In Episode 159 of “The Trusted Advisor,” RSPA CEO Jim Roddy talks AI and payments with Travis Chrisman, President of Coastal Pay; Don Wilczynski, CEO of Merchant Rescue, powered by Tried & True Consulting; and Aidan Chau, Founder & CEO of Maple.
“The Trusted Advisor,” powered by the Retail Solutions Providers Association (RSPA), is an award-winning content series designed specifically for retail IT VARs and software providers. Our goal is to educate you on the topics of leadership, management, hiring, sales, and other small business best practices. For more insights, visit the RSPA blog at www.GoRSPA.org.
Watch Episode 159 now:
“The Trusted Advisor” is also available on Amazon Audible, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Podcasts, and Spotify. Subscribe today!
Full episode transcript via Apple Podcasts:
00:00:06.720 –> 00:00:14.160
Roddy: Welcome to another episode of the Trusted Advisor podcast and video series, powered by the Retail Solutions Providers Association.
00:00:14.380 –> 00:00:19.720
Roddy: Our goal on the pod is to accelerate the success of today’s and tomorrow’s leaders in the retail IT industry.
00:00:19.960 –> 00:00:21.420
Roddy: I’m Jim Roddy back with you again.
00:00:21.420 –> 00:00:22.880
Roddy: Thank you so much for joining us.
00:00:23.140 –> 00:00:34.200
Roddy: Now, this is a special episode of the podcast based on the panel that the RSPA hosted back on June 8th at the Southeast Acquires Association, that’s the SCAA back at their conference in Miami.
00:00:34.260 –> 00:00:36.600
Roddy: Now, the room was set up for 160 seats.
00:00:36.680 –> 00:00:39.660
Roddy: We got at least 230 people in the room.
00:00:39.660 –> 00:00:43.280
Roddy: Don’t tell the fire marshal about that, but they were three or four deep in the back.
00:00:43.360 –> 00:00:45.300
Roddy: It was very hot in that side of the room.
00:00:45.340 –> 00:00:50.240
Roddy: But several attendees from SCAA said they couldn’t get into the room because it was overflowing.
00:00:50.240 –> 00:00:56.620
Roddy: So we talked afterwards and said, hey, let’s do the panel in a forum where there’s unlimited access and do it in a podcast.
00:00:56.620 –> 00:00:58.480
Roddy: So that’s what we’re doing here today.
00:00:58.480 –> 00:01:03.260
Roddy: So our panelists slash podcast guests for today are first Travis Chrisman.
00:01:03.260 –> 00:01:05.300
Roddy: He’s the president of Coastal Pay.
00:01:05.340 –> 00:01:06.780
Roddy: Hey, Travis, good to see you again.
00:01:07.340 –> 00:01:08.720
Chrisman: Good to see you too, Jim and everyone.
00:01:08.720 –> 00:01:09.260
Chrisman: Thank you.
00:01:09.960 –> 00:01:10.420
Roddy: You bet.
00:01:10.420 –> 00:01:16.480
Roddy: Don, next to we have is Don Wilczynski, the CEO of Merchant Rescue powered by Tried & True Consulting.
00:01:16.480 –> 00:01:17.920
Roddy: Don, how have you been since Miami?
00:01:18.300 –> 00:01:19.040
Wilczynski: Fantastic.
00:01:19.040 –> 00:01:19.600
Wilczynski: Thanks, Jim.
00:01:19.600 –> 00:01:20.320
Wilczynski: Appreciate it.
00:01:20.860 –> 00:01:21.540
Roddy: You bet.
00:01:21.720 –> 00:01:28.560
Roddy: Finally, the one panelist who unfortunately missed our SAA session due to flight issues from New York is Aidan Chau.
00:01:28.560 –> 00:01:30.800
Roddy: He’s the founder and CEO of Maple.
00:01:30.800 –> 00:01:33.400
Roddy: Aidan, we are so glad you were part of today’s discussion.
00:01:35.020 –> 00:01:35.380
Chau: Yeah.
00:01:35.380 –> 00:01:36.180
Chau: Thank you for having me.
00:01:36.180 –> 00:01:37.500
Chau: Excited to chat.
00:01:38.400 –> 00:01:38.940
Roddy: Excellent.
00:01:38.940 –> 00:01:48.680
Roddy: I feel bad Aidan couldn’t make it to Miami, but he was able to make it to Hawaii when he spoke on stage at the RSPA Inspire Conference back in January.
00:01:49.220 –> 00:01:58.180
Roddy: Gentlemen, I gave very quick introductions for each of you, but our audience better understands your perspective before we dive in talking about AI and payments.
00:01:58.360 –> 00:02:00.980
Roddy: Can you tell us details about your organization?
00:02:00.980 –> 00:02:02.720
Roddy: Are you an ISO of RNISV?
00:02:03.260 –> 00:02:04.540
Roddy: What’s your core offering?
00:02:04.540 –> 00:02:08.880
Roddy: The verticals you focus on, number of employees, headquarters, things of that nature.
00:02:08.880 –> 00:02:10.600
Roddy: Travis, can you start us off, please?
00:02:11.600 –> 00:02:12.320
Chrisman: Yeah, of course.
00:02:12.800 –> 00:02:14.500
Chrisman: Coastal Pay is based out of San Diego.
00:02:14.500 –> 00:02:18.000
Chrisman: We started in 2014, so we’re going on 12 years.
00:02:18.320 –> 00:02:25.600
Chrisman: Internal team is a little over 20, and then ISO offices, we have a little over 700.
00:02:26.240 –> 00:02:30.820
Chrisman: Our core product and focus is we’re an ISO, but we also build software.
00:02:31.200 –> 00:02:36.280
Chrisman: We built an onboarding platform, a couple of gateways, some plugins, we do custom integrations.
00:02:37.280 –> 00:02:42.700
Chrisman: Our ICP is we focus on ISVs and software companies.
00:02:44.460 –> 00:02:50.240
Chrisman: AI has been one of those things where it is helping us move faster than we’re used to, so we love it.
00:02:51.180 –> 00:02:51.880
Roddy: Excellent.
00:02:51.880 –> 00:02:52.560
Roddy: Very good.
00:02:52.560 –> 00:02:54.660
Roddy: Don, tell us a little about your organization.
00:02:54.760 –> 00:02:55.140
Wilczynski: Sure.
00:02:55.140 –> 00:03:00.040
Wilczynski: Tried & True, founded in 2009 in Orlando, Florida.
00:03:00.040 –> 00:03:06.780
Wilczynski: As our corporate office, we have 24 independent consultants across the Southeast and one in New York.
00:03:07.860 –> 00:03:15.720
Wilczynski: We have been primarily a payments point of sale gateway company, and over the last 18 months, transformed into IT and digital marketing.
00:03:15.740 –> 00:03:26.140
Wilczynski: As we expanded those product sets to reach out to more specific verticals in the marina, aviation, assisted living property management, in addition to your traditional retail restaurant.
00:03:26.400 –> 00:03:33.420
Wilczynski: Most recently, launched our Tooltruck Pro software for the independent tooltrucks organizations.
00:03:34.380 –> 00:03:39.920
Wilczynski: And like Travis, we found being able to scale and build the faster a little.
00:03:40.000 –> 00:03:45.080
Wilczynski: Faster, more efficiently has been done a lot on some of the AI platforms that we’re using.
00:03:46.360 –> 00:03:47.200
Roddy: Excellent, very good.
00:03:47.200 –> 00:03:49.420
Roddy: And Aidan, tell us about yourself and Maple, please.
00:03:49.940 –> 00:03:51.540
Chau: Hi, my name is Aidan.
00:03:51.540 –> 00:03:52.860
Chau: I’m the founder of Maple.
00:03:53.520 –> 00:03:57.580
Chau: Today is day 658 of Maple, so just under two years.
00:03:58.240 –> 00:04:02.760
Chau: Maple is a company, ISV, that builds voice AI solutions for restaurants.
00:04:03.400 –> 00:04:04.680
Chau: We work with dealers.
00:04:04.680 –> 00:04:06.160
Chau: We also have direct sales.
00:04:06.600 –> 00:04:12.420
Chau: And today we serve over 3,000 restaurants across the country and still growing.
00:04:12.420 –> 00:04:17.140
Chau: So team is still small, 35 people, obviously, out of here in New York City.
00:04:17.920 –> 00:04:19.840
Chau: But yeah, excited to chat today.
00:04:20.480 –> 00:04:21.040
Roddy: Very good.
00:04:21.040 –> 00:04:30.260
Roddy: I feel like everybody knows from our RSPA standpoint, we’ve been around about 79 years, that would be 28,835 days, if you’re keeping track and counting in days.
00:04:30.260 –> 00:04:32.660
Roddy: So I definitely appreciate you doing that, Aidan.
00:04:32.660 –> 00:04:39.860
Roddy: So all right, let’s cut through the AI hype, and we’re going to talk practical AI solutions that generate an ROI.
00:04:39.980 –> 00:04:46.000
Roddy: So where have each of you seen measurable ROI from AI in payments?
00:04:46.000 –> 00:04:53.740
Roddy: Again, so this could be revenue increase, it could be cost reduction, it could be churn reduction, or it could be something else.
00:04:53.780 –> 00:04:55.240
Roddy: So let’s keep going to the same order.
