Scaling vertical SaaS: From $1 to $1B processed
SaaS platform economy
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Processing over $1 billion in payments annually is an exciting milestone in any SaaS platform’s growth story. Hear from vertical SaaS leaders who’ve done it with Stripe, including how they assembled an effective payments team, the role of tooling and automation, and the frameworks they swear by.
Speakers
A.J. Axelrod, VP of Payments and Financial Services, Clio
Laura Collinson, VP and GM of Payments and Fintech, Jobber
Kevin Gallagher, Head of Global Payments and Financial Services, EverCommerce
Nicole Arboleda, Platform Partnerships, Stripe
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: All right. So, who remembers the “There’s an app for that” campaign? Forgot where you parked your car? Need some help weekly meal planning? Curious about the snow conditions in the mountains? “There’s an app for that” became a rallying cry for new solutions to everyday problems. Now fast-forward 16 years to today, and I think the reason we all still remember it as much as we do is that there’s still so much untapped potential for technology to solve long-held inconveniences. But, as we know, the internet economy has changed a lot over the last 16 years.
Now, in almost any vertical or niche of the economy, there’s a SaaS platform serving it. In the US alone, 60% of small businesses—some 20 million companies—now use SaaS platforms to help run their business. Music festivals use atVenu, youth sports clubs use PlayMetrics, and pool cleaners use Skimmer. As you can see, businesses all around us are benefiting from platforms that want to listen, dig into real pain points, and build around them. This is exactly what we’re seeing at Stripe. We partner with 15,000 platforms; 84 of those platforms each processed $1 billion in payments last year alone, 23 hit that exciting new milestone in the last 12 months, and 31 have grown from ambitious startups on Stripe to category leaders. Now, all 15,000 platforms do all have at least one thing in common: They all embedded payments and created new revenue streams.
I could wax lyrical here about the benefits to you, your businesses, your customers, about improving cash flow, conversion rates, average order size, and more. But there’s already a lot of information out there about the why. What’s less clear is the how. How do I build the right thing? How do I hire the right team to execute on that vision? How do I scale it to match or even exceed my existing revenue lines? That brings us to today. Today, we’re going to talk about the product, the people, and the processes to scale vertical SaaS platforms. Even better, we’re going to hear directly from seasoned leaders who have navigated these billion-dollar journeys, sometimes multiple times, head-on. Please join me in welcoming A.J. Axelrod from Clio, Kevin Gallagher from EverCommerce, and Laura Collinson from Jobber. Thank you. Okay, great. This is quite the party. All right. So let’s get started, shall we?
A.J. AXELROD: Sure.
LAURA COLLINSON: Let’s do it.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Laura, if we can start with you. So one of the first questions I often get is, what’s my margin going to be? What am I going to take home? But I think we know one of the first questions we should be asking ourselves is, how do we build the right thing? Can you talk us through how you make that part of your core at Jobber today in terms of keeping what’s valuable to your customers at the center?
LAURA COLLINSON: Yeah. So I think something that really resonated from Johnny’s talk yesterday was asking very deliberately the right research questions. I think that, of course, we ask the question, how do I build a great payments business? But I think a more important question to us is, actually, how do we help our customers truly be more successful to make it very different using Jobber than using nothing? I think that leads us down a path of: okay, which of our customers are more successful? Is it the ones who are able to migrate into larger, more profitable jobs, for example, who can go from lawn care to landscaping or kind of all residential to commercial? That lets us then really dig into, okay, what are the barriers to being able to get those larger, more profitable jobs?
That’s how we uncover things like capital, which is—we had a great customer recently who got a contract to install the beverage lines in an NBA stadium. So, massive job, huge opportunity, couldn’t afford the supplies, and took a capital loan for working capital and was able to do a very substantial kind of job that contributed to his growth.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Yeah. That’s beautiful. There’s so much power in the details. If you’re really, really listening, you can get that out. But it’s about not just listening, but it’s also really hearing what they’re trying to tell you, too. So—
LAURA COLLINSON: Totally.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: —I think that makes a lot of sense. It also gives us a sense for what to focus on, customers, and the right products to build. I’m also curious to hear—and maybe you can draw from multiple experiences across different companies here—but what are the pitfalls or mistakes that organizations should avoid as they’re scaling?
