Building Payworks: Barb Gamey on Growth, Culture, and Community

You mentioned that you kind of ran your 1.0 and 2.0 v- versions kind of overlapping, and that you wouldn't do that again.

I guess were there any other things that you got wrong or lessons that you took away from the early years that you'd go back and do differently if you could?

Oh, that's such a good question.

[laughs] So I've often said, you know, I'm not built with a rear view mirror.

I look straight ahead.

I don't view any of the decisions that we made in the past as ones I would do differently or that I regretted.

I think there were things that maybe I would have done faster or, you know, implemented.

And, uh, and some of it comes down to the question around scalability.

You know, we were doubling every five years, and it was incredibly easy to double from 5 to 10 customers.

Little more challenging to double from 5,000 to 10,000 and 10 to 20.

We're at 45,000 customers right now.

So the question of scalability was always, you know, kind of first and foremost in our thoughts.

So you know, if there was a system, a process, a piece of software that we were investing in, time, money, we always made sure that at least in five years there was some relevance to that investment.

Did we always get that right? No.

But was it something we gave a lot of thought to in the early days? Of course, 'cause no small business has money to burn.

You know, you don't wanna invest in, in a piece of software that you think is gonna help you be more productive and find that, you know, it's, it's not relevant in, in 12 months down the road.

You grew most of the business, like up until recently, without outside investment or raising outside capital.

Like, can you talk about, like, how you made that decision? Was that a deliberate decision from the start, or did it just evolve that way based on kind of how the business grew and you were able to support things internally and, and maybe like were there difficult decisions you had to make in order to bootstrap and kind of make that work?

I think that right from the beginning, Dave and John and I agreed that controlled growth was what we were looking for.

So this business is an annuity.

As long as a customer continues to run payroll and pay their employees, it's an annuity.

So your controlled growth means that you can't lose as much out the bottom of the funnel as you're adding in the top.

So we always made sure that we were really aware of customer sentiment, so are we on track to be 97%, you know, customer retention on, on preventable terminations? Are we investing in the right things in our business? Are our customers telling us that what we see from a value perspective is still resonating with them? And is our customer service experience still ranking as high as we think it should be and as high as customers value it? So I think with those kind of three thoughts, that's how we managed to grow the business and self-fund the things that we believed we needed to invest in the business in.