Latest / Leaders In Payments / Allen Kopelman, CEO & Founder of Nationwide Payment Systems | Episode 388

Transcript

Allen Kopelman, CEO & Founder of Nationwide Payment Systems | Episode 388 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: In Payments podcast.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, alan Payments Podcast.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, alan Kopelman, the CEO of Nationwide Payments Systems.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: So, alan, welcome to the show.
• 0:30
  Speaker 3: Oh, thank you for having me on today, Greg.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: Absolutely Well, let's dive in If you don't mind.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where?
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: Okay, so I live in Fort Lauderdale, florida.
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: I grew up in Florida.
• 0:45
  Speaker 3: After moving, my parents abducted us from New York in 1968.
• 0:51
  Speaker 3: Lived down here in South Florida most of my life, a little bit of time in Atlanta, dallas.
• 0:56
  Speaker 3: I used to be a chef and then crazily got into this payments business in 1998.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: And in 2001, I launched the company Nationwide Payment Systems.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: Okay, great.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: Well, tell us about Nationwide Payment Systems.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: What do you do?
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: Well, we started off basically selling little boxes like everybody else.
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: Back in the day, you know, with the Trans 330s, nereid 2085, hypercoms A lot of people doing it, newer people in the industry never heard of any of that and we started to get into integrating point of sale systems and restaurants as we got requests for that.
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: Because, you know, as you sign up more accounts, you get exposed to more customers and people asking for different things.
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: And over the years, you know, we've, especially the last, I would say, 10 years and then even more in the last five, six years, you know, become very focused on technology and focusing more on technology and less on, you know, merchant services, because today I feel that businesses are buying tech first, merchant services second in most cases.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: Right, right.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: Do you have certain industries or types of merchants that you focus on?
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: No, I think that that was one thing that I was really glad about when we went through the pandemic COVID.
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: That I was really glad about during the when we went through the pandemic COVID is that when I saw a lot of my friends who focused on restaurants, focused on nail salons and businesses like that and focused solely, maybe, in the city where they were, the state that they lost a lot more business than we lost.
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: And because we were focusing, in prior to that period, on a lot of e-com, you know we didn't see a huge drop off, which was good, so that was super important, while we did see a significant drop off in residuals, you know we didn't take as hard a hit as many people took.
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: So I think that when you stick to one sector, that that's really difficult.
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: But one of the things that we have done is is, you know, we kind of take the approach like okay, you know you're a higher not a high, not necessarily high risk, you know, but a higher risk type of business.
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: We focus in on finding solutions for them, finding software they could use, you know, working with processors that deal with those type of businesses, and those people get called on a lot less.
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: The B2B sector doesn't get called on.
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: I always tell my reps go to the warehouse areas.
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: What are you guys doing?
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: Everybody's pounding the pavement on the storefronts, right, and you know these guys that have businesses and warehouses and freestanding buildings.
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: No one ever calls on them and if you call on them you're going to find a hidden gem in there doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: So you know you have to, really you know, expand, who you're willing to call on to get business.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: Okay, so you're kind of talking about sort of go to market.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: So obviously you have sales reps, do you have partnerships?
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: How else do you go to market?
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: We don't really have a lot of sales reps, maybe like one or two, just other real sales reps.
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: Everybody else, basically, is a referral partner.
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: So you know, you come.
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: We deal with a lot of business brokers, you know consultants for different types of businesses, fractionals we have a couple of fractional CFOs, so they might be working with a business and the business you know is at a point where, okay, we need a new point of sale system with 50,000 items of inventory and what are we going to use for a point of sale.
• 4:49
  Speaker 3: And they'll come to us and say, oh, can you help us with this problem?
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: And we focus more on those type of opportunities.
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: I got booted off Stripe.
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: What do I?
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: do.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: I'm sure you hear that a lot.
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: We get some of those calls.
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: Some of them are super difficult to deal with because they build up.
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: It's amazing to me You'll see a business doing millions of dollars a month and they built their entire infrastructure on Stripe and then they can't move.
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's super challenging.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: And you mentioned POS.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: Are there certain POS systems that you like to sell more than others, or just pretty much whatever fits the merchant need?
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: Well, we always want to fit the merchant's need, but what we've done is in the last couple of years it's kind of learned our lesson when it comes to point of sale.