A.J. AXELROD: A couple of things come to mind. We’ve talked about it at Clio a bit. I often talk about it as like stepping on rakes, like things that just come right back up and hit you. What Laura said is actually the most important part, which is your payments business is derivative, typically, of some other business, and you have to do that really well. So for Clio’s context, that’s legal practice management and billing. If you don’t do the billing well, you don’t have a right to the payments, so you have to do that right.
I think the other pitfall that people often come to—and you alluded to it in your question—is they jump straight to take rate. Your margin expressed in basis points is actually the only thing that doesn’t compound in your payments business. So growing your customer base, solving their problems, helping them grow, getting more of them onto payments, driving adoption? Those things compound and grow over time, and you get to grow with your customers. If you just focus on the take rate, which feels so controllable because you can see it in the profit and loss (P&L), you actually miss the wider picture. If you want to grow continuously, you’ve got to focus on your customers.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: That’s great. So imagine now we’re focusing on our customers. We’re building the right things. We’re feeling really good about it. You have us in the right mental models to focus on what really matters; not just the shiny new things out there or the things that look good in the P&L. I’d love to hear your perspective. You’ve worn many hats across many organizations, Kevin. At this point, how do you decide between outsourcing versus building in-house as you’re going through this journey?
KEVIN GALLAGHER: Yeah. I think I’ve learned a lot over the last 30 years in trial and experiments with this, and what I’ve come to realization on is don’t build something that somebody can build so much better. Let’s take Stripe, for example, with the Checkout. We talked a lot about the checkout experience the last couple days. Seven thousand engineers, all they do all day long is work on Checkout, optimizing it, new payment methods, compliance, regulations, etc. We should never build something like that, right? Why dedicate resources against that, right? Let someone like Stripe, who’s an expert in that area, build those types of products and focus on products that are more differentiated to our customer base or embedded within our SaaS platform. Also, when you look at things like, what do you bring in-house versus not?
A lot of times, especially if you’re PE-owned, which I’m sure a lot of you are, they’re like, “Oh, you should bring risk in-house because you’re going to save three basis points.” You’re like, “Okay, yeah. I’ll save money.” But then when you start looking at what it takes to bring that in-house, you’ve got to hire underwriters. You’ve got to have a platform in place that can do underwriting. Have you underwritten a merchant lately? KYC, AML. It is crazy-complex. Then you’ve got to manage the transactional risk and have a platform to do that and people to monitor it. Then guess what? You’re going to take losses regardless of how well you do, right? So really looking at, do you really want to bring that in-house even if you could save a few basis points versus the overall ROI of investing in that and doing it well?
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Right.
A.J. AXELROD: If I could build on what you were saying a little bit, because I agree with all of it—the thesis for embedded payments is this better together, contextual experience, right? When you think about vertical SaaS, it is so specific. You’re not going to beat a horizontal platform playing a horizontal platform’s game, or even a company. You want to compete with Chase on straight DDAs and issuing cards? Good luck. That’s going to be difficult. But if you can focus on the things that are core to you and your user and are like that specific, right? Do that. Then, yeah. Anything that’s like someone else can do a thousand times better, just—yeah, buy it.
LAURA COLLINSON: Yeah. I think there’s also so much to build. I think about—we aim to be everything to our customers. There's a massive waterfront we haven’t covered yet. So any time spent going too deep has real cost.
A.J. AXELROD: Yeah.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: I think that’s beautiful. Whether we’re talking about product, or people, or processes, we keep coming back to the customer and what really matters to your business, right? It’s so easy to get pulled in so many different directions. It can feel like that’s the easy solve to go in that direction. But staying focused on what really matters, as we’ve discussed here, is really challenging but at the core of what we’re talking about today. So I want to transition here a little bit and talk about the people. Laura, you’ve mentioned in the past about how a Swiss Army knife–type person might be helpful for building a payments organization. Can you expand on how you build payments teams from the ground up?
LAURA COLLINSON: Sure. So I think one of the kind of—the beginning of really having a financial services business at Jobber was creating an autonomous team that had dedicated leadership, engineers, etc. I think having one team that wakes up in the morning and, while they’re brushing their teeth, thinks about how do I build an incredible payments product and build a great financial services business is key. That team ideally is comprised of people with the expertise to really wear multiple hats and just run fast against an opportunity, which includes Swiss Army knives, who can do all kinds of activities in the early days. Then that team really can run against the opportunity.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: I see some nods going. Anything you want to add?
KEVIN GALLAGHER: I was going to add something to that.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Yes, please.
