Latest / Sarah Knows Support Workers / From Garage to GOAT: Garth Belic on Building PayCat — Payroll That Actually Works

Transcript

From Garage to GOAT: Garth Belic on Building PayCat — Payroll That Actually Works · Sarah Knows Support Workers

• 0:00
  Hi everyone. It's Sarah from the support
• 0:01
  worker store Today I've got Gar. It is the brat and the cat.
• 0:05
  We're finally here. We finally made it to a podcast.
• 0:08
  Great. So do you want to get?
• 0:09
  Straight into it. Nice to meet you too.
• 0:12
  We finally. Yeah, let's do it.
• 0:13
  We did it. Like are you Melbourne based?
• 0:15
  No, I'm up in Newcastle and NSW. And you're just absolutely
• 0:18
  everywhere, Absolutely everywhere.
• 0:20
  Every time I talk to you, you seem to be on a flight somewhere
• 0:23
  and you're going there. So yeah, you're very Australian
• 0:26
  wide. I think in the time, yeah, we
• 0:29
  are. I think in the time I've been
• 0:30
  talking I've been had a few conferences on and a few trips
• 0:34
  to Sydney in there and stuff like that.
• 0:35
  But yeah, I try to try to limit the travel where I can because
• 0:39
  I've got a young family here. We've got a head office in
• 0:42
  Newcastle, but all our staff is out all over Australia.
• 0:45
  Yeah, tell me about a little bit more about your life.
• 0:47
  So you said you've got a small family.
• 0:49
  Tell me more. Well, yeah, so I've got two
• 0:52
  kids, 14 and 11. So my son's in year 8 at high
• 0:56
  school, my daughter's in year 6 and the the polar opposite, both
• 1:00
  lovely kids with the pole operatives.
• 1:01
  My daughter's, you know, posed to take over the world.
• 1:04
  She's school captain and wins public speaking competitions and
• 1:07
  all this stuff. And my son's a real sweetheart.
• 1:09
  He's right in his martial arts, so he loves his karate and
• 1:11
  everything like that. And he.
• 1:12
  Yeah, very sweet kid, very minded.
• 1:15
  And actually I called the when I set up company, I called 100
• 1:18
  Madison Holdings originally before you become the name.
• 1:21
  So that was sort of my little dedication to them so that, you
• 1:24
  know, when you have those days where you're not sure why you're
• 1:27
  bothering all this, you just remember why you're doing it.
• 1:29
  But yeah, they're wonderful. So how did you get yourself into
• 1:33
  payroll? I was a accountant by trade.
• 1:36
  So when I left uni I went went through some of the big four
• 1:39
  accounting firms and mid 2 firms in Newcastle I went to, I think
• 1:45
  it's like, I'm going to give you a long story here, but in around
• 1:47
  2010, two, 1011, it was sort of when, yeah.
• 1:51
  So it was when a lot of the cloud apps sort of came along,
• 1:56
  like see where I was one of them.
• 1:57
  But there was a product called SASU and all that sort of stuff.
• 2:00
  And prior to that I was doing a lot of external audit.
• 2:03
  So we'd audit big companies payroll systems and give them
• 2:05
  like obviously we're trying to find fraud and error and all
• 2:08
  that sort of stuff. But we also would give them
• 2:09
  advice through a management letter on how they could improve
• 2:12
  their system. And for me, that was the best
• 2:14
  part of or the most interesting part doing the audit as a young
• 2:17
  fella is just trying to learn and understand how these big
• 2:21
  companies operate, you know, and what systems they had in place,
• 2:24
  even primitive back then, like it was all pen and paper.
• 2:27
  I'm showing my age, but some system access stuff.
• 2:32
  But you know, it was, it was all desktop and, and often the
• 2:35
  advice would be, look, you've got a good system, but you
• 2:38
  should really try to make sure that you're not trying to
• 2:42
  duplicate data from here to here.
• 2:44
  Try to see if you can integrate it and bring it all into one
• 2:46
  spot. When cloud accounting came out,
• 2:48
  you know, it wasn't sort of desktop.
• 2:50
  It sort of untethered the, the systems at the time a little
• 2:53
  bit. And I was starting to get more
• 2:56
  and more curious about APIs and things like that.
• 2:58
  That was sort of piqued my interest, even though it wasn't
• 3:01
  in tech. I'm like, oh, wow, there's a way
• 3:02
  to sort of glue these systems together, which appealed to me a
• 3:06
  lot. And as time went on, I took the
• 3:07
  plunge and sort of around when my son was born, I took the
• 3:10
  plunge and opened up a little accounting practice.
• 3:13
  No clients. It was a crazy thing to do, but
• 3:16
  I used to just pound and go up and down the streets and try to
• 3:18
  find clients. And my idea at the time was I'd
• 3:20
  set up these cloud apps and run accounting for them or
• 3:25
  bookkeeping for them as a, as a function within their business,
• 3:29
  right? Sort of like a what we call a
• 3:30
  virtual CFO now. It's just not that wasn't around
• 3:34
  always around back then. And I had trouble like it wasn't
• 3:37
  really demand for that at the time.
• 3:38
  Like people were just still still sort of counting as get my
• 3:41
  tax return at the end of the year and that's it, right.
• 3:43
  So as I got into it, more and more people came up to me and
• 3:47
  said, oh, great, so you could do payroll.
• 3:50
  OK, sure, no problem. And Google what payroll means,
• 3:54
  you know, hours times, hourly rate, right, Sorry.
• 3:56
  How hard could it be? Couldn't be that difficult,
• 3:59
  surely. And you get into it and then you
• 4:01
  open up, you open up wards for the first time and your eyes
• 4:04
  glaze over and you know, what have I got myself into?
• 4:06
  And you know, back then people were still faxing timesheets to
• 4:10
  us and faxing leave requests to us and things like that.
• 4:12
  So I took it on and took it on mainly out of survival really.
• 4:17
  But as soon as I took it on, I thought, oh, I wonder if I can
• 4:19
  use these APIs to like find a good payroll system that has
• 4:22
  APIs, right? And, and see if we can, for
• 4:25
  example, like build an online form where you could maybe fill
• 4:28
  out a leave request in the online form and instead of
• 4:30
  faxing it, it just goes straight in.
• 4:32
  And same, same thing with the timesheet, same thing with a new
• 4:34
  employee. You know, so that was some of
• 4:36
  the early projects that took on. And I come across it's called
• 4:39
  employment here apparel now it's called key pay back then.
• 4:41
  And, and came across that pretty early.
• 4:44
  They just gone to market. And I was fascinated by it
• 4:46
  because when they, when they first came out, the first thing
• 4:49
  they put in place was employee self-service, which meant that
• 4:51
  the employee could log in and do all these things themselves.
• 4:54
  Cut out that straightaway, cut out those fax timesheets and you
• 4:58
  know, leave requests and all those sorts of things.
• 4:59
  We had to fill in ourselves, just took that out of it and,
• 5:03
  and that was great. And I just sort of got very
• 5:05
  nerdy about learning the the back end of the system like how
• 5:08
  APIs worked and all that sort of stuff.
• 5:10
  Fast forward a little bit, their product got better and better.
• 5:13
  It's pretty primitive when it first came out, but it got
• 5:15
  better and better. And they come out with a, a
• 5:18
  feature called rules, which very simply is where you can put, you
• 5:22
  know, if this happens, then do that.
• 5:24
  If, if somebody chooses this on their timesheet, pay them an
• 5:27
  allowance, somebody works past this time accurate and overtime
• 5:30
  pay category, that sort of thing.
• 5:31
  And they said to me, look, Garth, we've got a client, we
• 5:34
  want you to, we've only just released, it was like 48 hours
• 5:37
  ago released this feature. This client's been waiting for
• 5:39
  it go down and build it. And this client happened to be
• 5:43
  running an EBA for a construction business of an
• 5:46
  enterprise agreement said, OK, I'll take it on.