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: I was in a forum on Facebook the other day somebody big in the business I don't know if you know Mike Nardi he wrote most people don't understand what you're talking about.
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: You've lost more money in residual than most people have made in their lifetime.
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: The trend where all these private equity came in and bought up all these point of sale systems and then swooped in and stole all the credit card processing either right away or over a short period of time, that's really dug into our pocket.
• 6:07
  Speaker 3: And after that happened quite a few times.
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: We really worked hard to find companies who own the point of sale system, own the processing relationship and it's all one company.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: And that way we know that if they do sell we're not going to lose our residual.
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: And it's a huge problem in the business.
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: I mean, just like in 2024, last year we probably lost close to $10,000 a month in recurring revenue from just software.
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: Company gets sold.
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: Here goes to one merchant, two merchants, three merchants gone.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: You know so and that hurts.
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: You know when you lose that much money in residuals to those to that problem, and that problem I don't think is is ever going to stop right now.
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: I wrote an article about agnostic versus antagonistic and I wrote another follow-up article called Is Software the New ISO?
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: And software is the new ISO and that's where the business is going right now.
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: Every company out there is focused on partnering with ISVs.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely has been a trend for quite some time, I don't know.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: I've read stats where up to 60% of small businesses are running payments through software companies.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: Oh, definitely.
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: I would say that software is going to start, probably in the next two years, going to really outpace, especially as business owners get younger.
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: We're going to see more software, less terminals.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: Totally, totally agree.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: So are you guys just kind of based in the US or do you do anything outside the US?
• 7:52
  Speaker 3: We can do a little bit outside the US because we have referral relationships with companies.
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: When somebody comes to us If they're doing international transactions, I always laugh.
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: Visa has commercials, oh, it's a worldwide economy, but that's not really.
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: You know, that's far from the case.
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: I think that, you know, from an ISO perspective, when I look at some of these big ISOs, I think some of them need to really take a look.
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: At Stripe they probably used to laugh and go Stripe, what are they going to do, you know?
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: But I think they really need to take a look at you know how they're capturing a lot of these e-commerce companies, especially the SaaS companies, who are doing business all over the world, and you know we will get some of those businesses come to us and then it's if they have a large amount of international transactions.
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: It's really hard to service that kind of business Right and there, and there's only a few people in that game of international processing.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: Well, what would you say?
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: Differentiates your business from your competitors out there.
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: Well, one, we do a very good homework with our merchants.
• 8:56
  Speaker 3: We try to understand.
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: I ask them all the time like, okay, tell me about your business, how do you accept payments?
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: You can't show me two plumbers that are going to do business the exact same way.
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: One guy is going to want to have a card present.
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: One guy is going to want to key in everything.
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: The third guy is going to want to send a payment link out.
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: It's just what you know.
• 9:17
  Speaker 3: You just have to figure out and then try to explain to them the risks that accompany.
• 9:22
  Speaker 3: You know what they're doing and it's and you know sometimes the sometimes it just depends like they're beat, like we have a huge plumbing company.
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: It's b2b, they only deal with the businesses.
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: They have very little residential.
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: So for residential we gave them little swipe simples for their five guys that do residential, everybody else they just send them a link and they pay their bill.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: So you know you have to really do your homework and not try to stick a.
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: You know a square peg in a round hole and you know figure out what what they're doing, how they're doing it, and you know take advantage of things like when somebody comes to you and and they're in a particular business that might get breaks on interchange because of their SIC code, and make sure that you board them correctly so that they're getting the correct SIC codes and hitting the right interchange levels so that you can save them a lot of money like education utilities.
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: Insurance is a big one.
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: We found many insurance companies being charged retail interchange, nonprofits on retail interchange and they're on cost plus but they're not getting the break that they need.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: So you talked about software being the future.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: What are some other trends that you see over the next, say, three to five years in payments?
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: Well, that's definitely number one.
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: You see, over the next, say, three to five years in payments Well, that's definitely number one.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: I see number two.
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: I see a lot of sales going back to the ISOs where they're pressing to do more inside sales.
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: I see that.
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: The third thing I see is the FTC just came out with this really strict click to cancel rule and I think that that's going to create a lot of havoc out there for companies who are doing recurring transactions because the fine is $55,000 per incident.