KEVIN GALLAGHER: I think when you talk about people—I mean, I’ve seen this mistake quite a bit, especially PE firms that go on the buyer software platform. SaaS revenue is always number one. What’s the second-largest revenue generator for a SaaS platform? Payments, right? A lot of times what happens is people are like, “Oh, yeah. We need to launch payments. We want to monetize it.” They give it to the dev-and-engineering team and say, “Go in a great stride.” And great. They go ahead and do that. Then guess what? A year later, they’re like, “Why am I not having success? What’s going on?” Or they give it to the product team—and again, nothing against the product team—but they give it to the product team. The product team has 50 things they’re working on right now. Guess what? Hey, payments is 51. Have you really prioritized payments within the organization?
It starts with hiring a head of payments—a GM of payments, a head of payments. Whatever level, get a person that understands how to get this thing integrated, how to develop a go-to-market strategy, how to get it scaling, how to grow, how to work through the roadblocks, the kinks, and how to monetize it. Then you can start with a matrix organization if you’re small and use different components of the organization. Then, as that starts growing in-house, you gradually kind of start building the team around that based on the justification of the revenue. But you’ve got to have somebody in a group in the company that is all day long, 24/7, thinking, driving, and executing on payments.
A.J. AXELROD: As you grow, I think, you go from the Swiss Army knife to some specialization. One of the things I think I’ve continuously found successful is mixing people from sort of in-house that grew up in your organization with outside expertise. So as I think about our pay ops team, we’ve got people who grew up in customer support. They deeply understand the customer, the product, the problems. We’ve got people who came from outside, from other best-in-class, who have the right benchmarking. They understand the things that worked, but they don’t know our customer yet. Connecting those makes for really good organizations. You’re not going to learn merchant underwriting by winging it; that’s going to be a really expensive mistake. But you can try to combine the right people. So long as you share values, and the way you work, and your norms, it’ll work out and you’ll just combine that expertise.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Can we stick with you for a second on that, A.J.? So I love the idea of the head of payments or a Swiss Army knife, but how do you bring the whole organization along on this journey so that payments doesn’t stay siloed in one part of the business or another?
A.J. AXELROD: Prior to Clio, I spent some time in growth equity—and so sort of in a different perspective—and got to see across a lot of companies. What Kevin was alluding to is probably the most important thing. You need a leadership team that is aligned on this being a priority. If this is a thing they’re going to do on the side, it’s probably too hard and complicated for that. I think the most important thing from your board, your CEO, and your senior leadership team: have you agreed that this is a priority? Yes. Your SaaS revenues cannot always be first, because that’s your user base that you’re solving problems for. But, more than likely, the largest deterministic thing next about the growth of your company is going to be payments. So you need a leadership team that’s aligned.
You’d be amazed how many problems solve themselves when the leadership team is aligned and clear on priorities. From there, there’s no perfect framework on, “How do we prioritize resources?” We heard this morning in the AMA, that. But if you’re clear that this is a priority and everyone on the senior team is on board, a lot of the problems solve themselves.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Right.
KEVIN GALLAGHER: I agree. You know, as A.J. mentioned, you’ve got to start from the top. Again, I started with an acquisition of a software platform: the PE firm. That’s a huge component of the thesis, right? It starts there. The board is driving that down to the executive team. The executive team has to be driving that throughout the entire company every day, every week, every month. We do monthly meetings. What’s your number one initiative? Grow SaaS revenue. What’s your number two? Grow payments. Then whatever your number three is. But you’ve got to drive that home constantly throughout the organization.
The second thing to look at is, okay, if payments is your second largest revenue generator—let’s say you make $100 million in SaaS revenue, and I’m just throwing out numbers—and you’re going to make $30 million in payments, do you have 30% of your employees decked against payments? I guarantee none of you do. You don’t, but why not? Why wouldn’t you have 30% of your resources, time, energy, and employees decked against this second largest revenue generator? So, a lot of times, you might have 5%, or 10%, or you might not even have a head of payments, right? So think about it that way, from a prioritization standpoint internally.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: That’s great. Yes. So finding people that really, really care and can build the right thing for the users, and then also make sure that things are happening top to bottom, right? I’m curious to hear. So when you’re discussing with leadership, often the question is, how is payments growing, etc.? So how do you think about it from a sales and marketing or a go-to-market perspective? Maybe, Kevin, we can stay with you here. How do you think about building, for example, sales teams or marketing teams and building that engine?