• 5:48
  And I'm literally reading the, the tutorial on the plane on the
• 5:51
  way down. So personally, oven arrived
• 5:53
  pretending I know what I'm talking about.
• 5:55
  And, and I remember going to their office and it was a
• 5:58
  construction type business. So they were backed by a really
• 6:01
  powerful union. So I went and I built all this
• 6:03
  stuff and they switched it on and started using it.
• 6:06
  And I think it like, you know, I did something wrong in the first
• 6:10
  one I'd built and they were missing out on audio or they're
• 6:13
  missing out on something. There's something missing from
• 6:16
  300 posters went out with something missing.
• 6:18
  They all walk off site and, and they sit in the shed and they
• 6:23
  say we're going to sit in the shed with pay until this is
• 6:25
  fixed. So they're quite screaming at
• 6:27
  me, like, how could you possibly do this?
• 6:29
  That was sort of my first experience.
• 6:32
  And we kept up with the changes in the system and got better at
• 6:35
  implementing it. And in the end sold that price,
• 6:38
  ended up working for key pay internally.
• 6:40
  And my job when I was there was to I built all the awards, all
• 6:45
  the awards templates. A lot of the ones that still use
• 6:47
  today were sort of do it in that era.
• 6:49
  So like if you, if you went and downloaded employment care
• 6:52
  payroll now and downloaded say manufacturing or something in
• 6:55
  there. I built that at home in 2014,
• 7:00
  you know, so that was that was my job eventually left there and
• 7:04
  I can pay Cat, I think in 2018. And at the time single touch
• 7:10
  payroll had just come in. I don't actually remember that.
• 7:13
  But like all of a sudden we have to report pay events,
• 7:16
  deployment. Yeah.
• 7:17
  And a lot of old systems were around that were just sort of
• 7:21
  dinosaur systems that were sort of shutting down because they're
• 7:23
  like, you know what, we can't we can't be bothered making the
• 7:27
  investment to we don't want to spend 1,000,000 bucks trying to
• 7:29
  integrate with the Ato. So we're just going to park
• 7:31
  this. And they wanted all their
• 7:32
  clients to move across to key base and one of the few people
• 7:35
  out there that knew how to set up key pay for people.
• 7:41
  And I just put on LinkedIn and started getting a lot of work.
• 7:44
  So Pay Card actually started sort of me just doing freelance
• 7:46
  work from my garage in 2018. As, I mean, we'll talk about it
• 7:52
  more, but as more clients come in and more opportunities come
• 7:56
  in, I would say, all right, well, I can't do all this
• 7:59
  myself. So I'm going to bring somebody
• 8:00
  and I'm going to take one of the hats off and I'm wearing give it
• 8:02
  a that purse and take one of the hats off and give it a that
• 8:04
  purse. You know, Pay Cap now has 32
• 8:07
  staff and I most days are reasonably bored.
• 8:10
  You know, I don't have too much to do anymore because I've
• 8:12
  allocated out all these hats over the years.
• 8:14
  But but yeah, it's been a really interesting ride to go from that
• 8:18
  freelance model into what it is now.
• 8:19
  It's I've got to ask this because I do interview a lot of
• 8:23
  founders on this podcast. It sounds like you were actually
• 8:26
  quite curious. What sparked your curiosity when
• 8:29
  it began? Because it seemed like you
• 8:31
  upskilled yourself to learn new skills to be able to introduce
• 8:36
  it into an app form. Yeah.
• 8:38
  So obviously I like, I didn't, I didn't build it, just to
• 8:41
  clarify. I didn't build the app myself as
• 8:43
  much more clever build than me that built it.
• 8:44
  But I was very fascinated by it and the kind of person who likes
• 8:47
  to sort of look under the hood and see how things work.
• 8:50
  Great stuff. And you know, I probably, but in
• 8:53
  my top over, I probably would have gone into engineering more
• 8:55
  than accounting, you know, not but I got into accounting.
• 8:59
  So I was just fascinated by businesses.
• 9:01
  So it's the same curiosity there that led me into that
• 9:03
  profession. And you know, even if my early
• 9:06
  employees that actually because there's no rule.
• 9:09
  So there's no rule. Like unfortunately, there's no a
• 9:11
  dedicated profession in our country for payroll.
• 9:14
  You can sort of do it through bookkeeping and accounting and
• 9:16
  there's certifications and stuff.
• 9:18
  And there's there's movements of people to turn it into a
• 9:20
  profession, which I'm awful a complete backing on because
• 9:23
  payroll people are invaluable in our country.
• 9:27
  But you can't really find people from a degree, you know, so
• 9:31
  you've got to go, well, what's the right fit, right.
• 9:34
  And when I was trying to find people that could do an
• 9:36
  implementation for my first staff for actually guys that
• 9:40
  have done engineering at university and stuff like that.
• 9:42
  So they're done like mechatronics.
• 9:44
  One of my first employers was a mechatronics engineer, Chris
• 9:46
  Davies. He still works for us now and,
• 9:48
  and he brought along people that he knew through high school,
• 9:51
  like a, you know, like a high learning high school locally.
• 9:55
  A lot of his, a lot of his friends early on come along and
• 9:57
  started working for the garage. And we at once say we got funny
• 10:01
  photos and stuff of, of us sitting around.
• 10:02
  Some of those guys that still work for me was sitting in a
• 10:05
  garage in a dining table that hardly fit in the room.
• 10:09
  And literally if there's a monitor here, there'd be a cup
• 10:12
  of coffee on the desk. He does to move a cup of coffee
• 10:14
  over here because he's got to use his keyboard.
• 10:16
  And we, we joke around about, you know, saying their clients
• 10:19
  on Zoom, like we're just moving media room 2.
• 10:21
  It's just this one space. Media room 2 is my deck on the
• 10:25
  back of the house. So.
• 10:26
  So it's pretty humble. Because IBM.
• 10:28
  Because IBM. Yeah, to answer your question, I
• 10:31
  think there's a lot of good like Silicon Valley startup stories
• 10:35
  about in the garage and he's a Rider passive.
• 10:38
  And you know, how do you think about like in the time I've had
• 10:42
  hey cat, like it's all the work from home stuff sort of become
• 10:46
  vague now too. So like when I had it like in
• 10:48
  2018, remember we're still going to offices every day and all
• 10:52
  right. And COVID sort of forced
• 10:53
  everybody's hand to get a quicker work from home.
• 10:55
  So, so we're sort of we're going through that evolution now.
• 11:00
  So what is the hardest part when you look back when you first
• 11:04
  started your business? All right, well, when you first
• 11:07
  kick it off, you have all the time in the world, no money.
• 11:09
  So you've got to do stuff. You've got to do stuff that you
• 11:12
  know, you've got to use what you have an abundance of, right?
• 11:15
  So if you have an abundance of time, you could spend time
• 11:17
  sitting there doing business directory listings on, on Google
• 11:20
  and you can set up your social media.
• 11:22
  So you, you know, a lot, a lot of apps have like a freemium
• 11:25
  level that you can jump on and like HubSpot has a freemium
• 11:29
  level that you can go and settle that up, get an e-mail marketing
• 11:31
  campaign and all this sort of stuff.
• 11:33
  And a lot of it's sort of your ground games got to be good when
• 11:36
  you set up So cold, cold outreach to LinkedIn and
• 11:39
  utilizing your networks like sort of stuff to get those early
• 11:42
  clients in. Then as time goes on, you end up
• 11:45
  less time, more money if things go well.
