There are many details that demand mental energy. You’re likely focused on starting something new and how to bring your vision to life, but smaller tasks—like choosing the right payment processor for your business—can become overwhelming. With so many options, how can we stay focused while navigating these essential but exhausting decisions?
In this episode, I have Jeff Maine, founder and CEO of Pay Proudly, a payment processing company. Jeff discusses the payment processing industry and how his company aims to provide a better experience for businesses. He emphasizes building relationships with customers based on transparency and trust, offering personalized solutions tailored to each client’s needs rather than competing solely on price.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:09 — 41.3MB) | Embed
Payment Processing Solutions for Businesses with Jeff Maine
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, when it comes to a lot of the endeavors that we’re taking on, particularly starting businesses, there’s a lot to figure out and there’s a lot of things that we need to put mental energy into that we might not necessarily want to be thinking about because, likely, you’re thinking about what your passion is, you’re thinking about what you want to start, and thinking a bit about how you want to do it, but some of these nitty-gritty details, such as selecting a payment processor solution when there are so many out there, can be just a huge use of mental energy that you weren’t necessarily hoping to sign up for and I know how some of this decision fatigue around this and many other issues can cause people to lose their steam. So, today, I would like to introduce you to my guest, Jeff Maine, and he is the founder and CEO of a company that helps you figure out payment processing called Pay Proudly.
—
Jeff, welcome to the program.
Thanks so much for having me today, Stephen. Looking forward to talking about this fun subject of payment processing.
Yeah, it’s just one of the many things that businesses need to think about. And so, to orient our audience here, what do payment processors do and why does nearly every business need a payment processor?
The majority of businesses take the majority of their payments today through electronic payments so a lot of people go the Square routes. They go to big box shops, they go to their bank, sign up for credit card processing, but there’s a lot of small, independent sales organizations out there that have relationships with the big banks that this is what we focus on. This is our business. And so, obviously, when we were founding Pay Proudly, we – I’ve been in this business for 25 years and we’ve seen a lot of different things and I apologize to a lot of people for our industry. When I walk indoors, I apologize for a lot of what’s happened in our industry, and we can dive into some of that today, but there’s just a bad stigma around our industry. I tell people sometimes I feel like it’s that used car sales approach and there’s just a lot that goes on. And so one of the big differences that we’ve done in Pay Proudly is we want to know our customer and we want our customer to know us and we know we’re never going to grow as big as the big guys but we’re taking that extra step and the first part of our mission is all about clarity to our merchants. We really want them to understand payment processing and understand why they need to process or how they need to process and what kind of system they need to process on and really dive into it so that they feel more comfortable with making a decision that affects a big part of their business. So how we get paid is often overlooked but it shouldn’t be. So that’s what we’re doing.
So what do most people do when they look for a payment processor? Say, the average person just starts a website where, I don’t know, just say you’re selling a basic service and needs to collect $100 for each time someone logs on or something like that.
If you’re selling goods and services on the internet, a lot of people are going to go the Shopify approach or the big box store approaches. That’s already got the templates out there and they can easily just integrate to that setup and it’s already done for them and that’s a great solution for a startup business and we steer people that direction in startups because it’s easier and the fees are less. Once your business starts growing, so what happens is is their monthly processing fees may be less than ours but their rates are more so once your business starts amping up and you start processing any kind of volume, that’s when you want to start talking to businesses like ours. And there’s some businesses that you know are going to be on that growth trajectory right out of the gate so we want to talk to those businesses in the beginning. But, for some businesses, the Square, the Shopify, those systems are fantastic and they’re easy to use and it’s definitely where they need to land.
And so when I think about those ones, those are the ones where you tend to just pay like a pretty significant transaction fee for each particular transaction but not as much of a monthly fee. Is that –
That’s right. That’s absolutely right.
Is there ever a situation, because I think what you’re talking about now is businesses grow and they outgrow those solutions and they need something a bit more, you’re not paying a $3 fee every single time any transaction is made, now you can kind of process in bulk, almost like the difference between buying something at a store in small quantities versus going to Costco where you can buy in large quantities and save some money by that, is there ever a situation where a business wants to go straight to one of those solutions?