KEVIN GALLAGHER: Yeah. There’s so many variations of what you can do. Some companies are SaaS-led with sales reps, right? So they’re out there selling the SaaS software. You can work with them, train them, and have them embed payments as part of that component of what they’re selling. Some are PLG, product-related growth, where there is no sales rep touching them. You can have hybrid approaches, as well. We have scenarios where a SaaS rep will go out and try to embed and sell that. If they don’t, we have a payments-dedicated sales team that does a fast-follow immediately. Or PLG motion: go through PLG, doesn’t get a merchant signed up, payment sales rep comes and fast-follows, right? So the key is not letting anything drop through the floor.
The second thing I’ll say is you’ve got to get these merchants at the point of sale. That is the best time to sell them on attaching payments. The longer you wait—if you try to go sell a merchant in the back book that’s been on the system for two years, what happens? They develop their habits, right? They start using paper checks and they’ve—whatever. Over two years, they’ve done something different. But when you catch them at the point of sale, if they’re putting in a new legal practice management solution, they are making a significant change to how they run their business. That is the time to get them to change their payment methods, as well. So do everything possible to catch them right then as they’re signing up for the software.
The last part of it is embed the experience. Like, why did they go sign up for your SaaS software and then, whoa, okay, go for this application over here and fill out Worldpay application and something totally different? How do you take that and take Stripe, for example, and embed the Stripe onboarding to where they’re filling out five or six days of—you know—to sign up for SaaS? You’re asking them a few more, and then boom, behind the scenes, crank it out to API call to Stripe, get an account approved, and they’re done.
A.J. AXELROD: Yes. Customers love answering the same question multiple times.
KEVIN GALLAGHER: Oh, they love it. Yeah, it’s awesome.
A.J. AXELROD: That’s the best.
KEVIN GALLAGHER: Exactly. Take the data you’re already getting and build it in the embedded flow and get them signed up right then.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Okay, A.J., same question for you.
A.J. AXELROD: Yeah. I think, understand the DNA of your company, right? There’s a lot of models, but if you’re a PLG company, throwing human beings at this is going to be unnatural for you. So a few things like never go out of style, right? Having a great in-product experience is always a good idea. Making it as seamless as possible, catching people in habit-forming moments, being super clear about your value prop in a measurable way. For us, a lot of that is days to get paid. We measure that pretty maniacally. So if you’re clear on those things and you understand your DNA, you’ll be able to say, “Okay, is this a dedicated sales team or are we going to empower people? Is this a mix of that?” So we can—you know, for Clio, for example, every single one of our AEs is empowered to sell payments in the first five days. They can do that. After that, onboarding is empowered to do that. We have an account management team that’s reaching out to people. They can do it themselves; the customers can do it themselves in the product. We’re trying to catch them in every stage in the funnel, but it’s at that habit-forming moment that you have to give them that experience and they go, “Oh, this is better. It’s better together.”
Then you’ll get your incentives aligned for people. You make sure you comp people the right way, all those kind of things. You’ll have goal-setting. I would say be pretty maniacal about measuring. It’s unnatural for human beings to do things in basis points. It’s just really small. Dividing by 10,000 is not the easiest thing in the world. So you’re going to have to measure carefully and understand your ROI. If you hear from one of us, as an example, “Oh, you need to have a payment sales team who does it, blah, blah, blah,” and you have super small merchants, like micromerchants, you may never be able to afford that team. You got to find another model. A converse: if you serve enterprise, you’ve got to go act like an enterprise sale.
LAURA COLLINSON: Go talk to them.
A.J. AXELROD: Yeah, call them. I talk to some of our customers because they’re really big, important customers, along with our C team. There’s others where, if we’re onboarding 700 customers in a month, they don’t all want to talk to us.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Yeah. I think what you were saying here also is catching your customers in their buying journey, as well. So don’t make it hard for yourself. Kind of catch them as they’re already thinking through the process and what feels natural. But I think what you also said that caught my ear was something around days to go live, right? That was really important to you. Laura, I’d love if you could build on the idea of what metrics do you measure and what’s on your dashboard at Jobber to get a sense for things that are going well and maybe things that are falling behind track. Can you walk us through that?
LAURA COLLINSON: Totally. So I would separate the universe of embedded payments into two camps. One is industries where payments is on by default. You’re not going to go to a restaurant or use an ecommerce website and pay with a check or with cash. So really, you would expect in those industries to see GPV essentially equaling revenue. Then you have the industries that a lot of us plan, which I would call the emerging payments markets, where actually the default is still cash or check, and card, ACH, and BNPL are still kind of newer motions. I think in the ecommerce restaurant space, you really focus on attach and the growth of your customer’s revenue. Those are your big levers.