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: I think that could cause some major problems this year once that goes into effect in April or May.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: The other thing I've been reading about although the article that I read, two of them were pulled from the internet.
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: I guess it's a rumor that Visa and MasterCard are upset about all these companies who are propagating level two and level three data into the transactions.
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: It's kind of like, I guess, preset data to get lower interchange fees.
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: I guess they're trying to take action to stop that or at least not accept that data.
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: But they give everybody enough notice.
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: The payment companies will figure out some sort of AI to go in there so they're not sending the same data each and every time to the card processor.
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: That could cause another headache this year and let's hope that Dick Durbin doesn't get to promote the CCCA and try to even get that passed, because I think that that will create forget the havoc it would cause on our business.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: I think it would cause businesses to have a really hard time and I think it would really cost consumers more money.
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: It's not going to help consumers because it's just going to drive people to buy now, pay later.
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: And buy now, pay later costs businesses more money and costs consumers more money.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: Well, they're not educated enough to really, I think, understand the real implications in the real world.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: And that's always been a challenge, right?
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: The visas and MasterCards aren't going to give up their revenue, nor are the banks or acquirers or anyone else, right, they're going to find it another way.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: No, it was interesting to see the Congress when they had that hearing and they're questioning the people from Visa Well, what are you going to do about the trillion dollar deficit on credit cards?
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: They said we're not in charge.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: Talk to the banks, you know.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: So it just shows you that they're uneducated on how the payments business works and they're not interested.
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: It's more like hey, let's showboat, let's bring in Visa and MasterCard and let's slap them around.
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: The public will say, yeah, congress slapped around Visa and MasterCard.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: Right, right.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: Well, you mentioned AI a minute ago.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: Are you hearing much about that from your merchants?
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: Is it affecting your business at all?
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: Well, one thing AI is definitely out there.
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: If you're not experimenting with AI, I suggest you go to OpenAI or whichever Gemini or Copilot, whatever you want to use.
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: Register, have a registered account.
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: Get a paid account at least with one of.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: Have a registered account.
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: Get a paid account at least with one of those, because when you're using a paid account and you're typing and doing things and asking it to write letters or help you with blog posts or a document or marketing material or social media posts, it starts to learn about your website and what you're doing and you know.
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: So AI everybody needs to get on the AI train and start learning AI, because AI is not going to replace people in all cases.
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: It might reduce workforce somewhat because you know, if you're using AI to do underwriting, you know now you don't need somebody sitting there typing in websites and looking up people's credit report.
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: You can program an AI to go in and do all that and hand the underwriter.
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: Okay, here's the report on this guy.
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: Boom, and it's sitting in front of them in five minutes instead of 20 or 30 minutes or an hour.
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: So you know, definitely I think a lot of processors are using AI.
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: They're going to figure out how to use AI.
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: Businesses are going to figure out how to use it.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: We started using AI on our SEO.
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: We took our SEO from a single-digit 8 to 98 score on SEO, so obviously it works good.
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: It tells you everything.
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: It tells you, goes in, analyzes your entire site and then gives you a list like, okay, go here, fix this, fix that you know.
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: Tells you things you're doing right, what you're doing wrong.
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: So ai is here to stay.
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: I mean definitely see tons of investment into AI.
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: Who knows where it's going to take us in the future, but I think businesses are going to put it to use and people need to put it to use, because people who know how to use AI will replace people who don't use AI.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a fact.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: There's no doubt that that's coming.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: Maybe walk us through your professional journey, what you were doing before.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: You mentioned being a chef, but maybe talk about your professional journey, what got you into payments, how you started the company, a few things like that.
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so payments, that was just an accident.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: I had a restaurant and I was planning expand and then that didn't work out.
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: I was doing some catering and then one of my friends said hey, you should get into the payments game.
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: You can make all this money, sign people with leases and this and that and make residual.
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: So I started working for somebody and I really enjoyed the business.
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: It was a lot less work than working in a restaurant.
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: I mean, I worked in hotels, country clubs, I mean restaurant, so the hours are better, I would definitely say that in the payments business.
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: And then you know, you start to figure out like, hey, what am I going to do with this?
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: I started my own company.
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: I credit Riyad from JR's POS Depot.
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: He doesn't own it anymore.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: But he gave me my first two copies of the green sheet and I read the green sheet and then I was like, wow, I guess I could start one of these companies.