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of businesses based on their business plan and what they’re coming out of the door with. Are they really, are they coming out with a big bang? Are they just trying to start a little home-based business? It’s going to be a little side hustle. There’s a complete difference of what your mentality is and where you’re coming from and what kind of funds are you investing in this and what are you doing and what are you looking for and what’s your short-term vision of the business and what’s your long-term vision. We have all kinds of reporting tools and website integrations and recurring payments and fraud detection tools and we have the expertise and the know to be able to really guide those people down those roads of really helping them establish the model for growth. For the guys, this is a home-based business, this is a side hustle, this is a hobby, that’s where those other solutions work really well and those are the right solutions for those businesses.
So if someone listening right now is just thinking about something they want to do and maybe they’re open to growth later on but at this point in time, they’re just thinking about creating something on the side, maybe they’re content with their job, not in love with it but content with it, not suffering every minute of every day and just want to start something to see where it goes, you’d recommend going with like a like a Shopify, a Square, a Stripe type of solution?
I would recommend them having a conversation with an industry professional because without me knowing, and I think that’s a lot of what’s wrong with this industry today is there’s not a one size fits all just based on that alone. There’s so many other variables of how do you want to process payments. Do you want a website to process payments? Do you have products? Are you going to have a shopping cart? Do you have the need to be face to face with a customer where you could potentially swipe a card? You just start going down these paths and there’s ten questions that if I had the answers to those questions, I may very well say, “Yes, that is your best option,” but also I might say, “You know what? Because you’re going to be doing X, Y and Z, this really doesn’t work for you. You should do this because we can check all those boxes for you.” And so it’s really important as a new business owner, an established business owner is talking to somebody that we’re asking a lot of questions about your business because just because of what you do and somebody else may do the same thing but you guys may operate totally different, different types of businesses, of how you process your payment, you could have two totally different avenues of where you land.
And is it safe to say that from the standpoint of someone kind of looking into this industry and not really knowing much about it, only knowing I have this business I want to start, I have this service I want to give, et cetera, that the primary service that a payment processor provides is the safe transfer of money from your consumers into your bank account or is there another way that people should be looking at what a payment processor means to your business?
Yeah, so that’s the real easy part of it is the process of the payments and moving the money. Where you really want to talk to your payment processors is, for one, every business has to do a compliance survey every single year. Well, we hold our merchants’ hands and we do that with them to make sure that they know what they’re doing. When they have a chargeback situation and they call us, we walk them through how to respond to that chargeback, kind of here’s the language you need to use, here’s the site you go to, here’s your login, here’s what you need to do. Anytime, if they have an employee, a new employee, they don’t know how to run a refund, one of my machine breaks, what do I do?
Are you wanting to go with a one-stop shop that’s just going to put you on and you’re going to call an 800 number or do you want somebody local that you can actually call that’s going to help you through the process?
And so when looking at some of these more specific solutions when people kind of scale up, is location, like what country you’re in, what industry you’re in, what market you’re in, what are the areas people need to be thinking about when it comes to what’s probably the right solution for me?
Yeah. So, today, in today’s world, I tell people all the time, you used to go to trade shows in our industry, it was a lot of processors and check companies and gift card companies and what you would think about in the payments world. Today, you go to it and you still have those but the majority of the show is different types of point of sale systems and different things, because all these different industries have different solutions that are out there that work within their industry. So you want to also be talking to somebody who can bring you solutions based on your business and not just a credit card machine. So, just today, we were talking to a potential new customer that wants a booking system and wants a scheduler and wants multiple rooms and wants people to be able to fill up rooms and make reservations and so we can put them on the phone with the right people and say, “Okay, here’s how we can create that and make that happen,” where if you go walk in your bank and say, “Hey, can you set me up for credit card processing?” Sure, they can set you up but they’re not going to help you build that solution out. And that’s the difference. That’s what we’re really doing.
’We’re looking at every business and what they need and we’re helping them build a solution for their business. Share on X
So with that helping build a solution, does the makeup of your particular company matter with respect to, say, do I have a CFO? Do I have a fractional CFO?
I think as these businesses grow, all that comes into more of a play. I think one of the things that we talk a lot about here at Pay Proudly, we’re not just building a sales engine for new business because we actually value our current customers above our new customers because we know without these customers, our business doesn’t exist today. So, I think a lot of businesses lose touch with that. They’re only focused on growing and they’re not focused on what they already have. And so we focus heavily on what we already have because that’s what’s keeping us in business, that’s what’s turning our lights on, that’s what’s getting us here every day. We want to grow and we’re going to focus on that, we’re going to have a sales team, but as our sales team sells more deals, we’ve got to grow our operations, we’ve got to grow our ops people, our people to answer the phones, our customer support team, and we do have finance people that help us and so we have more of the fractional type stuff because we don’t have a need for one every single day. Not to mention, I’m a finance major so I like to get into that myself a little bit. But those are kind of our avenues of how we grow and how we look at it.