The key one I would add over here in our world is what we call GPV over GSV, so essentially the penetration of your payments business. What percentage of your customers’ revenue are you processing with digital methods? I think in this world, you’re asking your customers not just to switch from another payment processor; you’re asking them to take a big leap of faith and make some real workflow changes in their business. So that comes back to sales and marketing. You’ve got kind of a very different task. So that’s what we obsess over, is have we won the right to process more and more of our customers’ revenue each month?
A.J. AXELROD: Yeah. You measure your funnel maniacally. You measure your payments volume maniacally. You look at a customer level at your penetration, but you zoom out and I think of it as like a Mekko chart. The big square, right? It’s like, okay, are our customers attached? Are they active? What’s the adoption? What payment methods are they using that are ours, that are off-platform? Then, on a constant basis, you go back to it and say, like, “Okay. Well, what are the biggest addressable opportunities, and what are we doing about that?” You’re going to measure the whole thing.
The really nice thing about payments, maybe compared to some of the other SaaS products, is you get instant feedback. They’re either using your product or they’re not, and you’re getting paid if they’re using it and you are not getting paid if they are not. So you have actually a really nice alignment that is harder in the rest of SaaS.
LAURA COLLINSON: Yeah. If you see value in us, you will use us and if you don’t…
A.J. AXELROD: It’s like every day is opt-in.
LAURA COLLINSON: Yeah.
KEVIN GALLAGHER: I think like Laura said—well, we look at the funnel to start. Okay. So you look at attach rate, right? You start with, like, net-new coming in and get that nailed, right? As I said, that’s the best time to do it. So constantly looking at your attach rate, trying to get that thing growing month-over-month, and then scrutinizing every single objection you’re getting. Why did they not sign up for payments? So you should be reviewing that data every month with your sales team or whoever is trying to sign up those customers and then trying to tackle those. Some of those are product-related, right? Maybe you have product gaps. Maybe it’s a sales gap. They’re not doing as effective a job as they could. But really hone in on that and try to get your attach rate going up, up, up.
Then also try to—if there’s merchants that you’re not able to sign today, like, “Oh we only do US payments, but we’re signing up Canadian customers on our SaaS platform,” okay, great. That’s an opportunity to expand your addressable market by how—
A.J. AXELROD: And document that so you can go back to them later when you solve that problem.
KEVIN GALLAGHER: Yeah. And don’t really—
A.J. AXELROD: Don’t lose that in the ether.
KEVIN GALLAGHER: Then okay, great. You got them signed up. The next part of the funnel is, are they activated? Why are they not activated and actually using it? Then, once you go through the activation funnel, then it’s all about—like Laura mentioned, it’s we look at TIV to TPV, total invoice volume to total payment volume. The benefit for the vast majority of us in this room being a SaaS platform is you can see the invoice data.
The huge component of what you’ve got to do every month and every quarter is how much TIV, invoice volume, are your merchants doing versus the TPV, payment volume? You’re going to go in there and be like, “Wait a second. This customer did half a million in invoices and I only got 50,000 going through my payment processing. Why, why, why?” Drill into that and figure out specifically what you can address that will move that TIV to TPV. That component is huge, and that’s also how you find out what to iterate on. Again, some of that’s product gaps that are in there that maybe you’re not offering today that can solve that. An addressable market. Some is that shift to check—paper check—that they’re taking a lot of. I know lawyers very well. Same thing. You have lots of paper checks. So, yeah. Constantly reviewing that data through all aspects of the funnel is going to help you really optimize the payments experience.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Yeah. In payments, there’s a lot of data, right? So if you can listen to the data, it’ll really speak to you. To your point, it’s not just about leave no sale behind and continue to iterate on that journey. But also—I think you made a really great callout, also, on making sure that you’re listening for product gaps or product functionality that you can bring to your customers in the future. So at this point, we’re going to move to the lightning round. So the way that it’s going to work, similar to our last round also, is I’m going to give you one or two words, and then I’d love your reaction from your seat today at any of your organizations or the role you play in the broader ecosystem. Laura, we’re going to start with you again. Can you tell us about AI? How are you incorporating it into your organization today?