• 11:48
  It's at that point that you start saying, well, what you
• 11:50
  know do I bring somebody in to perform this function for me so
• 11:54
  I can keep my time free. And that you know like the most
• 11:57
  recent incarnation for us as we very early on outsource a lot of
• 12:00
  our marketing and we've brought that into house in the past 18
• 12:03
  months and that you know, accounting book was the same.
• 12:07
  I've definitely noticed, I said I'd noticed because it's so it's
• 12:09
  really easy to communicate with you guys.
• 12:11
  Yeah, that's great. That's true.
• 12:12
  They're doing their job. But yeah, they do a great job,
• 12:15
  you know, but but one of the going back to what really took
• 12:18
  Pay cut off, I guess there was a bit of chance actually when I
• 12:21
  started Pay cut, I started somebody got me on a HubSpot
• 12:24
  pretty early on. Do you use Hotspot at all or no
• 12:28
  of it? Yes, I tried it but I just felt
• 12:30
  overwhelmed by it because every time I wanted to do something I
• 12:33
  have to level up and I have to pay more and I feel like all I
• 12:37
  do is pay more. Like I never get what I need or
• 12:40
  I'm not quite sure if I've got the right automation in place,
• 12:44
  if that makes any sense. Yeah, so it's it's very, it's
• 12:48
  very broken down in modules, but they they had a nice free tier
• 12:51
  and I sort of pretty well kicked off on day one with that.
• 12:54
  And I've got very fascinated by the dead Blogs are very
• 12:57
  informative, right. So now I'm going to say, I'm
• 12:59
  just going to say body that is starting business now that it's
• 13:02
  watching your podcast. Like if you go on their blogs,
• 13:05
  they're extremely informative about their methodology they use
• 13:08
  to market to their audience, right.
• 13:09
  And I got quite fascinated by that.
• 13:12
  Don't have a background in marketing, but they used an
• 13:15
  approach called inbound marketing.
• 13:17
  And the methodology behind it is these days, we don't, you know,
• 13:20
  we don't wait for someone to knock on our door or, or we
• 13:23
  don't drive past a billboard or we don't look at the side of a
• 13:25
  bus and hear a radio Jingle and, and make a buying decision.
• 13:29
  We go and do our own research. You know, we have Google and we
• 13:32
  have now we have AI and these are research tools, right?
• 13:34
  So like, for example, if I'm looking to put in a new payroll
• 13:37
  system, I'm going to have questions about how much that's
• 13:39
  going to cost and what's going to be involved.
• 13:41
  And can I use my existing tools that I've got And all these I've
• 13:45
  got to answer before I even decide what I'm going to use.
• 13:47
  And by the time that customer is talking to us, they've done 80%
• 13:50
  of that research already, you know, and you're just bringing
• 13:53
  the last 20%. So what HubSpot it's all about
• 13:56
  is they say, well, you've got to put the information out that
• 13:58
  answers that question or answers those questions.
• 14:01
  And so when COVID hit, like a lot says Payca at the time,
• 14:05
  we're doing a lot of like construction, retail,
• 14:07
  hospitality, and a lot of that slowed right down.
• 14:09
  And so we decided, I decided to start putting out a whole bunch
• 14:14
  of blogs to, again, I had no money in a lot of time.
• 14:16
  So I put out a whole bunch of blogs and with the marketing
• 14:20
  agency I was using at the time, we, we put out a whole bunch of
• 14:23
  content about a whole bunch of different awards.
• 14:26
  We wrote the jargon free guide to the Shads award was one of
• 14:30
  them and construction and manufacturing and just put it
• 14:32
  out there and watch what happened.
• 14:33
  And it Hubspot's good at tracking all this stuff and
• 14:35
  telling you what resonates and what doesn't.
• 14:37
  And when we sat back and had a look at it, when we wrote the
• 14:40
  one about Shads, remember we wrote 17 or 18 of these things.
• 14:43
  The Shads 1 was the one that really took off.
• 14:46
  There's a huge appetite for people wanting to understand
• 14:49
  Shads award worked you know and and we.
• 14:51
  I sat back and looked at this and oh wow, this is like out
• 14:55
  like significantly outperforming blogs here.
• 14:57
  There's another time. Yeah, it's not the same now like
• 14:59
  we've got you and I could ask ChatGPT to write me a blog on
• 15:03
  the Shads award or to do it. But back then as a labor of
• 15:05
  love, right. And so, so people had people
• 15:07
  would go on and and do their own research.
• 15:10
  You know, how does a Shads award work?
• 15:11
  It's confusing me. And what we would do is we'd
• 15:13
  write the content and then we asked if they'd like to download
• 15:16
  a free ebook off the back of this blog and they'd have to put
• 15:19
  it's free to put their e-mail address in and off the back of
• 15:22
  that e-mail address, we send it a sequence of emails.
• 15:24
  Still, the template we use at this day, the sequence of emails
• 15:27
  talk about how we've helped other customers and, and some of
• 15:29
  the things that we find one that people are getting wrong out
• 15:31
  there and the Shads award and all this stuff.
• 15:32
  Essentially what we're doing, we're not saying bye bye bye.
• 15:35
  Essentially what we're doing is say, here's some value, here's
• 15:38
  maybe some answers to some questions you might have at the
• 15:41
  moment based on your buying journey when you're ready.
• 15:43
  And we'll get like, that's where all our leads come from to this
• 15:46
  day. And we'll get people that had
• 15:49
  been on our site two years ago originally and downloaded ebook.
• 15:53
  And they just had that relationship with our brand for
• 15:55
  several years before they even sort of make their first phone
• 15:58
  call. And just something's gone wrong
• 15:59
  in payroll and their business and they go, you know what, it's
• 16:01
  time. It's time to call that company
• 16:02
  I've been at and I've built that sort of yeah, exactly.
• 16:06
  So so that that's sort of how how inbound marketing works and
• 16:09
  it worked a work to treat for us.
• 16:10
  And of course, what we're seeing now is that, you know, we've got
• 16:13
  AI tool people aren't using Google as much as they used to
• 16:16
  for for research. They still are, but like not as
• 16:19
  not as prevalent as it was during COVID.
• 16:21
  So we have to keep up with the times.
• 16:23
  We have to make sure that, you know, we're getting into that
• 16:25
  link attribution in the AI tools now as well.
• 16:28
  So so that's the new frontier. But yeah, it's a paved by
• 16:31
  numbers way to get business, but it worked.
• 16:33
  What are you most proud of with your journey with Paycap?
• 16:37
  Well, I think I think probably opened a business and and ran it
• 16:40
  in the most turbulent time in recent history, right.
• 16:44
  Like you don't think I've had the Great Depression.
• 16:46
  Definitely comparable. So the fact that we're here and
• 16:49
  we're, you know, we've become as prominent as we are, and
• 16:52
  particularly in our space, gives me a great sense of pride when
• 16:58
  I. Who supported you the most when
• 17:00
  you first started Paycap? Good.
• 17:02
  Well, I've got to attribute my business partner Martin Frapple
• 17:05
  and I worked for a long time without pulling away.
• 17:09
  I gotta say Marty, he's been absolute rock.
• 17:14
  Probably remember pulling like $1000 a month for what a good
• 17:19
  idea months and COVID, which is not a he's a family man as well,
• 17:23
  not a liberal wage. Yeah, they I've got to pay huge
• 17:28
  tribute to him. I've got to pay huge tribute to
• 17:29
  Chris Davies I mentioned before and his two brothers worked for
• 17:32
  me, well Foundation employees and have have worked for me
• 17:36
  through periods where there's more work to do than days in the
• 17:39
  week. They've worked for me for
• 17:40
  periods where there's no work and they've had to cut back to
• 17:42
  like three days a week and they've gone.
• 17:43
  That's cool. And they're just sort of stuck
• 17:45
  with me and they're in key made positions now.