And so, at Pay Proudly, how do you interact with your clients?
Our typical clients today are found by door-to-door sales. We do a lot of networking. We do a lot of just different networking events, through chambers and being on groups and our salespeople are involved in these types of organizations and a lot of just word of mouth, and we vertically market too, like we’re heavy, we do a lot of dental offices, so we go and we market to dental offices with specific, like, “Here’s what we’re gonna do for you,” and so we do a lot of that type of marketing and growing our vertical business based on those types of businesses that we’ve been heavily successful in.
And then, for your customers, you’re essentially just helping them identify which payment processing solution is right for them.
Yeah. We’re offering the solutions around the vertical. So your vertical of what you do and a vertical of a dental office or a retail business or whatever, they’re going to need different applications. Maybe a retail business has got a point of sale system and they are going to process payments through that where another one might just use old cash register with a credit card machine and then somebody else may need to take credit cards on a website or they need to take credit cards on a cell phone or they need to – but we’re going to set those options up for them and we’re only learning that by talking to them and asking the proper questions.
Yeah. So it’s not something that someone can simply say, and I say this as someone who used to be in data science, make a decision tree and decision tree essentially is if then, if this then that, if this then that, in a somewhat complicated manner, and say, okay, and this is how you choose it, there’s a lot of ins and outs about specifics of how a business is running, its growth, its scaling.
Absolutely. I mean, I can use even specific industries, like the dental industry. There’s three main platforms that operate probably 90, 95 percent of all dental offices in the United States and we’ve got an integration of those and so we can go in and integrate to those and so you would think, “Well, that’s easy. You’re just gonna go on these dental offices, you’re gonna integrate that one software,” but it’s not that easy because we also need to know, do they want to be able to allow somebody to pay a bill on their website? Do they want to be able to take credit cards in the rooms where we have dental offices that when you get done having your teeth cleaned, you pay the hygienist right there in the room? Do they want to be able to do recurring payments? Because a lot of dental offices are starting to do the annual billing. So we can set all that up and automate all that, but it’s not every dental office is set up the exact same way because all of them have different services that they offer and how they run their business is how we’re going to conform to them and make the process work.
So a lot of it is configuration, essentially.
Absolutely. Equipment, configuration, setting it up and getting them to set it and saving them the most amount of time and helping their business, which is part of our mission.
Yeah, because the average person that starts up a business, buys a business, gets into a business, gets into a partnership that really gets excited about the mission of the business, gets excited about even the daily operations, guessing a lot of them don’t want to spend too much time toiling over everything that you’re talking about, picking a payment processing solution, implementing it, how to, even the compliance that you mentioned early on.
It’s a big deal, and every business has to do it, and we help our businesses do it. It’s a big, big deal.
And so I want to talk a little bit about your personal story. What inspired you to go off on your own or in your company and start Pay Proudly as opposed to what you were doing before? Take us through that story a little bit.