LAURA COLLINSON: Yeah. I think AI is going to completely transform how everyone works, including a plumber, a landscaper, kind of jobs that you wouldn’t think would have a real opportunity here. One of the things that I think is really powerful for our base, which is customers who don’t spend their life at a computer—they spend their life in a crawl space above your house trying to set up your new HVAC—we’re really bullish on everything voice-activated and being able to, essentially, speak to your AI all day: “Hey, Jobber. Can you do this? Where am I going next? Can you make an invoice for Bill? Here’s what I’m going to do for him. It’ll cost about $500.” And really make that the default mode of engagement with software. We also, for our customers, want to enable them to offer their customers the ability to engage with AI. So we already have an AI receptionist that our customers can use to, essentially, answer phones 24/7, even if they’re in that crawl space.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Fantastic. I could really see that call coming to life. I think we talk a lot about vertical SaaS, vertical AI. We’re just really scratching the surface. That’s very exciting to hear. A.J., for you: stablecoins.
A.J. AXELROD: It’s an interesting question for us because really, like law is a vertical, but there’s many verticals within it in our practice areas. I think for us, stablecoins, they present some really interesting opportunities, particularly in cross-border applications or law that moves across borders. But there’s a lot of it that is just not going to be applicable to us because of the on-ramp and off-ramp for those things. But I’ve worked in other places. I don’t actually know if they’re here, but one of the favorite platforms I’ve ever worked with, I think of it as a vertical supply chain for fresh-cut flowers. You don’t think about it, but that rose that you may see on the side of the road was probably in the ground less than four weeks ago in Ecuador, in most cases, actually. You need to move money between parties that don’t necessarily know each other all the time, that have to build relationships. It’s an importer typically through Miami, and gets cold-trucked the rest of the US.
It’s incredibly applicable there, where you’re trying to think about how do I move money between parties that I know and trust but may not know each other and trust each other, where there’s inherent barriers to moving this money across borders, and where it’s really expensive? So I think there’s these incredible applications that will show up in vertical SaaS. But I’d encourage everyone, right? Don’t grab a tool and go look for a problem. Understand your problem and then get the right tool for it. I think stablecoins are an incredible tool for a specific set of problems.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Yeah, that’s great. I think what you’ve also shone a light on, too, is it really pulls back the curtain on the supply chain or parts of the economy that we’re not really thinking about quite yet.
A.J. AXELROD: Yes.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: So there’s certainly a lot of opportunity ahead of us, but make sure that you’re solving it for the right reasons.
A.J. AXELROD: Yes.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: So, Kevin, take us home here: embedded finance.
KEVIN GALLAGHER: Love it. Love it. I mean, here’s the thing I’m going to say, though, is, okay, before you start jumping to embedded finance, make sure you’ve nailed payments, okay? I see a lot of organizations, they start jumping. “Oh, we’ve got to do ‘buy now, pay later.’ We’ve got to do capital and this and that,” and you look at their payments metrics and you’re like, “Eh, not that great.” Again, if that’s your second largest revenue generator, make sure you’ve got a solid foundation there first and everything’s looking good and it’s growing. Then yes. Then start looking at what’s the next solution that’s relevant to my customer base? That’s going to dictate what financial service products you look at.
Like Laura mentioned—and we have similar customers at EverCommerce as well—but yes, the access to capital to be able to do something for your business is very important for these small businesses. Also, hey, if you’re going out there as a customer—I just had; I have to get my windows replaced in my house. Holy cow, it’s expensive. Guess what? They offer zero percent financing. I was like, “Awesome. Great.” Right? Then look at: are your customers brand new? Are they new businesses? If so, that’s going to dictate what financial services you can offer. Maybe they need treasury, like a bank account, and they need payroll, and they need stuff that new business needs. Versus if you’re going after an existing customer that’s been in business for five years. It’s really hard to get them new payroll, right?
So just think about that within your customer base, as well, to help kind of determine what solutions would bubble up next. Then the last thing is build the ROI models, okay? Because you’re going to do some of these, which I’ve done, and you’re going to find out, oh boy, there’s no money in that. By the time you pay the rewards for card issuing or the risk management and somebody else is doing that, you’re down to, like, not much money, right? So really do the ROI models on those, as well.
NICOLE ARBOLEDA: Great. I’ve taken a lot from this conversation, and I hope you all have, as well. I think if there’s one thing that we all want to leave you with, it’s go home and talk to your customers, call them, really listen. So with that, that’s a wrap. Thank you for your time, and especially thank you to our panelists.
A.J. AXELROD: Thank you.
KEVIN GALLAGHER: Thank you.
LAURA COLLINSON: Thank you.