00:04:55.240 –> 00:04:59.400
Roddy: Travis, can you share with us where have you seen measurable ROI from AI in payments?
00:05:01.120 –> 00:05:02.320
Chrisman: Yeah, excellent question.
00:05:02.320 –> 00:05:04.940
Chrisman: So I would say we’ll start with our development team.
00:05:04.940 –> 00:05:11.920
Chrisman: Our development team uses Cursor and Cloud Code, and it helps them release software faster.
00:05:11.940 –> 00:05:17.180
Chrisman: So in terms of cost and number of developers we need to hire, we don’t need to hire as many.
00:05:18.260 –> 00:05:20.320
Chrisman: So that’s the first angle.
00:05:21.400 –> 00:05:26.180
Chrisman: Second one is, I mean, we’re using it in basically all departments across Coastal Pay.
00:05:27.120 –> 00:05:28.800
Chrisman: But the second one is going to be support.
00:05:29.140 –> 00:05:38.940
Chrisman: We’re able to analyze a lot of our data and make decisions a lot faster versus our team having to manually go through and come through reports and find this and that.
00:05:38.960 –> 00:05:41.080
Chrisman: The team uses and we create dashboards with it.
00:05:41.600 –> 00:05:42.760
Chrisman: So that’s the second one.
00:05:43.800 –> 00:05:49.720
Chrisman: Then on the financial side, I will say we’ve built a financial dashboard.
00:05:52.420 –> 00:05:55.300
Chrisman: I think this personally has been one of the most exciting things.
00:05:55.800 –> 00:06:03.600
Chrisman: We took our P&Ls, we took our bank statements, we took our credit card statements, we took one or two other reports.
00:06:04.000 –> 00:06:09.700
Chrisman: We built that through Clod and built a financial dashboard, and we had CFO level data in real time.
00:06:11.400 –> 00:06:14.300
Chrisman: So that’s another one where we’re saving cost.
00:06:14.580 –> 00:06:18.400
Chrisman: Also, we just have very powerful high-level insight.
00:06:18.400 –> 00:06:20.980
Chrisman: It allows us to see our data in a different light, right?
00:06:20.980 –> 00:06:26.320
Chrisman: So whether we’re looking at financials, whether we’re looking at sales, whether we’re looking wherever, it’s helping.
00:06:26.400 –> 00:06:28.400
Chrisman: And I think the last one I’ll touch on is sales.
00:06:29.760 –> 00:06:41.580
Chrisman: We’re working on an enterprise deal right now, and we’ve created custom these Excel sheets, and we use ISO AMP as well to create these typical cost analysis and savings analysis.
00:06:42.280 –> 00:06:57.080
Chrisman: But what we did for this enterprise deal is we took just what they were using with their term provider, we took the statements and then plus the call from Fireflies with a merchant, we took it, we ran it through Cloud, we had to build the presentation within seconds.
00:06:57.080 –> 00:07:03.700
Chrisman: We had an enterprise level report, we liked it, we went through that and just brushed it up a little bit, and sure enough, we presented it, and they loved it.
00:07:03.700 –> 00:07:06.660
Chrisman: So I mean, that’s just how, and it was quick, right?
00:07:06.660 –> 00:07:08.940
Chrisman: Like typically, this would take a week, a couple of weeks.
00:07:09.120 –> 00:07:11.920
Chrisman: I mean, we had this done in a matter of a few minutes.
00:07:12.000 –> 00:07:16.700
Chrisman: So it’s allowing us to move faster and give us a better quality output.
00:07:17.520 –> 00:07:18.080
Roddy: Interesting.
00:07:18.080 –> 00:07:18.680
Roddy: Thank you, Travis.
00:07:18.680 –> 00:07:23.440
Roddy: Don, where are you seeing, again, a measurable ROI from AI and payments in your world?
00:07:23.860 –> 00:07:32.640
Wilczynski: So a lot like Travis, I’ll label it into really three areas, in operations, in sales, and then in product development.
00:07:32.860 –> 00:07:34.820
Wilczynski: So I’ll start first with operations.
00:07:35.400 –> 00:07:54.740
Wilczynski: What we’ve been able to do, taking individuals that would literally fill up their entire calendar with manual processes and data uploads and analyzation of information, we’re able to do now with a few things within chat or cloud code, we’re able to take those people and exponentially make them more efficient.
00:07:54.860 –> 00:07:59.500
Wilczynski: They’re actually solving more problems now, not just for themselves, but for our clients.
00:07:59.700 –> 00:08:08.840
Wilczynski: So when someone does present an issue or an opportunity to research, they can do now in minutes what was taking days of research and emails back and forth.
00:08:08.840 –> 00:08:18.020
Wilczynski: Now we can just do one email, grab the data and generally within the same business day, turn around a response with the outcome that we need to take to solve those problems.
00:08:18.280 –> 00:08:24.520
Wilczynski: So increase in productivity within the available headcount you have was the number one thing we’ve already seen.
00:08:24.520 –> 00:08:42.580
Wilczynski: And I would say that that’s already resulted in, normally we might have hired two more FTE to do the number of new boards we’re doing and other things we’re able to just keep our core intact, pay them a little bit more this year and turn around and do something better with the resources that we have.
00:08:42.740 –> 00:08:44.040
Wilczynski: And so that’s number one.
00:08:44.040 –> 00:08:47.140
Wilczynski: Operational efficiency was definitely achieved just this year alone.
00:08:47.240 –> 00:08:49.300
Wilczynski: Number two, I talked about products.
00:08:49.660 –> 00:09:00.720
Wilczynski: We developed Chargeback Navigator with a combination of a lot of personal information research, looking at competitors’ solution sets, and ultimately arriving at a place where we go, where’s the gap?
00:09:01.460 –> 00:09:10.140
Wilczynski: And building that out, where normally a software solution, pre-AI might have taken hundreds of thousands to build something effectively.
00:09:10.360 –> 00:09:13.780
Wilczynski: You can do that now for just a few thousand dollars.
00:09:13.860 –> 00:09:21.840
Wilczynski: And then you’re going to have to lawyer up and do some other things with accounting platforms and such, where you’re still going to spend some money.
00:09:22.040 –> 00:09:27.040
Wilczynski: But you don’t have to spend 50, 60, 75 thousand dollars to develop something.
00:09:27.080 –> 00:09:40.240
Wilczynski: You can now get into the $10,000 range and become very effective, compliant, secure, and delivering a solution that is ultimately saving hours of our employee time, hours of the merchant time.
00:09:40.280 –> 00:09:43.280
Wilczynski: And we’ve already seen a measurable return on investment.
00:09:43.340 –> 00:09:44.900
Wilczynski: We’re up to nearly 45.
00:09:44.960 –> 00:09:53.100
Wilczynski: I think it’s 45 now defended charge back, something like 35 in a row, 36 in a row, including multiple re-presentments now.
00:09:53.300 –> 00:10:01.920
Wilczynski: And we’re in a position where we’re starting to see this number is now approaching $100,000 of retained earnings for our clients, not to mention fees avoided.
00:10:02.260 –> 00:10:08.940
Wilczynski: So that is a major transformation for a small company to be able to create and deliver these kind of results.
00:10:09.260 –> 00:10:13.240
Wilczynski: I think I’ve spoken about this at Aspire, where it was just 22 clients.
00:10:13.580 –> 00:10:15.320
Wilczynski: And it was like $35,000.
00:10:15.360 –> 00:10:16.840
Wilczynski: We’re $100,000 now.
00:10:16.900 –> 00:10:20.200
Wilczynski: So in six months, quite an impressive gain.
00:10:20.900 –> 00:10:22.820
Wilczynski: And now we’re starting to figure out how to monetize it.
00:10:22.820 –> 00:10:29.960
Wilczynski: We’re going to invest some of these savings we’re making, we’re investing back into making that product even better and be able to go to market with it.
00:10:30.160 –> 00:10:32.460
Wilczynski: The last thing I’d say is around sales.
00:10:33.000 –> 00:10:35.900
Wilczynski: We’re able to take merchant statements and do analysis.
00:10:35.900 –> 00:10:38.880
Wilczynski: I know there’s a lot of tools out there that we can compete against.
00:10:38.920 –> 00:10:47.260
Wilczynski: But at the end of the day, how we want to present it in creating in a manner in which we’d like to present it, was something we had to manually do every single time.
00:10:47.420 –> 00:10:50.480
Wilczynski: Now we just loaded up a template that’s already there.
00:10:50.520 –> 00:10:58.760
Wilczynski: We’ve seen us take data from customers where PLS systems are, maybe they tell one story through multiple sets of product reports.
00:10:59.000 –> 00:11:06.260
Wilczynski: We’re able to consolidate that in through a combination of chat and moving it into Cloud Code where we can get agents working a little more efficiently.
00:11:06.260 –> 00:11:22.780
Wilczynski: We’re getting into an area where we’re starting to really deliver really meaningful quarterly meetings with some of our larger clients and really determining what really is making the change, the transformation in ticket increase, what really is driving the increase in efficiency through the kitchen.
00:11:22.800 –> 00:11:25.540
Wilczynski: It’s more than just looking at a standard report.
00:11:25.620 –> 00:11:28.160
Wilczynski: We’re taking, and that is massive.
00:11:28.160 –> 00:11:40.680
Wilczynski: When you come in with case studies, as Travis alluded to, when you start loading these case studies into chat, you can do in minutes to maybe an hour refining something and making it for the next client.