Yeah. So, I’ve got a great story and it’s one I’m proud of and I finished college in 1999 and, in the late 90s, I had an opportunity to sell payment processing for a company out of Texas and so – and I was actually in St. Louis at the time and so I was doing some door knocking and they were setting some appointments and I’d learned the industry and it was great and my degree was in finance and I had interned for Monsanto during my college days and I had learned the PeopleSoft HR program and I had an opportunity out of college to go work for a big consulting firm and travel the country and do consulting in PeopleSoft. Mowed lawns all through high school and college and I was always kind of an entrepreneur at heart, just wanted to work for myself and I was always hustling, whether it was washing cars, moving furniture, cutting grass, whatever I needed to do. After college and I had that job offer, my dad sat me down and we were sitting there talking about what my next steps were and he just made the statement to me. He said, “You know, Jeff,” he said, “you can go get that job anytime you want it,” he said, “but right now, you can come back and live at home,” and he said, “I’ve supported you this long,” he said, “I’ll support you for a little while longer and help you start your first business while you don’t have the risk behind you to start it.” He said, “You know, I’m a corporate guy, I’ve been in corporate America and I’ve always been afraid to leave corporate America and go start my own business and I’m afraid if you go take this job, you’re always gonna make enough money where you’re never gonna branch out and try to start your own business. You’re just gonna get sucked into corporate America, like I have been.” And he’s like, “You can always go get this job.” He’s like, “If it doesn’t work, two years from now, go get the job. It’ll be there for you still.” So I took his advice and I started my first company the summer I graduated from college and that was 1999 and I’ve been in the payment processing business, whether owning different companies and partnerships, started a check company, sold it, sold different companies, and here I am still today in 2024 still in payment processing. And it’s interesting because people ask me all the time how did you fall into this and why payment processing. I kind of fell into it in college doing it and I just knew it and my dad didn’t really say, “Hey, go start a payment processing company,” he said, “Start a business.” What kind of business do you want to start? And I got into this business and this is one of those businesses, like I said earlier, that sometimes you get this feeling around it and people look at you and I really wanted to change that. I wanted my customer to not feel that way.
And that’s why the attrition rates are 15 percent or greater in our industry because businesses just don’t stick around. They leave. Well, I’m happy to report our attrition rates are less than 4 percent at Pay Probably and we lose business because they go out of business or they sell or they do things that are out of our control. But we take it very personally if the customer leaves us. And I’m not saying we’re perfect because we’re not, but we strive very hard to keep our current customers, and what I was saying earlier, that’s very important to us, it’s something we talk about weekly in our weekly meetings, it’s something we talk about monthly in our monthly meetings. We do a lot to take care of our current base of business and we do that by communicating with them. We know that’s the number one important thing is if they don’t hear from us, they don’t know us, but if they hear from us, they know us. And so if you’re one of our customers, you’re going to hear from us. It’s part of who we are and it’s what we do.
So there’s a lot to unpack there. So I’m going to start kind of toward the beginning and ask about your dad. So your dad said, “Start a business, I’ll handle the risk for you for a couple years,” coming out of college. Do you think he did this because he noticed something about your personality, about your drive that made you seem like the right kind of person or the kind of person that can actually make a business successful?
He’s no longer with us but if he were alive today, he would absolutely say that he saw the drive in me and he saw the person that I was and he trusted that I could go out, and he knew, I should say, as a father. You know your child can go do this. And I also think it was a little bit of him kind of getting to live that dream that he had through me and getting to be a part of it. So we gave him some ownership in the business and, in fact, my mother who’s still with us today, lives nine miles from me, I talk to her every day, she’s today, she still has a piece of ownership in our business and she always tells me, “I don’t know why you still do that,” and I’m like, “That’s who I am,” and it’s not about the money or any of that but it’s just about her involvement in it, because without my dad, I may not have done that. And we’ve been successful and we’ve been blessed and we’ve done a lot of great things and, actually, his last five years he was alive before he got sick and we knew that, he died of cancer, but before all that happened, he was able to retire and came and worked with me full time so he had an office in our office and we worked together, traveled together, we did a lot of really great things together and had a lot of fun. So had some big wins, had some big losses, but we got to celebrate them both and learn from our mistakes and it was a lot of fun and I’ll never regret those days for the rest of my life. And I would love to help my kids do the same thing as I watch them grow and what they’re doing today.
Well, it’s amazing to have that type of relationship with your father. One question, for anyone out there listening that might not have a support system of that kind, as it currently stands, whether it be a parent that really believes in them, a mentor, something like that, what would you suggest for someone who wants to, say, maybe go out and seek that out, seek out, find that person that believes in them enough to, whether it be like investor would be kind of the other version of it that I think most people look for, the person that can believe in them like that?
And I work with a lot of young men today who are going to upper junior, seniors in high school and through college and it’s my son’s age and I meet with a lot of these young guys and we talk about business and the future and it’s about building relationships with people like that that can help you and that have the wherewithal to help you and then showing them that what they’re investing in is real, and showing them to build their trust that what you’re saying you’re going to go do and that’s action.
’Talk is real easy but showing somebody what you can go do and what you’re willing to go do are two different things. Share on XSo what made you decide that the payment processing industry was for you for the business? I know you had the experience with the door to door sales in it but what made you think, “Okay, this is something that I could dedicate my company, my time, my talent into”?
