Payment Processing Solutions for Businesses with Jeff Maine

There are many details that demand mental energy. You’re likely focused on starting something new and how to bring your vision to life, but smaller tasks—like choosing the right payment processor for your business—can become overwhelming. With so many options, how can we stay focused while navigating these essential but exhausting decisions? In this episode, I have Jeff Maine, founder and CEO of Pay Proudly, a payment processing company. Jeff discusses the payment processing industry and how his company aims to provide a better experience for businesses. He emphasizes building relationships with customers based on transparency and trust, offering personalized solutions tailored to each client's needs rather than competing solely on price. --- Listen to the podcast here: Payment Processing Solutions for Businesses with Jeff Maine Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, when it comes to a lot of the endeavors that we’re taking on, particularly starting businesses, there’s a lot to figure out and there’s a lot of things that we need to put mental energy into that we might not necessarily want to be thinking about because, likely, you’re thinking about what your passion is, you’re thinking about what you want to start, and thinking a bit about how you want to do it, but some of these nitty-gritty details, such as selecting a payment processor solution when there are so many out there, can be just a huge use of mental energy that you weren’t necessarily hoping to sign up for and I know how some of this decision fatigue around this and many other issues can cause people to lose their steam. So, today, I would like to introduce you to my guest, Jeff Maine, and he is the founder and CEO of a company that helps you figure out payment processing called Pay Proudly. --- Jeff, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me today, Stephen. Looking forward to talking about this fun subject of payment processing. Yeah, it’s just one of the many things that businesses need to think about. And so, to orient our audience here, what do payment processors do and why does nearly every business need a payment processor? The majority of businesses take the majority of their payments today through electronic payments so a lot of people go the Square routes. They go to big box shops, they go to their bank, sign up for credit card processing, but there’s a lot of small, independent sales organizations out there that have relationships with the big banks that this is what we focus on. This is our business. And so, obviously, when we were founding Pay Proudly, we – I’ve been in this business for 25 years and we’ve seen a lot of different things and I apologize to a lot of people for our industry. When I walk indoors, I apologize for a lot of what’s happened in our industry, and we can dive into some of that today, but there’s just a bad stigma around our industry. I tell people sometimes I feel like it’s that used car sales approach and there’s just a lot that goes on. And so one of the big differences that we’ve done in Pay Proudly is we want to know our customer and we want our customer to know us and we know we’re never going to grow as big as the big guys but we’re taking that extra step and the first part of our mission is all about clarity to our merchants. We really want them to understand payment processing and understand why they need to process or how they need to process and what kind of system they need to process on and really dive into it so that they feel more comfortable with making a decision that affects a big part of their business. So how we get paid is often overlooked but it shouldn’t be. So that’s what we’re doing. So what do most people do when they look for a payment processor? Say, the average person just starts a website where, I don’t know, just say you’re selling a basic service and needs to collect $100 for each time someone logs on or something like that. If you’re selling goods and services on the internet, a lot of people are going to go the Shopify approach or the big box store approaches. That’s already got the templates out there and they can easily just integrate to that setup and it’s already done for them and that’s a great solution for a startup business and we steer people that direction in startups because it’s easier and the fees are less. Once your business starts growing, so what happens is is their monthly processing fees may be less than ours but their rates are more so once your business starts amping up and you start processing any kind of volume, that’s when you want to start talking to businesses like ours. And there’s some businesses that you know are going to be on that growth trajectory right out of the gate so we want to talk to those businesses in the beginning. But, for some businesses, the Square, the Shopify, those systems are fantastic and they’re easy to use and it’s definitely where they need to land. And so when I think about those ones, those are the ones where you tend to just pay like a pretty significant transaction fee for each particular transaction but not as much of a monthly fee. Is that – That’s right. That’s absolutely right. Is there ever a situation, because I think what you’re talking about now is businesses grow and they outgrow those solutions and they need something a bit more, you’re not paying a $3 fee every single time any transaction is made, now you can kind of process in bulk, almost like the difference between buying something at a store in small quantities versus going to Costco where you can buy in large quantities and save some money by that, is there ever a situation where a business wants to go straight to one of those solutions? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of businesses based on their business plan and what they’re coming out of the door with. Are they really, are they coming out with a big bang? Are they just trying to start a little home-based business? It’s going to be a little side hustle. There’s a complete difference of what your mentality is and where you’re coming from and what kind of funds are you investing in this and what are you doing and what are you looking for and what’s your short-term vision of the business and what’s your long-term vision. We have all kinds of reporting tools and website integrations and recurring payments and fraud detection tools and we have the expertise and the know to be able to really guide those people down those roads of really helping them establish the model for growth. For the guys, this is a home-based business, this is a side hustle, this is a hobby, that’s where those other solutions work really well and those are the right solutions for those businesses. So if someone listening right now is just thinking about something they want to do and maybe they’re open to growth later on but at this point in time, they’re just thinking about creating something on the side, maybe they’re content with their job, not in love with it but content with it, not suffering every minute of every day and just want to start something to see where it goes, you’d recommend going with like a like a Shopify, a Square, a Stripe type of solution? I would recommend them having a conversation with an industry professional because without me knowing, and I think that’s a lot of what’s wrong with this industry today is there’s not a one size fits all just based on that alone. There’s so many other variables of how do you want to process payments. Do you want a website to process payments? Do you have products? Are you going to have a shopping cart? Do you have the need to be face to face with a customer where you could potentially swipe a card? You just start going down these paths and there’s ten questions that if I had the answers to those questions, I may very well say, “Yes, that is your best option,” but also I might say, “You know what? Because you’re going to be doing X, Y and Z, this really doesn’t work for you. You should do this because we can check all those boxes for you.” And so it’s really important as a new business owner, an established business owner is talking to somebody that we’re asking a lot of questions about your business because just because of what you do and somebody else may do the same thing but you guys may operate totally different, different types of businesses, of how you process your payment, you could have two totally different avenues of where you land. And is it safe to say that from the standpoint of someone kind of looking into this industry and not really knowing much about it, only knowing I have this business I want to start, I have this service I want to give, et cetera, that the primary service that a payment processor provides is the safe transfer of money from your consumers into your bank account or is there another way that people should be looking at what a payment processor means to your business? Yeah, so that’s the real easy part of it is the process of the payments and moving the money. Where you really want to talk to your payment processors is, for one, every business has to do a compliance survey every single year. Well, we hold our merchants’ hands and we do that with them to make sure that they know what they’re doing. When they have a chargeback situation and they call us, we walk them through how to respond to that chargeback, kind of here’s the language you need to use, here’s the site you go to, here’s your login, here’s what you need to do. Anytime, if they have an employee, a new employee, they don’t know how to run a refund, one of my machine breaks, what do I do? We want to be the difference maker in those situations. We want to answer the phones. We want to help our merchants. We want them to call us and that’s the big differentiator in the business today. ...