00:11:41.560 –> 00:11:43.540
Wilczynski: All that’s doing is increasing productivity.
00:11:43.580 –> 00:11:50.100
Wilczynski: Our pipeline since SEAA alone is nearly $100 million, and new business is already verbally committed to us.
00:11:50.560 –> 00:11:52.620
Wilczynski: It’s all through these new tools that we’re creating.
00:11:52.940 –> 00:12:00.340
Wilczynski: In a company like that, we had it prior to mid-early last year, we were $150 million company in volume.
00:12:00.580 –> 00:12:04.400
Wilczynski: We’re now 250, and now we’re approaching another 100 already.
00:12:05.100 –> 00:12:07.380
Wilczynski: That’s the incredible growth it’s allowed to have happen.
00:12:07.660 –> 00:12:08.300
Roddy: That really is.
00:12:08.300 –> 00:12:16.540
Roddy: Yeah, I’ve heard you first talk about that charge-back solution in January to inspire, then at SEAA, and now today, and I’m glad that number keeps going up for you.
00:12:16.740 –> 00:12:17.620
Roddy: That’s wonderful.
00:12:18.380 –> 00:12:24.100
Roddy: Aidan, you might have a different perspective on this because Travis and Don, there are more payments first and then AI.
00:12:24.300 –> 00:12:26.260
Roddy: You’re an AI-first company.
00:12:26.260 –> 00:12:29.060
Roddy: Can you talk about how you’re seeing an ROI from AI and payments?
00:12:29.340 –> 00:12:29.800
Roddy: Yeah.
00:12:30.880 –> 00:12:34.240
Chau: I guess I’ll go over this in two different ways.
00:12:34.240 –> 00:12:45.780
Chau: One is talking about how we see ROI at Maple internally and then also how we help use AI to deliver ROI for our clients since we sell an AI product.
00:12:46.200 –> 00:12:51.820
Chau: So first, internally, I’ll say, echo a lot of what Travis and Donna said, better decision-making.
00:12:53.440 –> 00:13:09.240
Chau: We used to have all this data in front of us and very little way to make sense of it, or it took a long time, or you need to hire a data analyst, and now you can throw that into Codex or Cloud Code, and they can generate a pretty professional level report and helps inform better decision-making overall.
00:13:09.760 –> 00:13:20.140
Chau: The second way that we’ve adopted and seen ROI from internally is with these internal agents that we’ve been building, which have been pretty exciting.
00:13:21.540 –> 00:13:35.660
Chau: We built two agents that are production ready today, and the way we’re seeing them is instead of agents like Cloud Code and Codex that are initiated by humans, we see them more as entire departments of the company.
00:13:35.700 –> 00:13:37.480
Chau: And so, for example, support.
00:13:38.960 –> 00:13:43.600
Chau: As we were growing very quickly, we were growing 50% month on month since the start of this year.
00:13:43.600 –> 00:13:48.460
Chau: And so it’s been very hard to keep hiring up to serve our customers effectively.
00:13:48.460 –> 00:13:59.720
Chau: And so we ended up building out a support agent a couple of months ago, and the support agent basically fully autonomously handles tickets on its own and then escalates to a team member when needed.
00:13:59.760 –> 00:14:05.320
Chau: So we kind of have them as this front line, all tier one, level one tickets.
00:14:05.320 –> 00:14:10.060
Chau: And then when they get escalated, that’s only when a human gets involved.
00:14:10.060 –> 00:14:15.220
Chau: And today, this agent handles roughly 60% of all tickets fully autonomously.
00:14:15.220 –> 00:14:16.940
Chau: So no human involvement closes it out.
00:14:16.940 –> 00:14:18.320
Chau: And so that’s been pretty exciting.
00:14:18.320 –> 00:14:20.460
Chau: And it’s a number that’s only continued to increase.
00:14:20.780 –> 00:14:32.320
Chau: And as it increase, what we think and what we’re seeing is that it will allow us to scale to a much larger customer base without scaling the human set of support too aggressively.
00:14:32.320 –> 00:14:36.820
Chau: So you turn this linear function into a log function, which is always very exciting.
00:14:37.520 –> 00:14:44.700
Chau: And then the other one, and this is getting to the second point now, is this dealer manager agent that we’ve built.
00:14:44.840 –> 00:14:50.120
Chau: And so essentially, we have this network of hundreds of dealers now across the US.
00:14:50.240 –> 00:14:52.420
Chau: And these dealers come to us with a lot of questions.
00:14:52.420 –> 00:14:57.220
Chau: It’s a similar shape as a support agent, but the other side is it’s revenue driving.
00:14:57.220 –> 00:15:05.740
Chau: So this dealer agent is working with some of our resellers and dealers to make sure, like, hey, is this customer a good fit for the product?
00:15:05.740 –> 00:15:08.300
Chau: Like, this customer has these requirements.
00:15:08.440 –> 00:15:13.980
Chau: Let’s go check with our sales force, our internal knowledge base, see if this will work for them.
00:15:14.420 –> 00:15:17.040
Chau: And really handle the end-to-end relationship with the dealer.
00:15:17.040 –> 00:15:24.140
Chau: So signing up the customer, onboarding them, that kind of thing, and only bringing in able employees at the most critical moment.
00:15:24.260 –> 00:15:30.020
Chau: And so that’s been pretty exciting, and we’ve seen over $100,000 in revenue driven just from the agent alone, since launching it a few weeks ago.
00:15:31.340 –> 00:15:42.140
Chau: And then the other side of the answer to this question is, sort of, how we’re delivering value as an AI native company to our clients, and some of these, our dealers, and a lot of people actually in the RSPA network.
00:15:43.540 –> 00:15:51.680
Chau: Sort of, the problems that are open up now because of AI is pretty remarkable, right?
00:15:51.920 –> 00:16:00.460
Chau: Like Don was mentioning, this chargeback agent, really in the past, fighting every single chargeback that came through with enough evidence to actually win it was an impossible task, right?
00:16:00.580 –> 00:16:07.280
Chau: And now only with AI has it become this very tractable problem in a product that you can actually sell.
00:16:07.420 –> 00:16:22.560
Chau: And so one thing we’re super excited by, one area we’ve seen ROI be delivered from AI already is from our dealer network, reselling AI solutions into their existing merchant portfolios and delivering tremendous value to our merchants.
00:16:22.560 –> 00:16:30.140
Chau: I mean, today we’ve processed over $100 million in GMV just from voice AI in the thousands of merchants that were live.
00:16:30.140 –> 00:16:36.860
Chau: And so it’s a place where our end-merchancy operational efficiency and our dealers see increased revenue.
00:16:36.860 –> 00:16:38.740
Chau: So yeah.
00:16:38.740 –> 00:16:39.400
Roddy: Excellent.
00:16:39.400 –> 00:16:39.840
Roddy: Excellent.
00:16:39.840 –> 00:16:50.260
Roddy: And I guess it’s so for our listeners, everybody in the retail IT channel, you hear all this fear, uncertainty, and doubt related to AI or all this, you know, a bunch of blather about it.
00:16:50.300 –> 00:16:53.480
Roddy: But we’re inside the RSPA, we’re talking about getting to practical solutions.
00:16:53.480 –> 00:16:56.660
Roddy: That’s what you see Travis, Don and Aidan just all detailed for it.
00:16:56.660 –> 00:16:58.260
Roddy: I feel that we can end the podcast right now.
00:16:58.260 –> 00:16:58.940
Roddy: Goodbye, everybody.
00:16:58.940 –> 00:17:02.780
Roddy: Right now is a really valuable podcast, but we’re going to keep digging deeper.
00:17:02.780 –> 00:17:05.220
Roddy: So Don, I’m hoping you can take this next question.
00:17:05.320 –> 00:17:08.720
Roddy: So it’s about training your team to actually use AI.
00:17:08.800 –> 00:17:14.680
Roddy: So what is adoption of AI look like inside of your organization, right?
00:17:15.000 –> 00:17:22.180
Roddy: Isoagent, VAR organization that might not be considered like a large company or a naturally high tech company, right?
00:17:22.180 –> 00:17:23.280
Roddy: It’s from Payments First.
00:17:23.280 –> 00:17:25.160
Roddy: So how have you been training your team?
00:17:25.480 –> 00:17:30.940
Wilczynski: So since SEAA, because that question was posed once before, I was really struggling.
00:17:31.200 –> 00:17:33.840
Wilczynski: So we started inside out in the last 35 days.
00:17:35.220 –> 00:17:44.740
Wilczynski: We’ve expanded our reach within both our chat and our platforms, we got that first bought in-house.
00:17:44.880 –> 00:17:47.440
Wilczynski: Everybody now has access to it.
00:17:47.440 –> 00:17:52.360
Wilczynski: We shared that and they’re now as much of an evangelist as I am.
00:17:52.540 –> 00:17:57.540
Wilczynski: So what’s happening now is when somebody calls in, they go, well, we actually solved this.
00:17:57.620 –> 00:18:01.040
Wilczynski: What you’re asking me to do, did you know you can do this?
00:18:01.120 –> 00:18:02.720
Wilczynski: They actually start to lead the way.