Yeah, I think it was, in the early days of learning this industry, and still today, I really love the concept around the recurring revenue. I have had a high level of interest in it. Insurance is a lot the same way and different businesses that I could build into and create customer databases that had recurring revenue and that’s what really interested me in the space. And a lot of what come of the industry is things that happened so far ago but just given this industry, I wanted to be the difference maker. I wanted to be a guy that said, “No, we’re gonna do things different.” And, sure, do we have competition? Yeah, we have a ton of competition. But I tell my kids this all the time, nothing is easy. If it were easy, everybody would do it. Don’t be afraid of competition. Go be different. Go find what you need to do to be different to where if I’m just out here every day competing on price, then I might as well go do something else.
Oh, the race to the bottom. Yeah.
Yeah. Just, I mean, absolutely, and it’s just not what I’m in it for. And I have no problem telling my customers that I want to earn their business but I am a for-profit company and I don’t want to overcharge and I don’t want to rip anybody off or feel like that, but I do want to earn what we make. I want them to feel like they’re getting a value for the service of what they’re paying us for.
Well, as someone who helps people cut down on their technology addiction, reduce their screen time, I tend to think of things as the easiest thing to do is usually the least rewarding. And when I was a kid, the easiest thing to do was to press that button and turn the TV on. Now, the easiest thing to do is to pull out your smartphone and just start scrolling through a site and those are the easiest things to do but they are going to be the ones, and I think we’ve seen the results if you look at kind of how an entire generation’s mental health has turned out, we’ve seen the results of what happens when you always do the easiest thing and you don’t do the things that require a little bit of a challenge, a little bit of learning something but often lead to so much greater of a reward.
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s so true. Two in high school, one in college, we have that technology talk all the time that that’s the easy thing to do. It’s real, that’s for sure.
It’s real tough so I would just like to encourage everyone out there listening, because I know it can be really rewarding, and this goes across a lot of different areas, not just the technology addiction but driving through fast food instead of cooking a meal that’s going to nourish you better and give you health or having a disciplined exercise routine or even having disciplined time set up to work on your businesses, that is going to pay and reward, the reward just isn’t right away sometimes.
Absolutely. So true.
And now, let’s get into something that you alluded to a couple times already about kind of the industry as a whole and the reputation it has. I think the most generic statement I hear out there is, “Oh, the banks are just out there for the money,” and it’s probably a little bit orthogonal, a little bit away from like what the payment process are doing but what do you notice in the industry and what do you notice has given the industry the reputation that you observe it has today?
Yeah, so I think the big thing that people don’t understand about the industry is how the pricing is done and what goes on behind the scenes in our industry and they don’t understand the risk exposure either in this industry and so we’ll touch on both of those in as easy of a way to explain it as I can. The majority of the funds, people think MasterCard, Visa set the rates out there. That’s just not the case. They have branding rates that they’re going to charge and it’s the same on every transaction and it is what it is. Majority of the expense of taking credit cards today goes back to the card issuing banks. So if you pull out your credit card, you have a Chase card, you have a Bank of America card, or whatever you have, those card-issuing banks are the ones that are underwriting the merchants out there, the customer. They’re the ones setting those interchange categories. So as they make – yep, like Capital One Visa card. So Capital One is giving you points every time you use that card. So what they do is, as all these card-issuing banks get together and they create better programs around giving you more points, they raise interchange categories for the business owners. So I can pull out five different credit cards out of my wallet right now and you can take each one of those cards for the exact same thing that you’re selling me, and each one of those cards cost a different amount of money to your business. A debit card doesn’t cost that much. It’s the cheapest card to accept because there’s no points, there’s no programs. It’s a very inexpensive credit card, and it kind of goes up from there. It goes up into the reward cards and then it goes to the corporate cards and it goes to the American Express cards and all the cards and it just kind of stair steps up and it’s all about these card-issuing companies getting together and they set these interchange categories, and they set them different based on how you accept the card and what industry that you’re in. But when you see a credit card statement, you see all these different fees on it, that’s what it is. It’s all these different fees that that interchange categories have set up.
So, in this case, when I make my transaction, it’s not MasterCard that’s setting up the fees, it’s Capital One.
So it’s hitting certain interchange categories and people behind the scenes that are setting the interchange categories are your Capital Ones and your Chases and they’re the ones that are setting those interchange categories.