• 17:48
  So I've got some really, really good people around me.
• 17:51
  So if you could give your youngest self a tip in business,
• 17:56
  what would it be? Are we hypothetically is it now
• 17:59
  or is it? You do you.
• 18:01
  You tell me which one. So I'm giving a piece of
• 18:04
  business advice to me and it's 2025 and I'm starting pay cap.
• 18:08
  So are we going to do it? What do you think?
• 18:10
  Go for it. I would say stick to your niche.
• 18:13
  Don't try to be too much for too many people.
• 18:16
  Stick to your niche. Yeah.
• 18:17
  Was that a lesson that you had about you?
• 18:19
  Same question. I've got the same Yeah, trial
• 18:22
  and error, yeah, yeah, trial and error.
• 18:24
  Like you start. Yeah, when you start, it's just
• 18:27
  you just try anything and see what throw spaghetti to wall and
• 18:29
  see what sticks. And then as time goes on, you,
• 18:32
  you just, you know, somebody said to me once in business you
• 18:35
  can dig a a wide hole very shallow or a narrow hole very
• 18:38
  deep. And I've found more success
• 18:41
  digging in narrow hole very deep.
• 18:43
  Yeah. So what about you, Sarah?
• 18:44
  What would you say? My biggest same question.
• 18:46
  My biggest tip for younger self do it, do it, do it sooner.
• 18:50
  Don't wait do it. I wish if I, yeah, 100% do it
• 18:55
  sooner. And that's probably the one
• 18:57
  regret that I had because I really didn't know how much of
• 19:01
  an entrepreneur I was until I started and where I kind of
• 19:04
  fitted in, if that makes any sense.
• 19:06
  Yeah, we should have done it earlier.
• 19:08
  Yeah, for sure. And I'd probably resize because
• 19:13
  I think, well, a lot of us are perfectionist, right?
• 19:15
  And and so perfectionism comes with procrastination sometimes
• 19:18
  because you're like, I've got to wait till the moment's perfect
• 19:21
  or the opportunity is perfect or presented.
• 19:23
  You know, sometimes like even I told you the story about those
• 19:26
  blogs, right? The amount of spelling errors in
• 19:28
  version one of those blogs are incredible.
• 19:30
  And people would, people would write in and say, no, that's
• 19:32
  wrong. And they challenge it.
• 19:34
  Having something out there that's imperfect rather than not
• 19:36
  having anything out there at all. 100%.
• 19:39
  And that's probably another little tip, you know?
• 19:42
  Just to put it. Out.
• 19:43
  Don't wait. It's okay to be lean if you had
• 19:45
  to go. Exactly.
• 19:46
  Exactly. Yeah, I love that.
• 19:47
  If you had to go back in time, what was one of the biggest
• 19:50
  mistakes you made and what it has it taught you?
• 19:53
  On but go back. Yeah, definitely during like
• 19:56
  prior to pay cat, I think career took priority out of the health
• 19:59
  and that like I've flipped that a little bit in the past year,
• 20:02
  but I've I've focused more on health than than Korea this
• 20:05
  year. But yeah, like I think, I think
• 20:07
  I picked out some health issues earlier when I was younger and
• 20:11
  and didn't prioritize getting the basics right.
• 20:13
  And, you know, everything else suffers.
• 20:15
  Is that because your head was so in the?
• 20:17
  Game if I was to go back on yeah yeah again I get a hard to
• 20:21
  fixate on whatever I'm doing so you know am I talking to myself
• 20:24
  maturity just. I feel like I'm talking to the
• 20:28
  male version of me. Sure doesn't know it's a lot of
• 20:30
  people. Yeah.
• 20:34
  You know that's true, isn't. Yeah.
• 20:38
  And do you know Sarah, I think you'd like it.
• 20:39
  Could be a great it. Can I?
• 20:42
  Get it? But if I never.
• 20:46
  If I didn't hyperfixate on something, it would never have
• 20:49
  been built or somebody else is going to build it anyway in a
• 20:51
  couple of years. So am I so hyperfixate on it now
• 20:55
  knowing because I don't know at you, but my hyperfixation kind
• 20:57
  of brings me a bit of pleasure because I get to, you know,
• 21:00
  like, oh, look at this. Look what I've created on the
• 21:02
  first. How cool's this?
• 21:04
  Like, yeah, yeah, I understand that hyperfixation.
• 21:09
  I think a lot of ones same. And and yet we're not, we're not
• 21:13
  people like we're people that have to force ourselves to find
• 21:15
  balancing things like if you, if you say, like, you know, for
• 21:18
  example, health, money, business, family relationships
• 21:22
  are the five key pillars of life.
• 21:24
  I have a lot of trouble, not just going, I'm just going to do
• 21:26
  this one over here. You know, I have to 4th spread
• 21:29
  it out, keep connecting my my wife and kid and keep connected
• 21:33
  with people in my life And, and you know, balance the books,
• 21:37
  like all this stuff that you need to do to be an
• 21:39
  entrepreneur. You'd better having all these
• 21:41
  things working In Sync than just having one thing work and
• 21:44
  everything else just burning the ground.
• 21:46
  Yep. So with your hyperfixation and
• 21:49
  everything in between, what does success actually mean for you?
• 21:54
  And I'm guessing it's not just about money, but in life.
• 21:57
  It's a, it was like I remember, I remember going right back.
• 22:02
  I, I grew up loving family, but we didn't have a real lot of
• 22:05
  money. And I remember sort of taking
• 22:07
  that as a kid and going, I, I'm not going to have that same
• 22:11
  situation. I'm going to make a lot of
• 22:12
  money. And like, even though I'm going
• 22:13
  back to like 14, going to school and career studies, I said, what
• 22:17
  do you want to be when you're older?
• 22:18
  And everybody'd say I want to be a marine biologist or engineer
• 22:21
  or whatever. And I'd say I want to be rich.
• 22:22
  And they say, well, well, you better learn about money.
• 22:26
  So the following year I'm going, are they going to do commerce,
• 22:29
  accounting, your TAFE, legal studies, business studies.
• 22:31
  And on uni I did, I did a commerce degree and a finance
• 22:35
  degree and get my options open, went and applied banks and big
• 22:39
  accounting firms forever, you know, and like, for a long time
• 22:43
  it was just make money, make money, make money with good
• 22:46
  intentions. Like I'd seen the other side of
• 22:48
  that, that, you know, I think it's part of maturing is that
• 22:51
  those, those five pillars that I mentioned, money's just one of
• 22:54
  them. And if the other stuff doesn't,
• 22:56
  doesn't get prioritized, then you can have all the money in
• 22:58
  the world. And, you know, well, they say if
• 23:01
  you need to have 100 problems or one health problem, and that's
• 23:04
  the same thing, you know, or family relationships like that
• 23:07
  stuff. So I think for me, success is
• 23:09
  just keeping those five pillars in balance.
• 23:11
  You know, it's not, it's not up, it's giving them equal priority.
• 23:14
  It's just something I've had to learn the hard way as I've
• 23:16
  gotten older. You had to hustle to get to
• 23:18
  where you are now because before you did say that you don't work
• 23:22
  in the business as much as you used to.
• 23:24
  So is that because you could, you enjoyed your success because
• 23:28
  you've been able to boost it up? Yeah, for sure.
• 23:31
  Yeah. And and that's like, if you, if
• 23:33
  we say to ourselves, you know, what's the, what's the measure
• 23:37
  of success? And if you just said I was this
• 23:39
  revenue, I might achieve that by doing 50 or 60 hours of the
• 23:42
  business a week. And when I started it, that's
• 23:43
  what I had to do. One of my measures of success is
• 23:46
  like by maybe only doing 25 hours a week in the business or
• 23:51
  something, It allows me to get those other five parts of my
• 23:53
  life, you know, equal stride, you know, so, so I think, yeah,
• 24:00
  it's AI wouldn't give you a different answer five years ago,
• 24:03
  but I think success is just about looking at balance, all
• 24:07
  those different elements to your life and making them all good
• 24:10
  and giving them all equal weight.