00:18:02.940 –> 00:18:13.220
Wilczynski: So every time an independent consultant is calling in asking for a solution, we immediately reroute them back to, well, here’s what we’ve done, but let us show you how we did that.
00:18:13.220 –> 00:18:15.040
Wilczynski: Give me five minutes and we’ll show you.
00:18:16.060 –> 00:18:17.240
Wilczynski: Did you create this?
00:18:17.420 –> 00:18:31.500
Wilczynski: For the ones that have, about half of them have gone out, created their profile, and now we’re just walking them through what we did and said, upload this in there and now ask it to refine it with your information, so they can see what they can do.
00:18:31.500 –> 00:18:38.120
Wilczynski: So we took small steps internally, and now we’re starting to have every conversation end with, did you try AI first?
00:18:38.820 –> 00:18:46.580
Wilczynski: The last thing I’ll share is, we’re building some of those, that technology to start to become an agentic experience for our agents.
00:18:46.580 –> 00:19:04.420
Wilczynski: So we’re building, I’ll call it a workspace, a browser link that just will take them to our internal chat that is going to be largely driven by AI, so that they can just go do their solutioning right there through a Q&A with a bot that is already going to take them down the right path.
00:19:04.500 –> 00:19:13.160
Wilczynski: So we started internally, moved it to every conversation, and now we’re going to go ahead and bring it together with an actual resource for them.
00:19:13.440 –> 00:19:14.740
Wilczynski: So it’s a phased approach.
00:19:15.220 –> 00:19:15.580
Roddy: Thank you.
00:19:15.580 –> 00:19:18.900
Roddy: Travis, you want to share your insights, how you’ve been training your team on AI?
00:19:20.200 –> 00:19:21.020
Chrisman: Yeah, definitely.
00:19:21.280 –> 00:19:25.220
Chrisman: We actually just completed a full AI audit in the entire company.
00:19:25.820 –> 00:19:32.340
Chrisman: So one of our calls later today is to go over the findings of that call.
00:19:32.620 –> 00:19:36.740
Chrisman: But it’s like Don said, it’s giving them practical solutions.
00:19:37.600 –> 00:19:40.580
Chrisman: So what I like to do is put myself in their shoes.
00:19:42.180 –> 00:19:44.320
Chrisman: One of the best things I can do is lead by example.
00:19:44.500 –> 00:19:48.700
Chrisman: So I will show the team exactly what and how I do things.
00:19:50.200 –> 00:19:54.820
Chrisman: Then I remember I had a call with one of our Director of Customer Success the other day.
00:19:56.720 –> 00:20:02.580
Chrisman: She was manually taking the attrition report and adding them one by one.
00:20:02.820 –> 00:20:13.860
Chrisman: So I showed her, hey, instead of adding these 30 accounts I canceled this month, here’s boom boom, run the report, and then it puts them all into a report within a matter of seconds.
00:20:14.320 –> 00:20:19.320
Chrisman: So just little stuff like that where I know how to do it, and I’m showing them practical uses.
00:20:19.840 –> 00:20:22.600
Chrisman: We use Fireflies, Fireflies, it’s on all of our calls.
00:20:23.040 –> 00:20:27.280
Chrisman: So that’s a good one where they can go back, what did I say, what did this person say?
00:20:27.840 –> 00:20:45.080
Chrisman: Now that they realize how valuable is to have something that can memorize, have a 100% retention and memorize every single word, every single, everything that was discussed in the call, have action items, rate the call, everything, they can see how powerful that is with their own two eyes.
00:20:45.960 –> 00:20:55.020
Chrisman: But really the area of opportunity for us is how quickly can we get the team up to speed and what does adoption look like?
00:20:55.220 –> 00:21:01.740
Chrisman: Every team member, whether they’re in their 20s, whether they’re in their 50s, we’ve got two members of all ages at Coastal.
00:21:03.080 –> 00:21:04.840
Chrisman: Everyone learns differently.
00:21:06.280 –> 00:21:09.040
Chrisman: This is a brand new space, a brand new area of opportunity.
00:21:09.200 –> 00:21:12.340
Chrisman: How do we make it digestible where they can retain and they can like it and love it?
00:21:13.860 –> 00:21:14.700
Chrisman: It’s an art form.
00:21:14.880 –> 00:21:18.880
Chrisman: It’s connecting with your team and making it something that works for them.
00:21:20.060 –> 00:21:21.580
Roddy: Yeah, this isn’t like baking a cake.
00:21:21.580 –> 00:21:22.460
Roddy: Step one, this.
00:21:22.460 –> 00:21:23.280
Roddy: Step two, this.
00:21:23.300 –> 00:21:24.700
Roddy: It’s linear and you just repeat it.
00:21:24.700 –> 00:21:27.240
Roddy: Everything keeps changing and changing.
00:21:28.900 –> 00:21:32.900
Roddy: Aidan, what is your take on training your team?
00:21:32.900 –> 00:21:40.800
Roddy: I’m curious again, if that’s a different perspective as well, since folks are working right out of the gate from an AI company, but how do you train folks on these ever-changing tools?
00:21:41.140 –> 00:21:43.840
Chau: Yeah, it’s really tough.
00:21:44.520 –> 00:21:45.900
Chau: The space is changing.
00:21:46.300 –> 00:22:01.480
Chau: Every other week, there’s a new model dropping, new agent frameworks dropping, and even I find myself, it’s a little hard to keep up with what the latest is, and so I think there’s a couple of ways we try to do this well.
00:22:02.680 –> 00:22:14.900
Chau: People at the company generally are looped into the latest AI developments, whether on Twitter, online, research papers, that kind of thing, and we just share it across the company, and everyone’s really excited to learn.
00:22:15.660 –> 00:22:32.640
Chau: But the other part of this actually is it’s quite inefficient to get everyone to try and build their own AI tools when you can have one or two people build tools for the entire organization that are extremely effective.
00:22:33.940 –> 00:22:43.160
Chau: Really, the delta in performance and productivity gains between someone who kind of knows what they’re doing and someone who really knows what they’re doing with AI is just massive.
00:22:44.040 –> 00:22:46.440
Chau: What we actually try to do is meet people where they are.
00:22:46.800 –> 00:22:50.100
Chau: We have these internal agents that live in Slack, and all you have to do is tag them.
00:22:50.200 –> 00:22:55.580
Chau: Like, hey, Roo, which is our support agent, can you give us an update on these things?
00:22:56.060 –> 00:23:14.100
Chau: Rather than having to teach people how to use Cloud Code and set up their environments and share all the credentials, we just have one agent with all of that in one place that anyone can tag in the workflows that they already do, where they already work, and it’s a pattern we’re seeing more and more across the at least more AI and native industry.
00:23:14.700 –> 00:23:17.700
Chau: I think it’s a pattern that we actually see propagate pretty far.
00:23:18.840 –> 00:23:27.040
Chau: It’s an interesting different take than most, and I think one that will probably be given more adoption as time progresses.
00:23:27.040 –> 00:23:37.460
Roddy: If I understand what you’re saying, I think all of you are maybe touching on there is, and I take this back, Travis, you said people in their 20s to their 50s, I’m in my 50s now, so I can relate back to this.
00:23:37.620 –> 00:23:44.940
Roddy: When I first got my computer training, this would have been in the 1980s, it was all programming based.
00:23:45.020 –> 00:23:49.620
Roddy: Well, now it’s based on how do you use these applications, they’re not teaching me how to program.
00:23:49.760 –> 00:24:03.000
Roddy: I don’t know if anybody wants to dive into this a little bit more, but that’s what it sounds like you were all describing there in terms of, you’re not having everybody code, but you’re having some folks who are really good at it, and then you’re teaching people how to actually use those tools.
00:24:03.000 –> 00:24:05.340
Roddy: I don’t know if one of you wants to dive in on that a little bit more.
00:24:08.520 –> 00:24:08.660
Roddy: Yeah.
00:24:08.660 –> 00:24:09.440
Roddy: Don first.
00:24:09.700 –> 00:24:18.040
Wilczynski: Well, I’ll just say, again, it’s just knowing where your employee or consultant agent are at.
00:24:18.220 –> 00:24:22.200
Wilczynski: So once you know where they’re at, then you just start them down the path to proficiency.
00:24:23.060 –> 00:24:27.560
Wilczynski: That’s really the key is just get them started to a point that they’re comfortable.
00:24:27.560 –> 00:24:29.180
Wilczynski: If they’re not comfortable, okay.
00:24:29.540 –> 00:24:32.600
Wilczynski: Well, then we have to start making some other business decisions.
00:24:32.600 –> 00:24:43.540
Wilczynski: If they’re constantly calling and they’re not empowering and enabling, and they’re not willing to take that information and put it to use, we’ve got to start having a different business discussion.
00:24:43.600 –> 00:24:47.640
Wilczynski: But otherwise, most have been very, very amenable to, let me try this.
00:24:47.720 –> 00:24:48.520
Wilczynski: I want to try it.
00:24:48.520 –> 00:24:50.640
Wilczynski: Let me get this and it works pretty well.
00:24:50.960 –> 00:24:51.440
Roddy: Nice.
00:24:52.000 –> 00:24:53.220
Roddy: Aidan, you want to add to this?
00:24:54.920 –> 00:25:09.140
Chau: No, I mean, I think your assessment is pretty spot on where, yeah, you have a group of people who really know what they’re doing and they build tools to help the rest of the company and level up the entire team.