And the interchange category can be different. Like this is a personal card so if I were –
It’s different on a business card than it is on a personal card and it’s different on a debit card than it is on a reward card, it’s different on a – it kind of goes up the ladder from there.
So if I were to pull out my business card, which is a –
Which is even higher.
Even though it’s a business debit card so the contributing factors is that it’s a debit card which will make it lower but it’s a business card so the fees are going to be higher just because –
It’s all about what category of interchange it falls into but that’s correct.
And then with the business card, is it the different types of businesses? Because…
So different businesses have different interchange categories that they can hit. So, some businesses, and like a grocery store has its own type of interchange categories, retail does, business to business does, mail order does, and different ZIP codes fall underneath different types of umbrellas of where their fees fall.
I see, and there’s probably like a bunch of analysts behind –
That’s right, and it’s all about risk. It’s all done based on risk and that’s what a lot of people don’t understand is the risk and payment processors is in a retail environment or a restaurant environment, you walk in, you eat, you buy your stuff, you pay, and you leave. Very low risk in that environment because I just got what I said I was going to get, I paid for it, and I left. Very low risk. But then you have internet businesses and you have business coaches and you have all these other businesses, you’re paying for a service that you may not have yet or you’re ordering furniture and you don’t have it for a few months but you’re going ahead and paying for it, so the processors are sitting on all that risk for money that products haven’t been given yet, services haven’t been given yet, for money that’s been already processed, which creates higher risk for the processors because if you go out of business and you took all this money and credit cards and you didn’t provide the service or the product, the processor loses all that money. So when those chargebacks come, they lose it. Or if those chargebacks come and you’re still in business but you don’t have the money, the processor loses. They pay all that back. And so it’s not – the credit card doesn’t lose, Visa, MasterCard don’t lose, the processor lose. So there’s a lot of risk in this industry and that’s where these processors have full underwriting departments and risk departments and they’re monitoring transactions. They know what’s going on. Most of the time, we know about chargebacks and things going on with our merchants before our merchants know it and so we’ll see those emails come in, “Hey, X, Y, Z merchants got a chargeback coming for this,” and we’re notifying the merchant saying, “Hey, you’ve got a chargeback coming, be on the outlook for it,” because when you get it, we need to respond to it because you only have a certain number of days to respond and if you wait too many days, then you can’t respond, you’re just – you’ve lost. So we’re being proactive with our merchants saying, “Hey,” and our merchants get used to that kind of treatment. They like that. And not many processors are going to those steps that we go to.
And this chargeback risk, is this risk only applied on the business level or is there any cases where on the individual level, I don’t know, if you just have a reputation for reckless junk shopping where you charge back, something like that.
In the credit card world, if we approve your credit card, we approve it. It’s either approved or it’s declined and that’s all based on your credit card issuer.
Yeah, but the businesses, and I think even the banks know which businesses tend to be – which industries are of higher risk.
Absolutely, and those industries are harder to get underwritten than a restaurant, which is really easy. A restaurant owner can fog a mirror and get approved where a B2B business, we’re going to check financials, credit scores. There’s just a deeper level of underwriting that’s going to happen behind the scenes than with the guy over here that’s doing a retail, very low risk business.
So with these different fees kind of levied on everyone’s cards, is this the origin or is this the place where some of these reputation and issues for the industry arise from? Is this why…
I think what happens is a lot of businesses, they don’t get taught the proper way to – of things that could happen. So if I go set up a restaurant and they’re up and running, they’re so predictable, it’s not a big deal. But, for example, we set up a tire shop that also does lift kits and all this stuff on vehicles and we set them up with a $5,000 average ticket because sometimes they’re doing a tire job that’s $1,000 but sometimes they do a lift kit that’s $5,000, but we tell them, “Hey, we know your type of business. You may get somebody that comes in here and does tires and lift and all this stuff that’s gonna cost $10,000. Well, for the first two or three of those big $10,000 jobs, tell us when you’re doing them and send us an invoice and we will put that in the underwriter’s hands before – or the risk department’s hands before you hit the flags because that transaction is going to flag the system, and they’re going to want to see an invoice and talk,” because they’re learning your business just like you’re learning us. We get real proactive with those type of businesses, saying, “Hey, anything outside of this box, just tell us about it and we will, on your behalf, get in front of those situations,” and sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, and when they don’t, we just have to hold their hands because we’ll get a flag and our risk department will call and say, “Hey, I need this invoice. I need this. I need this.” We’ll call the merchant, we’ll walk them through why they’re asking for what they’re asking for, and most likely, we’ve already had a conversation with them and they’re going to say, “You told us to do this, we didn’t, so we’ll get it to you,” and we walk them through so that we’ll get them their money quicker. But that’s a lot of the training that we do on the front side of new merchants. And we only do that for the merchants that we know we need to do that for. If you have a real, predictable business, we don’t have to do it.