• 24:11
  It's kind of cool that you're at that point.
• 24:13
  Yeah, that must. Be yeah, it's different.
• 24:16
  It's different for sure. Satisfying.
• 24:18
  Yeah, it's it's a it's satisfying and it's definitely
• 24:23
  gives you a high sense of achievement that you can live
• 24:26
  this life. But it's also, yeah, I'm
• 24:29
  extremely grateful for it. You know, it's not not something
• 24:33
  I take for granted. Hey, cats sort of being the
• 24:35
  enabler for that. You know, I think, I think I've
• 24:38
  had businesses in the past where you burn the candle on both ends
• 24:40
  and, you know, it take takes a toll to health and the people
• 24:44
  around you and that sort of thing.
• 24:46
  And you know, this one, this one's been a real enabler.
• 24:48
  It's just, yeah, it's tested us going through COVID and has
• 24:52
  trials and tribulations. Like I need to write.
• 24:54
  I'll write a book. I read about it didn't I want to
• 24:56
  read, but I'll write one. But yeah, it's a great business
• 25:00
  now, right? Yeah.
• 25:03
  I was to buy my own book. Yeah, but but yeah, like it,
• 25:08
  it's I wouldn't change it for the world.
• 25:10
  It's been awesome. So anyone listening to this
• 25:13
  podcast, if you had to simplify the words, how would you
• 25:17
  describe pay cut to anybody new? Well, to, to follow the cues of
• 25:22
  the podcast originally when I opened, I would have said we, we
• 25:25
  specialize in complex payroll and, and we help businesses set
• 25:31
  up systems that help them deal with it and automate it to make
• 25:34
  it not complex. And there's nothing more complex
• 25:36
  out there than the Shads award, though we are Shads award
• 25:38
  specialists, the, the one industry that everyone else runs
• 25:41
  away from. We do it.
• 25:43
  If you're an NDS business, as you know, if you're an NDS
• 25:46
  business or a, you know, you do age care or disability care or
• 25:51
  home care or something like that, you fall under the Shads
• 25:52
  award or one of those similar awards up against one of the
• 25:55
  most difficult awards in Australia.
• 25:57
  And you have to pay compliant because margins are so lean.
• 26:02
  What a lot of industries out there just pay, you know, Sarah,
• 26:05
  I'm just going to give you an extra 5 bucks and we won't worry
• 26:07
  about those penalties. It's too hard to work out.
• 26:09
  You can't do that in chats, right?
• 26:10
  Like we're talking about 2% margins in NBS.
• 26:13
  You got to get it right, you got to do it quick and you got to do
• 26:16
  it in a way that you can scale it.
• 26:18
  If your workforce grows from six people to 100, like a lot of
• 26:22
  them do overnight, you know, all of a sudden you, you're back
• 26:25
  afraid you've got a huge workforce behind you and you're
• 26:27
  dealing with one of the most complicated employment
• 26:31
  instruments in Australia. You call Paycap, we'll help it
• 26:34
  out. That's that's sort of what I
• 26:37
  would say we're about. We're about helping businesses
• 26:40
  of any size deal with complex payroll.
• 26:42
  So when the sheds put implement new things, do you guys have
• 26:47
  like a study group where you all hang out and you read all the
• 26:49
  new changes coming? How do you guys implement
• 26:52
  anything that's new? Are you in your go?
• 26:54
  Implement that. That sounds awesome.
• 26:55
  Sorry. We have a Slack channel.
• 26:57
  Yeah, we have a Slack channel. There we go.
• 26:59
  You see what? Yeah, but that's pretty much how
• 27:01
  it goes. So like everyone else, we we get
• 27:03
  Fair Work updates and they've got a subscription service where
• 27:06
  like if things change in the award, they'll let you know and
• 27:09
  you react to make that change yourself.
• 27:11
  And then we listen to industry leaders, you know, on LinkedIn
• 27:14
  and sources like that. I give you like as an example,
• 27:17
  they're working the course did a 180 on how you should do with
• 27:21
  shift work either side of a sleepover.
• 27:23
  And it sort of changed the guidance overnight from what
• 27:26
  they've been saying to something new for us.
• 27:28
  It's not in the award yet. So it's not really forced the
• 27:31
  law, but what we have to watch that really closely.
• 27:33
  Occasionally there's cases like that where we just have to keep
• 27:37
  an eye on it in the media or or directory share work or through,
• 27:40
  you know, she's in the industry and stuff like that.
• 27:42
  So, and, and we communicate on Slack mostly.
• 27:45
  So we've got a dedicated channel to award changes that we get an
• 27:49
  RSS feed in and have chats on there and discuss it.
• 27:52
  And we've got a lot of clients also that get concerned when
• 27:55
  they hear things and they, they let us know.
• 27:57
  And you know, the good thing about having our template out
• 28:00
  there, our priority template out there is that like it's, it gets
• 28:04
  crowd tested after a while as well.
• 28:06
  It's been independently verified our ward template by our
• 28:10
  professionals, but it's also those really clever people that
• 28:14
  do payroll out there go, hey, we do it differently here.
• 28:17
  And This is why. And like, you know, we get a new
• 28:19
  client, they, they challenge it. So over time it gets more and
• 28:22
  more robust. I'm a little bit disappointed
• 28:24
  that they're not in your garage and there's pizza.
• 28:26
  I thought that's where your study group would be.
• 28:29
  So I missed the last village. I said I'm a little bit
• 28:31
  disappointed. I'm not even hearing a garage
• 28:33
  drinking beer having a study Group.
• 28:36
  A bit disappointed now to hear that sort of Slack group.
• 28:39
  Yeah, you'll be disappointed to see my garages.
• 28:41
  There's there's no dining table in there anymore.
• 28:44
  It's it's not Silicon Valley set up.
• 28:46
  It's now got a pool table with a whole bunch of junk on it that
• 28:49
  we're trying to sell on gum tree.
• 28:50
  So yeah, no longer a recall like like it used to be, but yeah.
• 28:54
  How does Pay Cat make life easier for small NDIS providers
• 28:59
  or a small support worker team? What what we would do if you're
• 29:03
  using ACRM or a rostering system or something like that, most do
• 29:07
  you know, for, for the purposes of billing and rostering and
• 29:10
  scheduling and appointments and notes and all that sort of
• 29:12
  stuff, we'll work with those systems and bring the time
• 29:14
  sheets in and without you having to sort of work out in a
• 29:17
  spreadsheet what the, the sheds calculation is meant to be.
• 29:20
  We'll put those time sheets into our system, produce a compliant
• 29:23
  pay slip and send it out to your staff.
• 29:24
  So instead of you hear horror stories of people spending a
• 29:28
  day, three days on payroll, most small businesses get that done
• 29:32
  in under an hour, like 20 minutes a week.
• 29:34
  So, yeah. So, yeah, often the stack
• 29:36
  they'll start with is they might use a 0 or an MYOB that's
• 29:39
  attached to their accounting products.
• 29:41
  But, and they're good. Like those officers are fine.
• 29:43
  I'm not bagging them. But it does mean you have to
• 29:46
  open up Excel and work stuff out and then punch the result.
• 29:49
  You know, we take that process out of it.
• 29:51
  So and plus if it changes and when it changes and it does it
• 29:54
  changes at least once a year, we update those changes and that
• 29:56
  propagates through to how you're going to pay as well.