00:25:09.480 –> 00:25:10.000
Wilczynski: All right.
00:25:10.180 –> 00:25:11.620
Roddy: I’ll really show my age here.
00:25:11.620 –> 00:25:13.520
Roddy: I remember going to Hill’s Department Store.
00:25:13.520 –> 00:25:19.600
Roddy: I don’t know if you guys remember Hill’s Department Store as they were in your area, and the computers they had there was just for people to program.
00:25:19.600 –> 00:25:23.960
Roddy: I remember a girl walking up and typed in, play games and hit enter and she’s like, nothing happened.
00:25:23.960 –> 00:25:29.860
Roddy: So we’ve come a long way in terms of how things operate from that standpoint.
00:25:29.980 –> 00:25:35.060
Roddy: So I’m going to pause here to let our listeners and viewers know about the Retail Solution Providers Association.
00:25:35.220 –> 00:25:43.680
Roddy: RSPA is North America’s largest community of retail technology VARs, software providers, vendors, and distributors in the retail, restaurant, and grocery verticals.
00:25:43.780 –> 00:25:49.400
Roddy: To accelerate your success in RSPA membership, email membership at gorspa.org.
00:25:49.400 –> 00:25:55.820
Roddy: I also want to highlight an RSPA tool that Travis, Don, and Aidan, and a few other dozen RSPA members have helped build.
00:25:55.880 –> 00:25:59.100
Roddy: It’s called the RSPA AI Resource Hub.
00:25:59.100 –> 00:26:09.820
Roddy: If you just Google RSPA AI Resource Hub, you’ll find that tons and tons of practical information, all for solution providers in the retail technology space.
00:26:10.100 –> 00:26:17.180
Roddy: Then also we want to make sure we thank these channel-focused companies who support the RSPA and make this podcast and video series possible.
00:26:17.240 –> 00:26:24.800
Roddy: Our gold sponsors are Blue Star, CoCard, Epson, Global Payments, and ScanSource.
00:26:24.900 –> 00:26:33.520
Roddy: I want to get to a few questions that we didn’t quite get to in Miami because we got tons and tons of questions and comments from the audience there.
00:26:33.600 –> 00:26:36.020
Roddy: I’ll make another reference for people in their 50s and 60s.
00:26:36.020 –> 00:26:44.160
Roddy: Phil Donahue, I was running around with my microphone, getting all sorts of questions and having Travis and Don were answering them.
00:26:44.740 –> 00:26:48.660
Roddy: One question we didn’t get to was about decision-making related to AI.
00:26:49.520 –> 00:27:07.440
Roddy: Travis, if you want to take this one first, how should ISO and ISV leaders decide whether to buy AI-ready solutions, whether to embed them into their existing platforms by development or wait for their processor or vendor or somebody else to deliver a packageable AI solution?
00:27:07.440 –> 00:27:09.620
Roddy: How have you gone through that decision-making process?
00:27:10.580 –> 00:27:12.060
Chrisman: This is an excellent question.
00:27:13.420 –> 00:27:15.240
Chrisman: I would say it depends on the pain point.
00:27:16.320 –> 00:27:22.560
Chrisman: One of the questions that came up when we went through our AI audit is, what’s taking our team members the most time?
00:27:22.880 –> 00:27:27.700
Chrisman: Then we analyze what’s taken the most time and then how do we build an AI agent?
00:27:28.600 –> 00:27:37.420
Chrisman: We’re about to start one of the things that Aidan has built and we’re building a chatbot to handle those tickets.
00:27:38.280 –> 00:27:41.980
Chrisman: 60% seems to be the number and the target that we’re shooting at.
00:27:42.960 –> 00:27:44.180
Chrisman: He’s done a great job there.
00:27:45.680 –> 00:27:48.480
Chrisman: It really depends on the use case.
00:27:48.480 –> 00:27:51.700
Chrisman: I think about Fireflies, one of our most basic.
00:27:51.700 –> 00:27:53.020
Chrisman: That sits on all of our calls.
00:27:53.080 –> 00:27:56.320
Chrisman: That’s a very easy thing that can sit on support calls.
00:27:56.320 –> 00:27:58.460
Chrisman: It can sit on sales calls.
00:27:58.460 –> 00:28:06.320
Chrisman: It can sit on all the calls and it’s easily implemented versus us trying to build out that would probably take us a lot longer.
00:28:06.980 –> 00:28:13.420
Chrisman: Stuff that’s easy plug and play, there’s no point on trying to build it from scratch.
00:28:13.420 –> 00:28:17.820
Chrisman: But I would really go back to every company is going to be a little bit different.
00:28:17.820 –> 00:28:21.760
Chrisman: My challenges at Coastal Pay are going to be a little different than everyone else’s.
00:28:22.200 –> 00:28:26.360
Chrisman: And so really look at what’s slowing down your team, right?
00:28:26.360 –> 00:28:28.060
Chrisman: What’s the biggest area of opportunity?
00:28:28.260 –> 00:28:30.320
Chrisman: And then do you build that or do you go buy it?
00:28:30.320 –> 00:28:31.240
Chrisman: Does it exist today?
00:28:31.240 –> 00:28:32.860
Chrisman: Go do research, does it exist?
00:28:32.920 –> 00:28:34.140
Chrisman: What are licensing costs?
00:28:34.140 –> 00:28:34.900
Chrisman: Can you build it?
00:28:34.900 –> 00:28:37.460
Chrisman: What’s going to cost to build out and so forth.
00:28:37.460 –> 00:28:40.700
Chrisman: And so just doing the research, right?
00:28:42.060 –> 00:28:43.220
Chrisman: Just doing proper research, right?
00:28:43.220 –> 00:28:44.660
Chrisman: And figuring out it doesn’t make sense for you.
00:28:45.620 –> 00:28:46.160
Roddy: Correct, that’s great.
00:28:46.160 –> 00:28:48.080
Roddy: Aidan, what would you add to that?
00:28:48.080 –> 00:28:59.200
Roddy: What do you counsel, again, folks who might not be AI native organizations, whether it’s buy, build or nag their vendor to create a solution for them?
00:29:00.460 –> 00:29:02.060
Roddy: How do you counsel RSPA members?
00:29:03.580 –> 00:29:09.380
Chau: Yeah, I’d say the answer is really twofold here.
00:29:09.720 –> 00:29:24.280
Chau: One is really the pace of change of the AI industry has moved so fast that it’s very hard to keep up with developments.
00:29:25.400 –> 00:29:39.120
Chau: For example, if we were to have tried to build an agent a year ago to automate your coding tasks, there was something that you could have seen coming and something that would obviously deliver value.
00:29:39.680 –> 00:29:43.560
Chau: But the reality of it is there’s a lot of very, very smart people working on these problems.
00:29:44.020 –> 00:29:51.960
Chau: If you just wait maybe a month, two months, you’ll have some very well-polished packaged product ready for you to use.
00:29:53.020 –> 00:29:59.280
Chau: What you should think about when thinking about this build by problem is how many people are actually experiencing the same problem as you.
00:30:00.480 –> 00:30:12.200
Chau: For ones where a lot of people are experiencing the same problem, and ones where you can see like OpenAI or Anthropic or some of these big guys launching products in that space, I would recommend against building that.
00:30:12.440 –> 00:30:24.020
Chau: But when it’s something that’s very, very hyper-tailored to your use case, there’s something that not a lot of people experience, whether it’s company-specific quirks or just more niche workflows.
00:30:24.260 –> 00:30:27.580
Chau: For us, an example of that would be like voice AI for restaurants.
00:30:28.660 –> 00:30:31.120
Chau: That’s when it starts to make sense to think about building it.
00:30:31.120 –> 00:30:35.020
Chau: You look at the landscape of vendors, you’re not happy with any of that.
00:30:35.900 –> 00:30:43.220
Chau: Talk to Cloud a little bit, talk to OpenAI, see how far you can get before committing to a vendor.
00:30:43.600 –> 00:30:50.860
Chau: But yeah, that’s generally what I would say is, if it’s a big problem and a lot of people are having that problem, probably don’t build it because someone else is going to build it better than you.
00:30:51.520 –> 00:30:58.800
Chau: But if it’s a niche problem and you’re one of the only people who are feeling this problem, then yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense to build it.
00:30:59.240 –> 00:30:59.660
Roddy: Yeah.
00:30:59.660 –> 00:31:00.540
Roddy: Thank you for that, Aidan.
00:31:00.540 –> 00:31:02.060
Roddy: Don, how would you answer that question?
00:31:02.220 –> 00:31:03.580
Roddy: How do you weigh in on the builder buy?
00:31:03.980 –> 00:31:04.280
Wilczynski: Yeah.
00:31:04.280 –> 00:31:21.100
Wilczynski: So the acquire, build or to partner gets down to really, it’s a combination of an economic decision, time investment, and where does that place us in our schedule of growth or our trajectory of growth.
00:31:21.800 –> 00:31:24.860
Wilczynski: We are a company that really doesn’t want to be acquired.
00:31:25.080 –> 00:31:27.700
Wilczynski: So that puts us on an island a lot of times.
00:31:28.100 –> 00:31:36.120
Wilczynski: In an industry right now that is wrought with acquisition and or challenged with a lot of smaller independent companies being bought by larger ones.