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: So that's what I ended up doing as my business partner, david, and we launched our company in 2001.
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: And we really just looked at things and said we need to do things.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: That the way we want to be treated the way I would want to be treated as a business owner and just treat people the way we want to be treated Be available.
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: I always tell sales reps the one thing.
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: I tell this to merchants too anybody who has a business If you answer your phone, you're doing 10 times better than everybody that's not answering their phone.
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: So you have to answer your phone.
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: That's a key thing in business.
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: Return emails and today you need to have a good digital presence.
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: You have to figure out, have a linkedin profile, have uh, I mean I see I started my podcast almost three years ago and hardly anybody was podcasting in payments.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: Now there's probably a dozen or more payments, podcasts and from all different types of companies and people and all that.
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: So you know, and everything's focused on a different topic area.
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: And leasing that was another like big headache.
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: So we decided like, oh, we're just going to do this 12-month lease.
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: And when we would go into businesses in our early days we'd say, oh, the lease is only 12 months, you make 13 payments and you're done.
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: Say, oh, the lease is only 12 months, you make 13 payments and you're done, so you don't have to deal with the year-end tax bill that you would get and all this other you know, excise taxes on leases.
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: It was really crazy and when you get yelled at a few times you go, hey well, how can I fix this?
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: And you know, I was lucky that the people that I worked for at the time Imperial Bank of California they hooked us up with a good leasing company and what's funny is a lot of relationships I have in the business today.
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: Long-term relationships all came from that relationship that I started with.
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: So the people that worked at that bank tons of them Joe, gretchen, kevin, there was a guy, steve we write business for his group now for years.
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: Tons of people that I met, rosie tons of people that I met through that one relationship, are still around today.
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: So relationships are super important in this business.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: Somebody will come to me and they'll go well, can you get this merchant approved?
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, where are you going to send it?
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: Then I'll tell them oh, this place.
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: Well, heck, I sent it there, it was declined.
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: Well, you're you and I'm me.
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: And people don't understand.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: They call everything like oh, there's a super ISO and then there's whatever wholesale ISOs and all these names, right.
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: And basically I tell people I go, you guys just don't understand the business.
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: If somebody has an ISO and they're a full service ISO, where they're taking liability at least most of the liability or all the liability they're going to be able to get more things approved at the bank than somebody who's an ISO but has zero liability.
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: And that's what people don't tend to understand, what the real structure of the business is.
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: And then obviously everybody's got five, ten years experience in the business brings the same deal in with more information and a full package.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: There's ways to get things approved.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: Well, what are some things you're passionate about?
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: Maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: Work-related passion is I like giving back to the community of the payments, coming on podcasts talking about the payments industry.
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: I always attend the SCAA.
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: I went to the very first one.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: I'm going there this year.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: I'm going to be doing a panel talking about software is coming for us and you know I really enjoy doing that.
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: I write a column in the green sheet, the street smarts column.
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: They just announced that I'm invited back for my second year, so I really enjoy doing that and getting a lot of good feedback from reps that start to.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: They discover one article, then they start reading more articles and you know it's nice to you know get that feedback from people that they're wow.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: This is really, really appreciate you sharing the content.
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: That's really important.
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: The podcast is also.
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: We're talking to business people and giving small to medium-sized business owners tips on all sorts of things sales, marketing, not just about payments, it's about more than that talking to different business leaders about their startup company and how did they start it up.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: Maybe we help them along the way, or they tell us about their project that they're doing and things like that.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: I'm really passionate about doing that and helping people.
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: It's super important.
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: That's one of the things I like about this business being a chef, you cook food and then you see smiling faces, everybody's enjoying your food.
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: That's really cool.
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: And with this business, we're helping business owners achieve what they want in their business.
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: Technology helps businesses save time and money, so it's super important you help people save time, save money, give them good information.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: You know sometimes they don't like.
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: Sometimes you're the bearer of like oh, maybe you shouldn't do that or you need to change this to protect yourself more and things like that.
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: You know like nobody likes to discuss chargebacks.
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: You know like that.
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: You know like nobody likes to discuss chargebacks.
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: You know, and my personal life and even that goes into business a little bit is, you know, giving back to the community and it's important to give back to your community and we're involved with a lot of local charities here in South Florida.