• 29:59
  So it just takes a lot of that compliance risk away from the
• 30:01
  business. Anyone starting out might be a
• 30:04
  bit nervous to approach Pay Cat to begin with because you know
• 30:09
  when you're starting a new business, your overheads can be
• 30:12
  quite expensive. Is there a way so anybody that's
• 30:14
  watching the podcast or listening today that it defines
• 30:19
  like the different types of ways you could use pay cap for your
• 30:22
  business and the costings around it?
• 30:24
  Yeah, we. It's interesting you say that so
• 30:27
  yeah, All right, like often it's the story that you know what,
• 30:30
  let's go back to what we said before about I have all the no
• 30:33
  money, a lot of time. Well, if you only have 4 star,
• 30:36
  five star, maybe you can spend a bit of time in a spreadsheet and
• 30:39
  punch those calculations in and try to work out that's correct.
• 30:42
  And then go punch it in zero or MYOB or whatever where paycheck
• 30:45
  comes in. You're sucking a few more
• 30:47
  employees and all of a sudden your spreadsheets not sort of
• 30:50
  keeping up with the complexity of the business anymore.
• 30:52
  And so it does sometimes suit. Yeah, you start revising your
• 30:56
  systems and your businesses will be bigger and you come to
• 30:59
  paycheck. However, a lot of people still
• 31:01
  come to us in startup phase and there's absolutely nothing wrong
• 31:03
  like we have a like a $500 implementation fee for startups
• 31:10
  that allows them just to come in.
• 31:11
  We set up a file, we install the award, show them how bit of
• 31:14
  training, show them how to put the first employee on to to 0,
• 31:18
  you know, get it registered with the Ato, do all that sort of
• 31:20
  stuff with sort of a hand holding exercise and then
• 31:23
  they're off, off and running. And it costs our fees $8 per
• 31:26
  employee per month. So you know, you have, you have
• 31:29
  a dozen employees at six, 848 dollars.
• 31:31
  That's time you save. You think about it like you know
• 31:34
  time is money. Like at the time you would save
• 31:36
  only $8 a month. Especially Sarah, at that phase
• 31:40
  of business and you can probably reflect that, you know, at that
• 31:43
  stage in business, you're often still on the tools like you
• 31:45
  might still be at servicing clients.
• 31:46
  So if you're marking out three hours a week to go and run
• 31:50
  Ushad's payroll, you win that back.
• 31:52
  That's a charge rate, you know, so.
• 31:54
  Yeah. You guys into like you can
• 31:57
  integrate into multiple systems, multiple CRMS for anybody in the
• 32:02
  sector. Can you name a couple of CRMS on
• 32:04
  top of your head that you guys integrate to to use for pay cut?
• 32:08
  Yeah. Visual care, shift care, Data,
• 32:13
  Nova Flow Logic is the name of the product we've got top my
• 32:16
  head. There's some out there that are
• 32:18
  building integration at the moment.
• 32:20
  There's a whole bunch of new CRMS that open up all the time
• 32:22
  we get approached about building integrations.
• 32:25
  We've actually got something really exciting.
• 32:26
  I'm gonna give you the exclusive actually work with Nightingale's
• 32:30
  a notable example. Yeah, yeah, Nightingale's great.
• 32:33
  So on the 1st of January or early January, we're actually
• 32:37
  launching a new service, which is going to sound boring at its
• 32:40
  core, but what it is, it's an API that allows all these CRMS
• 32:45
  to send their rosters and time sheets to us.
• 32:48
  We're going to cost it to send it back and they'll be able to
• 32:50
  just place things straight to the CRM.
• 32:52
  So what that means is as you're rostering, you get to see what
• 32:55
  your payroll results going to be.
• 32:56
  And I mean, compliant way. There's some out there that that
• 33:00
  sort of they had a crack at it to be to be nice about it, but
• 33:04
  they don't might only get 70% of it right.
• 33:07
  So this is going to be 100% right, 100% show to compliant.
• 33:11
  You're going to send your rosters from you won't have to
• 33:13
  leave the system, but you'll hit a button.
• 33:15
  It'll say cost my roster for me. It's going to bring all these
• 33:17
  costs back in from us to that CRM, present them to you and you
• 33:21
  can make decisions as you go and say I'm going to give that shift
• 33:24
  to someone else to be a bit cheaper, or I'm going to move
• 33:27
  that second shift off to somebody else so I don't get the
• 33:29
  broken shifts allowance. Or I'm going to yeah, pull back
• 33:32
  and give these shifts to someone else because it sent them in a
• 33:33
  fortnightly overtime. And just these little things
• 33:36
  that are gonna actually save a lot of businesses a lot of
• 33:38
  money. And we're we're working with the
• 33:40
  leading CRMS as we speak behind the scenes to get that, that
• 33:44
  live quarter one next year. So wow, there you go.
• 33:47
  You have the. 1st save a lot of money.
• 33:49
  For workers. When I think about it, how many
• 33:51
  times because you, if you do the count, you're like, have we,
• 33:54
  have I gone over? Have I gone under?
• 33:56
  Because sometimes in the CRMS, it doesn't always tell you that
• 33:59
  this person's over their contract or the hours aren't
• 34:02
  matching. They're under their contract.
• 34:04
  Yes, exactly, and that's how poor Ross managers that have to
• 34:07
  work this out. It's like go and you know, we're
• 34:10
  relying on them to get it right. And the thing we peril is like
• 34:13
  pay Cat's wonderful. Like don't get me wrong, like
• 34:15
  you can produce a great payslip, but you can't really back and
• 34:18
  change time sheets because that's already happened.
• 34:20
  They've already yeah, it's already been done.
• 34:22
  The top actually look at it and save money and analyze it and is
• 34:26
  when you're doing the roster, you know, and that's when we
• 34:29
  want to put those that quality information under the the user
• 34:32
  and go. You know what, I'm going to move
• 34:34
  serious shift over to here because that's going to lead me
• 34:37
  into overtime or a shift penalty or a top up hour or those, those
• 34:41
  subtle little things that cost money that you don't pass on
• 34:44
  sometimes in the NDIS billing. So we we think it's going to be
• 34:47
  a game changer 100% really. Excited about it.
• 34:49
  I'm feeling it because there's been times where, like, you're
• 34:52
  trying to do the maths in your head going, all right, so public
• 34:55
  holiday, this person's a casual. If I move this person, can I
• 34:59
  move the part timer onto the public holiday?
• 35:02
  Is it too many days in a row are the hours?
• 35:04
  Yeah. Wow.
• 35:05
  Who? Who thought of this idea?
• 35:07
  He saw his grand idea. Was this yours or some team
• 35:09
  members? It was mine.
• 35:13
  You must be getting a lot of beers at the pub because
• 35:16
  somebody would be really happy. That's going to save a lot of
• 35:18
  people money. Yeah.
• 35:19
  I think it's mine. It's you're saying it's mine.
• 35:22
  Like the idea of the solution is, but the problem was being
• 35:25
  raised was so many times by our clients.
• 35:28
  You know, it's been a, it's been a consumer LED thing that
• 35:30
  people, people really just need to know real time.
• 35:33
  You know, particularly we hit 1 July, the price book increases
• 35:37
  feel a little bit short of people's expectations, right?
• 35:40
  So that puts pressure on your back options a lot when you
• 35:43
  know, because the first thing to go when you when you lose your
• 35:46
  martyrs, you lose your your money to run a good back office,
• 35:48
  right, which includes payroll and includes rostering.
• 35:50
  And so so you know, the, the chatter around this has been
• 35:54
  always been there has been stronger and stronger since
• 35:56
  since July, I think. So we, we really wanted to
• 35:58
  address that and it's we're doing it in partnership with
• 36:01
  some of the, I can't announce who yet, but we're some of the
• 36:03
  leading serums in the market. We're doing this in partnership
• 36:06
  with. Yeah.