00:31:36.600 –> 00:31:43.000
Wilczynski: It is one where you have to determine whether this is a differentiation or is this something I can partner and collaborate with.
00:31:43.000 –> 00:31:51.820
Wilczynski: And so I’ve surrounded myself with people that are the same size, twice the size, five times the size, and then significantly larger.
00:31:51.940 –> 00:31:59.260
Wilczynski: And I seek guidance through them because they’ve made it through that journey and or are going through it to get and we go through it together.
00:31:59.260 –> 00:32:08.880
Wilczynski: So to me, oftentimes we may take a lead on something or I may find somebody that’s doing something similar and I’ll give them some additional ideas and go, why don’t you build this?
00:32:08.880 –> 00:32:16.420
Wilczynski: I’ll build this and now we’ll just work together on the new business going forward with each other’s products in our arson.
00:32:16.960 –> 00:32:22.980
Wilczynski: And so, you know, that to me is becoming a more intelligent play than just trying to do it all myself.
00:32:23.660 –> 00:32:28.780
Wilczynski: And it’s helping to defer cost, deflect cost for multiple companies in what we do.
00:32:29.120 –> 00:32:39.740
Wilczynski: And so to me, that approach is going to allow us to be a little more sustainable and scalable long term and probably makes us a little more difficult to acquire because I’ll say, well, that’s this partner too.
00:32:39.740 –> 00:32:41.020
Wilczynski: So you’re going to do this.
00:32:41.020 –> 00:32:42.020
Wilczynski: You’re going to need to build.
00:32:42.020 –> 00:32:43.400
Wilczynski: You’re going to buy both of us now.
00:32:44.320 –> 00:32:47.380
Wilczynski: So it becomes, to me, a method of survival.
00:32:47.640 –> 00:33:02.320
Wilczynski: But I have found most of our stuff, we’ve tried to build, if it’s going to cost us less than six times our monthly revenue, and it has a sustainable, projectable 3x, 4x annual revenue.
00:33:02.400 –> 00:33:04.620
Wilczynski: All right, well, now I’ll probably go build it.
00:33:04.800 –> 00:33:08.260
Wilczynski: Otherwise, I’ll partner or I’ll buy.
00:33:09.020 –> 00:33:10.940
Wilczynski: It just goes down that pecking order.
00:33:11.580 –> 00:33:12.100
Roddy: Got it.
00:33:12.340 –> 00:33:13.340
Roddy: Now, thank you all for that.
00:33:13.340 –> 00:33:17.080
Roddy: So we were talking about building by like at a general philosophical level.
00:33:17.140 –> 00:33:28.100
Roddy: I want to drill in a little bit deeper, and this is something that I heard last year at SCAA, where it was talking about ISOs to ISVs, and I was like, do you really mean ISOs are becoming ISVs, like you’re developing your own software?
00:33:28.100 –> 00:33:30.660
Roddy: That seems like a huge leap in that regard.
00:33:30.660 –> 00:33:38.160
Roddy: But then this year at the event, there were many ISOs talking about, hey, all we used to do is talk payments with people, but we were missing out on all their pain points.
00:33:38.360 –> 00:33:45.200
Roddy: So now we are leaning on AI very heavily to build our own POS systems for this groups.
00:33:45.200 –> 00:33:49.040
Roddy: Part of me is just like, like I see the value and I see where they’re coming from.
00:33:49.060 –> 00:33:51.840
Roddy: But I’ve worked with a lot of ISVs over many, many years.
00:33:51.860 –> 00:33:58.080
Roddy: It just seems like you’re going to get to a point where you’re going to hit a ceiling, and you’re like, man, there’s so many other things that they want my software to do.
00:33:58.360 –> 00:33:59.900
Roddy: I’m not going to be able to do that.
00:33:59.960 –> 00:34:01.560
Roddy: Then where do they go from there?
00:34:01.560 –> 00:34:04.800
Roddy: Is it a dead end or they have to go and start doing all sorts of APIs?
00:34:05.020 –> 00:34:08.840
Roddy: Should they just start off partnering with somebody and finding the right provider?
00:34:09.500 –> 00:34:10.760
Roddy: I’m throwing that out there.
00:34:11.040 –> 00:34:12.880
Roddy: Who wants to take that first?
00:34:13.380 –> 00:34:14.500
Roddy: Be honest.
00:34:14.500 –> 00:34:24.440
Roddy: Act like you’re a consultant for these ISOs who are considering to becoming ISVs, because I’m sitting in the audience listening to them and going, that might look good in 2026, like 18 months into it.
00:34:24.500 –> 00:34:27.800
Roddy: I just don’t know what this looks like five or 10 years down the road.
00:34:27.800 –> 00:34:30.700
Roddy: You’re really becoming a software provider.
00:34:30.800 –> 00:34:33.400
Roddy: That’s not something you do with your left hand.
00:34:33.400 –> 00:34:36.340
Roddy: So raise your hand if you want to take a crack at that one.
00:34:38.760 –> 00:34:40.600
Chau: All right, Travis, thank you.
00:34:40.600 –> 00:34:42.060
Wilczynski: I know Aidan, I saw your hand.
00:34:42.260 –> 00:34:43.740
Wilczynski: I like to get into, but go ahead.
00:34:43.740 –> 00:34:45.260
Roddy: All right, Travis, Aidan, then Don.
00:34:45.260 –> 00:34:46.300
Roddy: Yeah, Travis first.
00:34:47.340 –> 00:34:47.920
Chrisman: Awesome.
00:34:48.120 –> 00:34:53.440
Chrisman: Yeah, right now, we’re doing a lot of custom integrations.
00:34:53.540 –> 00:35:02.340
Chrisman: We’re building software, and we started in ISO, and four years ago, we started building software.
00:35:02.580 –> 00:35:04.440
Chrisman: So we are in that boat.
00:35:04.440 –> 00:35:08.060
Chrisman: It’s like, where do we draw the line?
00:35:08.280 –> 00:35:09.800
Chrisman: How much software do we build?
00:35:09.800 –> 00:35:11.740
Chrisman: Do we create boundaries around this?
00:35:13.140 –> 00:35:18.820
Chrisman: Right now, currently, a lot of it, we’re looking at accounts doing a million a month and up, and we’ll do custom stuff.
00:35:19.100 –> 00:35:24.520
Chrisman: But eventually, as you scale, there becomes that tipping point, where you’re all over the place.
00:35:25.720 –> 00:35:31.660
Chrisman: I think it’s important to define your path and have those boundaries, so you have a clear path.
00:35:31.660 –> 00:35:43.340
Chrisman: Because right now, it’s like we’ve created something for churches, we’ve created a custom one for flooring, we’ve created all these different softwares in all these different industries that we now have to support.
00:35:45.260 –> 00:35:46.060
Chrisman: It’s a lot.
00:35:46.060 –> 00:35:50.780
Chrisman: You need support, you need boarding, you need all these teams to support all the software we’re building.
00:35:52.220 –> 00:36:02.800
Chrisman: And so I think it’s important to get clear on your ICP, clear on your directives, clear on set boundaries, because if you’re not, you can go down all these number of holes.
00:36:03.740 –> 00:36:07.360
Chrisman: When we started, the first piece of software we built was called our Sign Up Link.
00:36:07.780 –> 00:36:15.020
Chrisman: We looked at Stripe and Square and we’re like, why is Stripe and Square scaling way faster than any other company in our space?
00:36:15.480 –> 00:36:20.880
Chrisman: And what they’ve done is they’ve made the user experience to onboarding to them very simple.
00:36:20.880 –> 00:36:24.660
Chrisman: So the first thing we developed was called our Sign Up Link, which is our onboarding platform.
00:36:24.660 –> 00:36:27.680
Chrisman: It connects to Plaid, it connects to Facebook, and Google, and all these things.
00:36:28.060 –> 00:36:33.540
Chrisman: We took a PDF application that has roughly 120 to 160 mapped fields.
00:36:33.740 –> 00:36:36.020
Chrisman: We boiled that down to 23 fields.
00:36:36.800 –> 00:36:42.580
Chrisman: It’s not as little as a PayFac like these, but it’s moving 5x in the right direction.
00:36:42.580 –> 00:36:47.220
Chrisman: And so we decided, hey, we’re going to enhance this customer experience and make it better.
00:36:47.480 –> 00:36:48.660
Chrisman: And so that was our journey.
00:36:48.660 –> 00:37:00.780
Chrisman: We started there, and from then we’ve developed stuff that’s been roughly about a million a month and up, because those merchants aren’t like, you’re not finding them on a daily basis.
00:37:00.780 –> 00:37:10.060
Chrisman: Well, sometimes it feels like we are these days, but it allows us to scale with some sort of a consistency and not too quickly.
00:37:10.780 –> 00:37:11.360
Roddy: Got it.
00:37:11.380 –> 00:37:12.000
Roddy: Thank you for that.
00:37:12.000 –> 00:37:16.360
Roddy: Yeah, you’re going to go the extra mile for those larger customers.
00:37:16.620 –> 00:37:20.360
Roddy: Aidan, what’s your take on this ISO to ISV transition?
00:37:20.520 –> 00:37:21.980
Roddy: What council would you give them?
00:37:22.660 –> 00:37:36.820
Chau: Yeah, I would say the calculus is not very clear, I think, to a lot of people, and even to us, especially given how fast the coding models have changed.