Well, it reminds me of, in the world of personal cards, I think most people can relate to the banks who sometimes need to call you if, say, you’re not a common international traveler and then suddenly you travel overseas for the first time in six, eight, ten years, or the first time in your life and they were like, “Hey, we just got several purchases from Denmark and we just need to know no one stole your credit card because that’s not normal behavior.” So it sounds like what you’re saying is that your relationship with your bank or with your payment processor or anything like that is just like any other relationship and just like a relationship, say, you’d have with an investor, and if someone invests in your business, obviously, they’re going to want that quarterly update email, they’re going to want the monthly, the board meetings, they want to see that, exactly as you were saying before, that you did indeed do what you said you were going to do and everything’s running according to expectations.
Right, absolutely.
And then, in your line of work, what are the biggest challenges you encounter on a regular basis? You talked a bit about the challenge around people’s impression, the reputation the industry had. What other challenges do you encounter?
I think our biggest challenge is the fear of change with business owners, of calming the nerves of a business that is interested in making a change but they’re afraid of change because they’re dealing with their money and it’s us relaying what we’re going to do and how we’re going to handle the change and how we don’t want to interrupt their business, and we want them to go from one system to the new system without any interruption at all, zero. Obviously, we do it every day. We’ve gotten really good at it, but it’s common that business owner to say, hey, give us a chance and just talk to us and have conversation with us. The more conversation we have, we can take a lot of that fear away, but business owners definitely have a fear of change when it comes to our industry.
Yeah. Now, is it a fear of change or is it people just like not wanting to put in like the effort and energy? Because I know that can be a problem for a lot of businesses as well.
Yeah, I think it’s both. I think people don’t want to put in the effort or the energy but they also maybe have been burned in the past and they’ve done change and then it hadn’t worked or their transactions got thrown into – something didn’t go right, they swore upon, swore I’m never doing that again, and a lot of that is just because of our industry and what’s happened in our industry and so we have to show them that we’re different, that that’s not who we are, we’re going to be here to help them, we’re going to be able to answer their questions, and we’re going to make this change easy, and we’re going to start putting money back in their pocket.
And what is your primary mechanism in showing these businesses that we’re different? Because, I think, you talked about used car salesman and the same thing, keep it going expecting –
A lot of it is them being comfortable with us and that we’re not used car salesmen. And a lot of it is, I mean, we still have references. I mean, some people just want to call our references and we have that. I’d say we have that more than other businesses. And it’s, “Hey, we want to talk to a few people who have just transferred over to you about how the transfer went,” and so we set those calls up and we have plenty of references and I tell people all the time, listen, it’s real easy for me to go pick my three best friends to be my references every time, but here’s my book of business, here’s 50 accounts, you pick which one you want to talk to. And what we always try to do is we geographically will say, “Hey, well, you’re located here. We have five businesses that are within a mile radius of you. Which one of them do you wanna call? We’ll set you up with them.” Or go walk in the door and go talk to Amy. She’s their – she runs their front desk and she deals with us when we come in and she’ll give you a reference for us. And so we try to make it out like call anyhow. You know what? Who do you want to call? Because you and I both know references are what they are. It’s real easy for me, I could easily give somebody my best friend every single time who’s always going to say something good.
Yeah, for sure. And people do that with job references all the time.
Absolutely.
You’re going to hire someone, you ask for three references, of course, those are going to be three people –
Yeah, I’m not going to give you somebody that’s going to say something bad.
Yeah, no. And then when you were getting Pay Proudly started before you had that large set of references, how did you go about getting from the place where you were just starting out? Didn’t have documentation yet to that place where you had all those references?
That still exists today. It’s less and less because people just don’t do it, but just the good old like going out and knocking on doors and walking in and being real. And I think business owners can see that. They can see who’s being real and who’s not.