• 36:07
  So it's going to be awesome. It's quite cool that you've
• 36:10
  taken the feedback from the community and you've been able
• 36:12
  to create and develop this. Is this something like G?
• 36:16
  Is it like feedback that is from a LinkedIn DM?
• 36:20
  Is it a message on Instagram? How do you get this feedback
• 36:23
  back from the people that we served that like our CRMS, our
• 36:28
  organizations and providers, that this was something that
• 36:31
  they were looking for? Yeah, a lot of this one-on-one
• 36:33
  conversations were having clients and we have interactions
• 36:37
  with our clients all the way through their life cycle stages
• 36:40
  with paychats everywhere from in pre sale.
• 36:43
  We're doing a demo and talking about what their pain points are
• 36:46
  and their requirements and they'll bring it up there.
• 36:48
  And we go through boarding and training and deal with their
• 36:51
  clients. And we do check insurance with
• 36:52
  our clients after they're gone live with our systems.
• 36:54
  So there's, there's always talking points we're having with
• 36:56
  all the way through and of course, just being in good, good
• 37:00
  partnerships with our CRM providers out there and talk to
• 37:03
  them about the challenges they have about trying to be award
• 37:05
  compliant, building an award engine into their products.
• 37:08
  And you know, a lot of them openly admit they try and it
• 37:10
  kind of like it, it's, it's just AI.
• 37:13
  Don't blame them. It's a bloody complicated award.
• 37:15
  So you know, they, they deal with the best, but it's very
• 37:19
  hard to sort of get all those little nuanced bits right.
• 37:22
  So yeah, watch this space. No, I can't wait.
• 37:25
  Are you going to do like a big launch?
• 37:28
  Is everyone going to be in the garage?
• 37:30
  How does this work? I think so.
• 37:33
  No, I promise we have a nice little workspace near in
• 37:37
  Newcastle. We might have a little clicky
• 37:39
  shoe cocktails. Yeah, I think the garage is
• 37:43
  locked from as a workspace there.
• 37:46
  So what is 1 feature in Pay Cat that you find that everybody
• 37:50
  loves the most? Award costing, yeah.
• 37:53
  Is it in seconds? Simply yes, as soon as you yeah,
• 37:56
  it is sub seconds here at the moment.
• 38:00
  We take say you've done your timesheets in your CRM like
• 38:03
  Nightingale, we'll import those timesheets in our system and
• 38:07
  start spinning out sheds compliant payslips and it takes
• 38:10
  you wouldn't be able to make a cup of coffee in the time it
• 38:12
  takes for hundreds of calculators.
• 38:16
  And my favorite part is when we do demos early on and you're
• 38:20
  showing somebody that and it's that aha moment.
• 38:23
  So yeah, we'll show them how to onboard an employee and how to
• 38:26
  log in and how intuitive it looks and all this sort of
• 38:28
  stuff. And as soon as you hit that,
• 38:30
  hey, look at all these costings like, Oh my God, I spent hours
• 38:33
  doing that. You know, you almost see the
• 38:35
  light bulb, the cartoon light bulb, but the you know, so
• 38:37
  that's my favorite bit. So it is definitely the one that
• 38:41
  resonates the most is just hey this stuff calculates it
• 38:44
  straight away automatically with pretty easy inputs.
• 38:47
  Does it make people nervous when they come to pay Cat because the
• 38:50
  idea of like their jobs changing because pay Cat is so quick and
• 38:55
  fast, but beforehand a lot of people were doing it on the
• 38:57
  Excel spreadsheet. Yeah, yes and no courses of
• 39:02
  course is sometimes for sure. I've definitely been the, the,
• 39:05
  the strangest case years ago, I was out of the a client down in
• 39:09
  SA and while I was there they pulled the pin on the project.
• 39:12
  So I'd gone down there very early on.
• 39:14
  But mind you, I was, you know, very early on in the pay
• 39:17
  category. And like I was, I was sort of
• 39:20
  down there. I said, look, guys, Kath, this
• 39:21
  is a little bit awkward, but the board of directors just said
• 39:23
  we're not going to go ahead by changing payroll systems.
• 39:26
  And sometimes there is a little bit of internal politics
• 39:28
  involved in people are a little bit, you know, changed about
• 39:31
  whole discipline unto itself. But sometimes people do get
• 39:35
  protected because they think they're worried about I'm going
• 39:37
  to lose my job because it's not going to take three days a week
• 39:40
  anymore. It's going to take an hour.
• 39:41
  But the reality is you still need drivers of the system.
• 39:45
  And like, if it's me, I don't necessarily want to cut my
• 39:48
  payroll ladies hours back. I want to get her analyzing
• 39:53
  roster patterns and you know, looking at ways I can make it a
• 39:57
  little bit cheap or streamlined or a lot of those value add
• 40:00
  things that they can. Use a time on better than just
• 40:03
  sitting there in a spreadsheet calculating shad.
• 40:04
  So it's not always about just trying to trying to get people
• 40:08
  out of a job. It's just bringing them in all
• 40:12
  parts of the business that you're not doing because you're
• 40:14
  seeing they're punching out a spreadsheet that doesn't benefit
• 40:17
  anybody. Now like my boat for a moment,
• 40:19
  what is the with all the providers that you provide pay
• 40:22
  cat to can you what is the most staff members one provider has
• 40:28
  that you guys are able to with nanoseconds, as you said, an
• 40:31
  instance be able to determine pay slips and pump them all out.
• 40:35
  4000. And how quick do they do?
• 40:37
  It they divide it up into three pay runs and it would process 5
• 40:40
  minutes per pay run. The people listening to this
• 40:43
  right now going why am I spending so long to go and get
• 40:47
  on an excel spreadsheet? Yeah, I mean, it's been that
• 40:50
  song for eight years. We we live in a look, the
• 40:52
  journey, as I said, the journey is, oh, I'm, I'm about to open
• 40:55
  up. I've got my own US registration
• 40:57
  behind me about to open up a business.
• 40:59
  I need an account system, one of the best accounting systems in
• 41:02
  Australia. Well, we've got zero.
• 41:04
  We've got MIB. Oh, look, they've got payroll.
• 41:06
  That'll do for now. That's what people start, right.
• 41:08
  And I'm not going to change that.
• 41:09
  Like that's there's a big powerful marketing machine
• 41:11
  behind that and that's great. If you and I opened a business
• 41:14
  and, and we had a couple of staff on a salary or a cup, you
• 41:18
  know, a flat hourly rate, it's fine, good system.
• 41:20
  But the second you introduce shad to compliance to those
• 41:23
  systems, you got to do it somewhere else.
• 41:25
  And it like it's just people sort of don't get that straight
• 41:29
  away. They've got to go through that
• 41:30
  pain before they realize. So you know, as I said, there
• 41:33
  are some CRMS that make a OK effort to get that calculation
• 41:38
  in there. But at the end of the day, if
• 41:39
  you want something reliable, you've got to have something
• 41:41
  really robust behind you. It's not about the size you work
• 41:43
  for us, it's about a complexity of the industry.
• 41:46
  Without ruining anyone's confidentiality, once you've had
• 41:50
  people come into Paycat, has they seen the provide providers
• 41:55
  seen a significant change and difference in payments that
• 42:00
  they're no longer losing or they're they are seeing where
• 42:03
  the holes are because money can be lost on payroll quite easily?