00:37:37.300 –> 00:37:52.760
Chau: But I think the one thing to throw out there is for us, when we evaluate what software we use internally versus building in-house, the number one thing we look at is the team building the software that we’re evaluating.
00:37:53.420 –> 00:37:54.820
Chau: Is this a fast-moving team?
00:37:55.640 –> 00:38:01.620
Chau: Can they build software faster than we can build software, especially in this area?
00:38:02.860 –> 00:38:09.560
Chau: The way I see it is most of us are in our companies because we have a specific competency.
00:38:10.680 –> 00:38:24.940
Chau: Trying to branch out too much and boil the ocean, is usually not the strongest idea, especially if you’re not entropic and with a trillion dollars in market capital around.
00:38:24.940 –> 00:38:27.460
Chau: Most of us are not entropic yet.
00:38:27.460 –> 00:38:28.020
Chau: Not yet.
00:38:28.020 –> 00:38:29.600
Chau: Most of us are not entropic yet.
00:38:31.980 –> 00:38:42.620
Chau: And so I think some of the examples Travis gave are pretty interesting in that these are relatively underserved markets with basically no products existing.
00:38:42.620 –> 00:38:47.120
Chau: And so at that point, obviously, if there’s no product, something is better than nothing.
00:38:47.120 –> 00:38:50.900
Chau: And so you should definitely give it a go.
00:38:50.900 –> 00:39:11.660
Chau: But for existing products that have a lot of edge cases or a lot of players in it, the reality of it is often someone who is focused on just making the best restaurant POS software ever is going to move a lot faster than someone who is trying to give a good payments experience and a good restaurant POS software experience.
00:39:11.800 –> 00:39:19.460
Chau: And so you should bet on your vendors, pick good ones to partner with for the long term because they’re in it as much as you are.
00:39:20.360 –> 00:39:23.980
Chau: And so yeah, that’s hopefully some interesting building.
00:39:24.500 –> 00:39:25.360
Roddy: Now, thanks Aidan.
00:39:25.360 –> 00:39:25.820
Roddy: Don?
00:39:27.360 –> 00:39:31.780
Wilczynski: As a small ISO, I look at it, it’s very nuanced.
00:39:32.820 –> 00:39:43.000
Wilczynski: The desire, the natural desire of an entrepreneur, once you solve something for someone or a business vertical, you feel like you can solve them all.
00:39:43.200 –> 00:39:52.640
Wilczynski: And so you’ve got to temper yourself and go, A, as that small company, we went, what industries do we really like?
00:39:53.300 –> 00:39:58.680
Wilczynski: What are things that we know and we like and we enjoy and that are fun to be around?
00:39:58.680 –> 00:40:03.080
Wilczynski: And the people in the industries just generally aligns well with our core values.
00:40:03.320 –> 00:40:05.160
Wilczynski: And let’s stick to that.
00:40:05.520 –> 00:40:08.420
Wilczynski: Let’s not get too wide, even though we could.
00:40:08.740 –> 00:40:18.240
Wilczynski: Let’s be very cautious so that we invest our money the right way to grow intelligently and be very, very specific in who we’re solving problems for.
00:40:18.300 –> 00:40:28.800
Wilczynski: So we can go deep into their stack and not just solve the superficial operational stuff, but let’s get them out of 10 different plugins that they use to run the business.
00:40:28.840 –> 00:40:34.320
Wilczynski: Let’s do one and get it really down to one, maybe two logins and that is it.
00:40:34.320 –> 00:40:38.040
Wilczynski: If we can get them there, we’ll own that particular vertical.
00:40:38.180 –> 00:40:42.400
Wilczynski: So I take the approach every day of, in fact, it’ll happen tomorrow.
00:40:42.440 –> 00:40:48.580
Wilczynski: When I pull the team meeting together, they’re gonna tell me about 10 new ideas and go, we chose these five for a reason.
00:40:48.780 –> 00:40:52.560
Wilczynski: Those look good, don’t go after that shiny gold over there.
00:40:52.940 –> 00:40:59.600
Wilczynski: It might be fool’s gold, it’ll take us as much money if not too much because none of us are experts in it.
00:40:59.820 –> 00:41:04.740
Wilczynski: We just heard there’s a problem and as problem solvers, we wanna go solve it.
00:41:04.940 –> 00:41:05.920
Wilczynski: We gotta temp ourselves.
00:41:05.920 –> 00:41:07.860
Wilczynski: So that’s the approach we’ve been taking.
00:41:07.860 –> 00:41:19.980
Wilczynski: Let’s be very, very specific on what we’re gonna build for, be very nuanced in what we’re doing and then do it incredibly well across all parts of what we’re going to serve and support for our clients.
00:41:20.200 –> 00:41:31.600
Wilczynski: And then when the next opportunity arises, because we’ve perfectly monetized and put ourselves in a position where somebody else comes along and go, wow, you really know XYZ industry?
00:41:32.060 –> 00:41:33.420
Wilczynski: What’s really the problem there?
00:41:33.420 –> 00:41:34.740
Wilczynski: And is it nuanced?
00:41:35.340 –> 00:41:39.300
Wilczynski: And can we get it and solve it deep, deep, deep core solve?
00:41:39.320 –> 00:41:41.460
Wilczynski: Great, then let’s invest in that then.
00:41:41.680 –> 00:41:43.760
Wilczynski: Otherwise, we’ve got enough on our plate.
00:41:44.600 –> 00:41:45.060
Roddy: Interesting.
00:41:45.060 –> 00:41:46.680
Chau: Yeah, go ahead, Travis.
00:41:47.240 –> 00:41:48.100
Chrisman: I want to add on that, too.
00:41:48.300 –> 00:41:49.200
Chrisman: You said verticals.
00:41:49.200 –> 00:41:53.260
Chrisman: So I had lunch with Rob Fox from NMI yesterday.
00:41:53.320 –> 00:41:59.580
Chrisman: And one of the things we were talking about, strategy and what NMI is doing, they’re big in ISV and VAR world.
00:42:01.220 –> 00:42:02.420
Chrisman: And they’re very focused.
00:42:02.420 –> 00:42:04.760
Chrisman: They choose five verticals, right?
00:42:04.760 –> 00:42:08.000
Chrisman: And they try to master those five verticals, right?
00:42:08.020 –> 00:42:12.040
Chrisman: And they just had their acquisition of Dualo for 2.75 billion, right?
00:42:12.040 –> 00:42:14.100
Chrisman: And so we were unpacking that, right?
00:42:15.300 –> 00:42:16.380
Chrisman: And it’s interesting, right?
00:42:16.380 –> 00:42:21.580
Chrisman: It’s interesting to see the vertical aspect and what’s that target market look like?
00:42:21.580 –> 00:42:25.300
Chrisman: And then how do you build around that and just staying focused on that?
00:42:25.300 –> 00:42:28.380
Chrisman: Because you can go down these rabbit holes, right?
00:42:28.380 –> 00:42:33.660
Chrisman: And I find myself personally like, oh, it’s like, OK, don’t get too far off, right?
00:42:33.760 –> 00:42:36.340
Chrisman: I told this story about the golf and the AI coach, right?
00:42:36.700 –> 00:42:41.720
Chrisman: And it’s like, we can go down these rabbit holes and like, just like that, there’s 2 million of revenue, right?
00:42:41.760 –> 00:42:44.440
Chrisman: And it’s like, and that took what, two weeks?
00:42:44.820 –> 00:42:49.960
Chrisman: And so where do you put the boundaries of just being able to generate 2 million of revenue in a couple of weeks, right?
00:42:49.960 –> 00:42:57.180
Chrisman: And Aidan mentioned this earlier, it’s tough because AI is unlocked so much, right?
00:42:57.180 –> 00:43:01.580
Chrisman: That the potential out there is wild and it’s really exciting for us.
00:43:01.580 –> 00:43:05.680
Chrisman: I think when I got into the industry, we were excited about chip cards, right?
00:43:05.680 –> 00:43:07.220
Chrisman: PCI 3.0 compliance.
00:43:07.540 –> 00:43:16.000
Chrisman: Right now, it’s like we’ve got ATMs, we’ve got FedNow, we’ve got all these, we’ve got all these different, we have AI, we have all these different things.
00:43:16.000 –> 00:43:17.860
Chrisman: So boundaries.
00:43:18.600 –> 00:43:21.500
Wilczynski: Yes, the boundaries back to there has to be an economic value.
00:43:21.500 –> 00:43:25.440
Wilczynski: If I’m going to spend 2 weeks, I’m giving up a lot of other things I could be doing.
00:43:25.580 –> 00:43:30.480
Wilczynski: But if it is just 2 weeks because you’ve perfected it, and that’s what I think people are going to find.
00:43:30.480 –> 00:43:41.260
Wilczynski: They’re going to perfect something and then realize that they can do something in one-tenth the time they used to be able to do it to get to what they just solved for because the framework is already there.
00:43:42.400 –> 00:43:46.480
Wilczynski: You’re starting with a new input, so it makes you able to scale faster.
00:43:46.480 –> 00:43:52.780
Wilczynski: But again, be cautious because you don’t necessarily know everything yet about that vertical you’re solving for.
00:43:53.540 –> 00:43:56.120
Wilczynski: But it is exciting.