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: A lot of them are related to children children that need clothing, children that need scholarships to pay for sports, scholarships so children can be in a preschool, and different things like that.
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: And you know dog charities and you know we have food banks and all different sorts of charities and we give money throughout the year and we volunteer at some of those charities and so it's important to give back.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: I also tell reps you know it's super important.
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: You know, be involved in your community, give back to your community, show people that you're a business leader.
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: And the other thing I always tell reps they don't listen to this one.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: You're a sales rep, okay, and you're selling bank card.
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: You need to invest in your business.
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: Invest in your business means put up a one-page website, promote yourself.
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: I have a website, alan coblemancom.
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: I mean it's not super important for me because I own a company, but if you have a company name put, make a one-page website with information about your company, stick your picture on there, put your linkedin on there and make yourself look good.
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: And don't have a Gmail or a Yahoo or a mail.
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: You know you got to look professional.
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: You got to look the part right.
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: So when you look the part and you act the part, people don't know how big or how small your company is.
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: They don't know so.
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: But if you don't present yourself where you have a real business, that's kind of hard to deal with.
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: And I tell them form a corporation the money it costs you to form your corporation.
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: I tell this even to small business owners form a corporation.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: If you don't have money for that, start out at least with a fictitious name.
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: Separate your money from your business and your personal.
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: Do not co-mingle those funds because later, when you go to incorporate, you already have the start of a business.
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: So it's super important to invest in your business.
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: Whether you're a sales rep or you're the ISO, whatever your role is in your business is to do it the right way and make an investment.
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: Invest in your business and invest in your community.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: Very, very important.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: So one final question and you've kind of answered this from advice perspective to sales reps but if someone just came to you and said hey, you know, maybe they're right out of college, they're looking for a career, they want to build a career in payments, they know you have a lot of knowledge what would you tell them to do to be successful in payments as a career?
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: To be successful in payment Today, go invent some software.
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: It's crazy, but I tell this story all the time.
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: In 2001, when I started, people built software to sell hardware and to sell service contracts, and they sell their software right.
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: So that's what they sold.
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: Today, somebody builds software, they're looking, they don't care about hardware.
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: They're using iPads or Android tablets or just whatever any kind of computer the merchant has, you know, and they're selling a SaaS revenue and they want payments.
• 26:14
  Speaker 3: That's you know.
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: That's what we're all about now.
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: We're trying to recruit as many independent software vendors as possible.
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: And you know, if you want to get started in payments, you got to get out there, get your nose bloody.
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: You got to have to do what everybody else did to learn this business.
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: I can't download.
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: You know everything 25 years into somebody's brain.
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: You know you had to out there, pound some pavement, get beat up.
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: It's just much harder today because somebody's got a POS sitting on their counter.
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: Unless that thing's broken, it's a lot harder to rip out of there than somebody's just got a Trans 330 or a Hypercom.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: Back in the old days you just walked up, batched it out, hit a few buttons after you got them approved and boom, you have a merchant account.
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: You know it's just a lot harder today.
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: But you know, listen, you can get out there.
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: And also with cash discount, dual pricing, 0% programs, surcharging you know that's a whole other subject matter.
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: But that just gives reps a way bigger leg up on when we started in the business because they can make hundreds or thousands of dollars a month from one merchant account.
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: So it's a lot easier to make money that way on zero percent programs and just bite the bullet and stop fighting with the merchants and sending out letters and secret shoppers and stop with the games with the surcharging.
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: And I read an article where it said more than 33 percent of retail merchants are passing a fee to their customers.
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: So that means one out of three.
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: That's a lot.
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: That's a lot of businesses passing the fee.
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: I mean, will Visa change course?
• 28:04
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: No one tells Visa what to do.
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: They make their own rules.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: They're so big.
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: The only company or person that has more money than Visa is Elon Musk, all right, or a person that has more money than visas, Elon Musk.
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: Well, Alan, we've had a great discussion about you and the company and the industry as a whole.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: Is there anything you'd like to add before we wrap up?
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: Well, if you want to connect with me, you can reach me on LinkedIn, alan Kopelman.
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: You can check out the podcast B2B Vault.
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: Listen to Greg's podcast.
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: Hope everybody enjoyed what we talked about today and thank you for having me on the show.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, alan, thank you, and I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being on the show today.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Thank you, and to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: Until the next story.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 29:01
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