• 42:07
  Yeah. So there's, there's two, there's
• 42:10
  two aspects to it. 1 is that they might have realized they've
• 42:13
  been underpaid and on the dollars a cent to underpaying
• 42:17
  your staff intentionally, unintentionally brings penalties
• 42:20
  for Fair Work. It brings reputational risk to
• 42:23
  your, to your workforce. Like there's a study done that
• 42:25
  said, if you pay your staff wrong twice, they start looking
• 42:28
  for another job. So if you like the price of ads
• 42:31
  on Seek, that's a good way of ramping that cost up in the
• 42:34
  recruitment cost. And it's hard to get staff in
• 42:36
  this industry. So you want to keep, you want to
• 42:38
  keep the good ones. You don't want to hang wrong.
• 42:40
  That said, in most cases that I find more than most people
• 42:44
  genuinely want to pay their staff, right.
• 42:46
  Yeah. Like I don't, I don't think I've
• 42:47
  come across businesses that go, I'm intentionally trying to pay
• 42:50
  my underpay, my staff. What they're doing is they're
• 42:52
  getting the policies wrong, they're getting the
• 42:53
  interpretation, the award wrong and potentially underpaying
• 42:56
  their staff. Then there's another version of
• 42:58
  it where they're overpaying their staff. 2 reasons why they
• 43:00
  might be doing that. Again, they might be
• 43:01
  interpreting something wrong and paying too much and they're
• 43:04
  going to save money by introducing pay cap.
• 43:06
  The second version of it is that this is too dim complicated, so
• 43:10
  I'm just going to pay overs. And we have a habit of doing
• 43:12
  that in Australia. We have like the construction
• 43:14
  industry's killer for construction industry.
• 43:16
  Hop on one leg and turn around three times, you get an
• 43:18
  allowance, right? The people in the construction
• 43:21
  industry said don't worry about that, I'm just going to pay
• 43:23
  bucks now. Don't worry about all this other
• 43:24
  stuff, which is 50 bucks an hour.
• 43:26
  I'll give you a bit of overtime for a week.
• 43:28
  That's it, right? You work a public holiday, you
• 43:30
  work over Easter and all of a sudden you're underpaying your
• 43:32
  stuff because you, even though you're overpaying it, you don't
• 43:34
  actually realize that the amount that I'm meant to get under the
• 43:37
  awards higher. So you run that risk with
• 43:39
  overpayment. And also you are still required
• 43:44
  once a year to check it and go, what should this person got
• 43:48
  without being paid under the award?
• 43:49
  Or have they been paid enough and reconcile that?
• 43:51
  So you're not really you actually, the award actually
• 43:55
  says this is the minimum amount you meant to pay your employee.
• 43:57
  You've had to say you've got to stick to your minimums in this
• 44:00
  industry. You know, now more than ever you
• 44:02
  have to pay minimum. Like if you try to pay overs,
• 44:04
  you're going to you're eating into your margin and there's not
• 44:07
  much margin. So, you know, if you want to run
• 44:09
  a lean chip, you've you've got to pay your.
• 44:12
  Stuff. If anyone's looking to use
• 44:13
  Paycat as a service after visiting to this podcast, what
• 44:17
  is the best way for them to contact you guys to visit your
• 44:20
  website, e-mail, phone call? Yeah, website's great.
• 44:24
  You can jump on our website and book a demo.
• 44:25
  It's probably the best way to do it.
• 44:27
  There's on the on the homepage, you go to a demo.
• 44:29
  Also have a look at some of the we've got even I'll send you a
• 44:32
  link if you like. We've got some really good.
• 44:34
  I mentioned blogs and resources and stuff like that, just that
• 44:37
  you can get for free. You can download and read
• 44:40
  through and just just cross check against what you're doing
• 44:41
  at the moment. It's a good place to start, you
• 44:43
  know, even before you call us and you know, there's, there's
• 44:46
  payday checklists and stuff like that in there that you can use.
• 44:48
  So I'll send that through to you if you listen 100%.
• 44:51
  And, and by all means, Paul, we're old school.
• 44:53
  We actually answer the phone, still give us a call even after
• 44:57
  we actually have phone support. You don't hear about that much
• 44:59
  anymore. Do you phone support the
• 45:01
  software? I don't like the phone call.
• 45:04
  I'm a I'm a caller. I'll I'll admit that I love
• 45:06
  calling people over an e-mail any day.
• 45:08
  What? People do first name basis.
• 45:10
  Hey, how's your weekend? That's like, yeah.
• 45:18
  So to bring this home, where do you see?
• 45:21
  Oh, there's a big one, you're ready for it.
• 45:23
  Where do you see PayPal in 10 years time?
• 45:25
  I'd like, I'd like to think that we have the majority market
• 45:29
  share in Sri fish heads that the NDIS care space.
• 45:32
  Yeah, I don't think it'll take 10 years.
• 45:34
  I'd like to see it. The costing is being used in
• 45:36
  every major CRM in the market. And I like the other thing I'd
• 45:40
  really like to do is just as we get, as we get bigger and we get
• 45:44
  our tentacles out more and more, I sort of want to build a
• 45:45
  community. And this is part of why going on
• 45:48
  the podcast is really important. Like build a community to people
• 45:51
  in our industry that do payroll, that deal with these challenges
• 45:54
  every day, that can talk to each other.
• 45:56
  But for us to talk to each other, Yeah, there's some of the
• 45:59
  things I really places I'd really love to see paycheck in
• 46:01
  the next period of time. But look, who knows, you know,
• 46:05
  we've, we've got, we always have to stay agile and, and India's
• 46:08
  business have to say agile as well because they'll be changing
• 46:10
  landscape and you just have to move on.
• 46:12
  So we need to see what impact AI is going to have on, on parallel
• 46:15
  industry as a whole and what Fair Work you're going to do
• 46:18
  with making it more complicated or more simple in the future and
• 46:21
  all those sorts of things as well.
• 46:22
  But yeah, continue to be adaptable.
• 46:25
  You mentioned communities, so you've got me thinking you've
• 46:27
  got to wear your bag of fruits soon because you're going to an
• 46:30
  award ceremony and you guys are the sponsor.
• 46:34
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we'll chat after.
• 46:37
  We are. You got to be down there as
• 46:39
  well. Tell me more you guys are
• 46:41
  sponsoring. What part are you sponsoring
• 46:44
  The? Change Maker Award, I think is
• 46:45
  that category which is always sort of most fitting for
• 46:48
  business transformational change as people go through it.
• 46:51
  Yeah, looking forward to it. Yeah, the one.
• 46:54
  Not a year I wear a suit. Is this the first time you have
• 46:58
  been a sponsor for an event? Yeah.
• 47:00
  Congratulations. Do you see you guys?
• 47:02
  Doing more Thank you first time being down there.
• 47:05
  I'd love to I'd love to well those nights are just like a fun
• 47:10
  lay your hair in our way of getting to know the industry do
• 47:12
  better too. So, yeah, you know, if you, if
• 47:15
  you're listening to this, you see me there was like come
• 47:18
  introduce yourself and say hello.
• 47:19
  But yeah, you know, we've been a few conferences and they always
• 47:22
  put on the the evening soirees, all that sort of stuff.
• 47:25
  And that's yeah, people will just get relaxed of those
• 47:27
  things. And yeah, you're asking before
• 47:29
  we hear about the challenges people have.
• 47:31
  Often it comes from just one-on-one chats.
• 47:33
  So really looking forward to it. Well.
• 47:35
  That's anything else that I've missed or we need to talk about
• 47:38
  Pay Cat. Now I've you've got really great
• 47:43
  questions for me. You stumped me on a few, which
• 47:45
  is good. Not hard to do, but good.
• 47:49
  Yeah. Really enjoy this form.
• 47:50
  I'm glad, glad we could line it up.
• 47:52
  All right, thank you so much for joining the podcast.
• 47:55
  I will put the links down below for anybody who's wanting to
• 47:58
  click in, read some of your blogs and where you're at, and
• 48:02
  if not, say hello to you at the awards every.
• 48:05
  Thank you so much.