00:43:56.380 –> 00:44:10.680
Wilczynski: For those that are creative, entrepreneurial and understand what the horse they’re riding and the capabilities of that horse, and you can bring another horse just like it into the stable, boy, does it get fun to have some internal discussions.
00:44:11.300 –> 00:44:11.640
Roddy: Yeah.
00:44:11.640 –> 00:44:14.680
Roddy: One man’s excitement is another man’s stomach ache.
00:44:14.740 –> 00:44:16.000
Chau: All right.
00:44:17.740 –> 00:44:23.240
Roddy: We only have time for one more question, and I’m going to skip my closing question because I want to dig a little bit deeper on this.
00:44:23.860 –> 00:44:27.580
Roddy: This just ties into, again, helping our members make decisions better.
00:44:27.640 –> 00:44:29.400
Roddy: Whoever wants to take a crack at this first.
00:44:29.640 –> 00:44:35.640
Roddy: It seems like you guys were talking about all the different factors that go into making the decision whether it’s build or buy.
00:44:35.980 –> 00:44:37.720
Roddy: But then there’s the partner element too.
00:44:37.720 –> 00:44:45.460
Roddy: The day after SCAA Quantic, who Travis and Don, I don’t know if you work with them, but I know Aidan, you have a partnership with Quantic.
00:44:45.640 –> 00:44:54.200
Roddy: They very much had, hey, here’s what we do from a baseline software standpoint, and we work with all these partners to build on top of what they do.
00:44:54.200 –> 00:44:57.220
Roddy: A brand new member of ours, Liquorbee, we met them there at the event.
00:44:57.220 –> 00:45:01.000
Roddy: They built a liquor solution on top of it as opposed to going from the ground up.
00:45:01.000 –> 00:45:03.760
Roddy: So who wants to weigh in on that aspect of it?
00:45:03.760 –> 00:45:14.660
Roddy: Or is it just hugely important if you’re a solution provider to know the whole landscape, to know my team and then what’s out there, then you make a better decision whether it’s building, buying, or partnering?
00:45:14.660 –> 00:45:20.820
Roddy: Who wants to talk about that, about working with somebody who white labels and you can go and build upon it in those decisions?
00:45:21.140 –> 00:45:22.160
Roddy: Who wants to weigh in first?
00:45:22.880 –> 00:45:24.140
Wilczynski: I’ll jump in really quick.
00:45:24.180 –> 00:45:35.640
Wilczynski: I mean, when we built the Marina Aviation and Tooltruck software because we had expertise within our organization to do it.
00:45:36.380 –> 00:45:41.340
Wilczynski: However, assisted living property management, we didn’t know anything about.
00:45:42.500 –> 00:45:48.000
Wilczynski: But a partner came along that happened to have deep experience, but they didn’t have a distribution channel.
00:45:48.000 –> 00:45:50.520
Wilczynski: They were lacking something that we had.
00:45:50.920 –> 00:46:07.260
Wilczynski: So at the end of the day, we made a strategic partnership decision with somebody that could really build it out more robust, make it scalable and easier for me to sell into the mid-market to small enterprise level that we were able to partner with.
00:46:07.260 –> 00:46:17.920
Wilczynski: So to me, again, it gets down to a strategic business decision to make sure we’re not going to cross paths, we’re not going to conflict with each other’s business cases, we’re not looking to acquire each other.
00:46:18.180 –> 00:46:30.220
Wilczynski: So as long as you can find the right things that check the boxes to keep your business unit thriving and growing in a new vertical, that’s when at least I choose to partner at Tried & True, we go that route.
00:46:30.700 –> 00:46:31.220
Roddy: Interesting.
00:46:31.220 –> 00:46:31.580
Roddy: Thank you.
00:46:31.580 –> 00:46:36.260
Roddy: Don, Aidan, if you want to weigh in on this, again, the partnering thing and then Travis will give you the last word.
00:46:36.580 –> 00:46:37.520
Chau: Yeah.
00:46:37.520 –> 00:46:38.740
Chau: Happy to weigh in here.
00:46:40.180 –> 00:46:45.220
Chau: It’s a very good question and one we actually run into a lot with a lot of the POS partners that we work with.
00:46:45.380 –> 00:46:48.980
Chau: So we’re voice AI specialists, we go voice agents for restaurants.
00:46:50.740 –> 00:46:57.300
Chau: If you’re a POS company, you look at voice agents, especially as a restaurant POS company, you look at it as this very hot market.
00:46:57.580 –> 00:47:00.740
Chau: Actually, we’ve seen a lot of players try and build voice agents.
00:47:00.880 –> 00:47:01.840
Chau: A lot.
00:47:02.240 –> 00:47:05.820
Roddy: Every trade show I go to, I’m like, so how are you guys different from the other person?
00:47:05.820 –> 00:47:07.500
Roddy: They don’t have a great answer necessarily.
00:47:08.140 –> 00:47:08.740
Chau: Exactly.
00:47:08.820 –> 00:47:20.300
Chau: What we really see is that people will try, but going back to some of the earlier comments that were made in this podcast, it’s really hard to do everything well.
00:47:21.480 –> 00:47:35.240
Chau: What we’ve seen is POS companies really come to us to partner with us and white label even our technology to serve their merchants, because they realize that, hey, these guys are Voicii specialists.
00:47:35.240 –> 00:47:42.400
Chau: They did this one thing really well and they stick to their way, and we know that we can offer our customers a very great experience.
00:47:42.460 –> 00:47:49.080
Chau: Today, we have over 30 POSs that are actively integrated, partnered and also reselling our platform.
00:47:49.080 –> 00:48:02.280
Chau: We actually had so much interest that we launched a developer API relatively recently to support even more POS companies to integrate with our voice agents and so that they can offer voice agents to their end customers.
00:48:03.720 –> 00:48:10.360
Chau: Hopefully, that’s some interesting context for any listeners out there who are thinking about this.
00:48:11.160 –> 00:48:28.860
Chau: This goes back to that build-buy, partner, build-in-house decision and from what we’ve seen is a lot of customers coming to us with POS complaints and we have great POS partners that are able to help us there rather than us trying to build the POS side of things and vice versa.
00:48:29.800 –> 00:48:30.240
Roddy: Excellent.
00:48:30.240 –> 00:48:30.760
Roddy: Thank you, Aidan.
00:48:30.760 –> 00:48:34.100
Roddy: Travis, I’ll give you the last word on AI payments and partnering.
00:48:35.860 –> 00:48:42.000
Chrisman: So the partner aspects, we’re rolling out, there’s quite a few examples I can give here, but we’ll use the banking.
00:48:42.000 –> 00:48:47.040
Chrisman: We’re rolling out a banking product, and part of banking is who’s going to be the program manager.
00:48:47.340 –> 00:48:58.000
Chrisman: Banking is a brand new product for us, and so instead of us being the program manager, we’re relying on the bank to be the program manager for this, and that goes back to the partner.
00:48:58.820 –> 00:49:13.540
Chrisman: I like the crawl, walk, run approach is you start small, whether that’s a white label, whether that’s whatever the product is, and just crawl first, crawl before you walk, get comfortable, get to know the product.
00:49:14.260 –> 00:49:16.720
Chrisman: There’s no point in trying to do everything from day one.
00:49:16.920 –> 00:49:20.920
Chrisman: You can do that, just understand it’s going to be time consuming and it can be expensive.
00:49:21.560 –> 00:49:35.100
Chrisman: And so I would just weigh out the pros and the cons of what is the product, what are the pros and cons of what does this look like, and just do the research ahead of time versus half way through the project and be like, oh, we didn’t account for this or we didn’t think for this.
00:49:35.340 –> 00:49:47.120
Chrisman: But this beautiful topic about AI, you can just prompt AI and it’ll tell you, hey, we’re trying to do this, we’re looking at doing this, here’s, give us the pros and cons of it, what do you think?
00:49:47.260 –> 00:49:51.320
Chrisman: And AI will give you within seconds stuff that you didn’t think about right away.
00:49:51.500 –> 00:49:56.560
Chrisman: Or typically you have to go out there and hire a consultant to bring in to do this, and you have that at your fingertips.
00:49:56.620 –> 00:50:01.000
Chrisman: So, we can use AI to help us move in that direction.
00:50:02.400 –> 00:50:03.320
Roddy: Excellent, very good.
00:50:03.320 –> 00:50:05.820
Roddy: Well, that does it for this episode of The Trusted Advisor.
00:50:05.900 –> 00:50:13.020
Roddy: If you enjoyed our discussion, be sure to subscribe to the RSPA YouTube channel and The Trusted Advisor podcast, so you never miss an episode.
00:50:13.060 –> 00:50:19.240
Roddy: Before we go, big thanks again to Travis Chrisman, Don Wilczynski and Aidan Chau for sharing their wisdom with us today.
00:50:19.420 –> 00:50:27.580
Roddy: Thanks also to RSPA Marketing Director, Chris Arnold for his production work, Joseph McDade for our music, and last but not least, thanks so much to you for listening.
00:50:27.640 –> 00:50:34.740
Roddy: Our goal at the RSPA is to accelerate the success of our members in the retail technology ecosystem by providing knowledge and connections.
00:50:34.740 –> 00:50:38.500
Roddy: For more information, please visit our website at gorspa.org.
00:50:38.540 –> 00:50:42.060
Roddy: Thanks for listening and goodbye everybody.