Yeah. I almost feel like a lot of people have this sense for whenever anyone’s talking, whenever I’m saying anything, you said you go to a lot of networking events sometimes –
We do.
– events, and so you’ve probably been in a lot of events where you can tell if someone’s just giving a standard memorized speech and not being real.
Yeah. And we also, we sponsor a lot of local events. The second part of our mission is a give back feature that was just important to my wife and I and it’s what we want to bring charity to our community through payment processing and so that’s a big selling point for us is that every transaction, we’re making donations back to the local community, and so we’re supporting a lot of the major charitable organizations in town and we sponsor their events and so now we’ve got name recognition and branding and so when people see us and hear about us, they know we’re real because we don’t just say we’re doing it, we’re out doing what we say. And it’s made a big difference for our business. It’s made a big difference for people that want to work for us. I mean, we legitimately today have people that want to work for us because of our give back program. I never thought that would be the case but it absolutely is the case today.
Whether it’s working for them or being a client, a customer, people who are consistent with their values, people who are real, people who are doing something that sounds like it has a good impact, because I see people get stuck in these jobs where they don’t really feel the impact of what they’re doing every day and I think that can have a pretty negative impact on someone if they stay at that job over years and years and keep doing things that they don’t really feel aligned with the mission on.
Absolutely. Yeah, we have monthly meetings with our entire team and the entire team picks the charities that we support every month and so everybody has a say in that.
If you were to like summarize in just a couple quick sentences what impact your business has on the people that you work with.
The impact we have is the owners of the business can now focus on what they need to focus on and not worry about what we need to focus on for them. And they also know that through their employees working with us, when their employees have an issue, they don’t need to get involved because they know when that employee calls us, we’re going to answer the phone, we’re going to do what we need to do, and we’re going to fix it. And so it enables business owners to take this part of their business and say, “We’ve got it taken care of and we’re with the right company.”
Yeah, and that’s amazing and I’ll just give you a chance to say, if anyone out there listening has been hearing this conversation, has their own business that they’re bringing up and looking for payment processing solutions, what will be a best way to get a hold of you?
Yeah. So, check us out at payproudly.com, check us out on LinkedIn, Jeff Maine. All of our contact information is out there. My email is jmaine@payproudly.com and that’s Maine spelled just like the state, M, A, I, N, E, and what I would tell the business owners, I believe, with this is even if you’re happy with where you’re at, we have a free AI-driven proposal tool that will read your statement, read all the interchange categories, where you’re paying your fees at, and we’ll put together a full proposal for you and send it back and you can use that proposal to go at your current process and get a better deal or you can have a conversation with us. But use us. That costs absolutely nothing and we would love to have the opportunity to have a conversation with you.
Well, that is wonderful. I’m glad you’re able to, with your everyday life, help businesses succeed, help businesses, help people that want to focus on the things that they want to focus on, the reason that they started their business in the first place, not spend so much time on this, how to process the payments as well as all the fraud and chargeback stuff, which is very important and can cause a lot of nightmares, a lot of headaches for a lot of business.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, for telling us about your story, how you had the support of your father but also the belief in yourself and you have the ways of kind of showing people, not just saying but showing people what you can do for them.
I appreciate it, Stephen. I really enjoyed being on your show today and I look forward to talking to whoever and anybody who would like to have a conversation.
Definitely. And I would also like to end up by thanking everyone that’s listening today, everyone for taking some time out to listen to Action’s Antidotes, and I hope you have some ideas about following your passions, following your dreams, and especially just to know that when it comes to all these ins and outs, these things that are not the most interesting topics to you, per se, that there are businesses out there, like Pay Proudly, that can help you navigate that and get back to thinking about your business.
Important Links:
About Jeff Maine
Jeff is the Founder & CEO of Pay Proudly.
Jeff founded his company with a goal to take the payment processing industry from simply transactional….to relational! Jeff is the founder of Pay Proudly and his mission is twofold: to provide business owners payment clarity and to support communities through charity. Throughout his career, Jeff saw that there was a gap in the marketplace for relational support in payment processing.
Payment processing is the lifeblood of a business and Jeff and his team are passionate about educating business owners on how important having the right payment processor is for your business. He is ready to share his unique Entrepreneurial background; what led him to be a disrupter and how he has utilized his business platform to ‘Pay it Forward’ with your audience.