all kinds of stuff for us. They don't help us in sales and marketing, but high level conversations with anybody, because they're on this shit by themselves and having that coach gives them that ability to do that and it's been instrumental in my success, I believe. But I think for that entrepreneur that is in a startup phase that doesn't have the capital for that, I think there are tons and tons of people that would go have coffee with them once a week or once a month and would be a voice of just throwing things at them and having a mentor. There's a lot of successful people out there that would love to do that for people.
Speaker 2:I do it with people all the time, but we'll go just talk about business and talk about what you're doing, and they might see something different than you. But something that I even still do today, even with having a business coach, is I make it a point once a month to have coffee with somebody that I just go talk business with right, that we can just talk about. Hey, what are you doing? What are you seeing, what do you think? And it could people in totally different industries. It doesn't. It could be a home builder, it could be a, it can be anybody, because they're still dealing with a lot of the same type of things that you're dealing with, just on a different level. They still have the same employment issues, they have the same tax strategy and just anything like that. Hey, what are you doing for this? Or what are you doing with? And a lot of business owners, with other business owners, are open book about that stuff and you can learn so much from having those conversations.
Speaker 1:I think it's invaluable because when I started I didn't have a mentor, but I found a group online that I was able to meet up with connect and then I found some other small business owners that we would just meet every other week coffee, library, wherever and just shoot the bull. Like you said about business. It helps and you can continue to grow from that. But then you have to step up from that point and there are other resources out there that you can actually utilize for coaching. You just have to figure out what is your, how bad do you want it and what can you do to offset some of those costs. Because ultimately, you're going to want to pay for a good coach because he or she or they could help you out in many different directions and you just don't know what you're missing. Because, like you said, when you're on the boat, when you're on, when you're in the boat by yourself, it's tough, but when you have other people to help you with that perspective, it opens up a whole nother world, and that's what happened with me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think those are things that you just can't talk about with your employees and you need that voice, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs get caught in this rut of I'm successful, I can do it on my own, I run this business, I don't need that, but I think they're still missing a big piece of what they could become, because we're real minded and we need somebody to open up our horizons a little bit for us and show us a different way.
Speaker 1:The biggest challenge that I have, and I still do, is I can't be the person that slows down the business. If I'm in it, I'm doing a disservice, because I need to be looking at that larger view, figuring out the things that are going to generate more revenue, but also being focused on the things that I enjoy doing, and that's one of the biggest, one of the largest challenges I still deal with, because I want to still try to do everything and it doesn't work that way. I need to focus on the things that I'm good at, that I enjoy the rest of it, train develop and hand those off to somebody else that can actually excel at it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a huge issue for most business owners, because there's a lot of things right that it's just easier to do it rather than handing it off. But if you hand it off, then the next time it comes up it gets handed off. And I think the other big thing that the business coaches help me with a lot is most entrepreneurs have what we call a red ball syndrome. Right is most entrepreneurs have what we call a red ball syndrome. Right, it's that red ball that comes by and we are always got our eyes open, looking at other opportunities and different things and him sometimes just saying hey, come back, focus on what you do well and what you know you do well and how you make money. And sometimes you need that rain to be rained back in, because you'll lose sight on being that guy that you're just talking about, of running your business and growing your business, and because it's easy to look at other opportunities all the time. That's what our minds are designed to do.
Speaker 1:Correct, and one of the things that I'm focusing on this year is really being hyper-focused on my top three things that I want to accomplish, and it's not just for the year. I'm breaking it down into smaller goals, to where I'm doing a weekly goal or a daily, weekly and then monthly, and then that'll translate into a quarterly and then translates into a semi-annual. I've learned with myself and my mindset if I don't break it down in smaller steps myself and my mindset, if I don't break it down in smaller steps I will take the problem or this or whatever I'm trying to accomplish and put it into these huge steps, and then I get overwhelmed and then it doesn't happen If I don't break it down and see progress. I've got a lot of challenges.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so something from our business coach that we do with all of our staff is what we call quarterly goals, 12 week goals. We have three every quarter and then, based on each of those three you have what is it going to take you to get to that goal? Steps right To get to that goal, and we green, yellow, red light all those steps. And then it's something we talk about every week in our team meetings where are you at with this and what do you need help with, and how do you need to get to the end result? And so we do the exact same thing. We just start at the 12 and then we drill it down to where we're working on it throughout that 12 weeks to get to the end result of being all green.
Speaker 1:Love it. Yeah, I think that's great. We're coming to the bottom of the hour, but I'd like to ask you a couple more questions. I know you said you're just starting to get outside your local market. Are you only going, are you one only focused on medical, or will you bring on new clients that are outside of the medical?
Speaker 2:space area that has questions about processing or interested in just learning more, just having conversations. We're open to have those conversations. That we've signed a lot of business outside of our local market, just like that. When I talk about verticals and outside of our local market, when we're spending our marketing dollars, we're not going to go market to the masses, we're going to market to certain verticals because obviously we're going to have better results with that, and so that's how. And dental is one of our big markets, so that's how we're, that's how we market. But but yes, we're open to have conversations, and that's from retail businesses to home-based businesses, to any type of business.
Speaker 2:If you need to take credit cards with your cell phone or if you need to take credit cards, quickbooks is a big one. We do a ton of business that people use QuickBooks for payments and they think that's their only option. We have a full QuickBooks integration that we can integrate to QuickBooks, and we can even integrate to QuickBooks where, when that invoice gets sent to your customer, we're giving them a cash price and a credit card price where you're eliminating your credit card fees. So there's a lot of different things that are happening in our industry that are changing things that are all compliant with MasterCard Visa rules and regs, and I really encourage business owners that this is an industry that you need to learn a little bit about because it represents a big portion of your revenue.
Speaker 2:The majority of businesses 90% of their payments is electronic, and so take a little bit of time and talk to people, and when you're talking to payment processors, these payment processors should be asking you a lot of questions. They need to learn about your business, because how you take credit cards right now, a plumber takes credit cards in two different ways, right, and so I have to learn how are you doing your business and how are you taking credit cards and what kind of invoicing do you do? And do you have inventory? Do you? What are you doing, and and. So if I'm not asking those questions, I'm not going to be able to give you the correct answers.
Speaker 1:I love it. And if individuals, business owners, entrepreneurs want to reach out to you, where would be the best place to connect with you?
Speaker 2:AI tool. We'll do a proposal for you, we'll send it right back to you, we'll read your statements of what you're doing today and you can use that to get better rates with your current processor. If that's what you choose to do, that's fine. Or if you choose to do business with us, we'd love to have your business and we'd love to talk to you about how that works.
Speaker 1:I will also put your website in the show notes so people can reach out to you directly. So that'd be great. Sir, thank you very much for coming on. I love what you're doing. You're giving back and you're actually wanting to work with businesses. You really want to be a partner, so thank you for doing that.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me and I look forward to having conversations with any of your listeners that wish to have a conversation. Yes, sir, thank you, thank you.
