If someone that thinks of you as mentor, asked you the question, "Should I start a payroll company?" what would you say to them these days?
Yeah. I think that there's a huge opportunity
and it's so much different than it was
when I started 15, 20 years ago, right?
back in the day, if you wanted to start a payroll company, everybody would say it was like a $2 million investment, because you couldn't halfway start a payroll company. Like if gonna create banking relationships, you were gonna start paying tax, like paying taxes for people, you know, all of those kind of things.
You couldn't do it halfway. You had to be all in. And not that you can do it halfway now, but you can do it with a lot less risk now.
if you wanted to just start with the idea of sales and support, there's opportunities to do that now where there wasn't 10 years ago. So I think is an excellent time to dip your toe in and, and start this business 'cause you can do it a with a lot less risk.
Yeah. And I am, I'm very curious about that. Before we go down that rabbit hole, I have to ask, how did payroll as an industry end up being a part of your life in the first place? Like, how did you end up sitting in this chair?
Yeah. That's a really interesting story. Um, so when I graduated high school, college wasn't in the cards for me, for a variety of reasons which we don't need to go into. So I got a job at a credit card processing company.
And my dad to this day says it's the best job I ever had. I would also call it the worst job I ever had.
we had these computer monitors, and our cubicles were about four inches on either side bigger than the computer monitor.
And it was cubicle hell. And I to myself, like, "I can't do this anymore."
I was killing the stats, 'cause if you give me stats, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kill 'em. But, so I went out looking for a job that was anything other than that. And I ended up at a job fair talking to somebody from Paychex. I was 19 years old, and I remember saying, he said, "It's a customer service job." I said, "I'm good with that, but can I, like, get up and go to the fax machine every so often?
Like, is there meetings I have to go to?" 'Cause it was the being tied to the phone for the, for eight hours solid that I, like, couldn't handle. Um, he said yes, so I went ahead and, and applied for that job. Went in and they gave me a math test,
Yeah
I aced that math test, right? They gave me a math test with 20 questions, 10 minutes to do it, and said, "Nobody ever finishes it. Don't worry. We worry about accuracy, not, you know, not how many you get done." I walked back out to the receptionist six minutes later, and she's like, "Oh, do you have a problem?" And I was "No, I'm just done." She's like, "We've never had anybody finish the math test." And I'm "Oh, well, here you go."
That's excellent.
100% on this math test." Because I was, again, eight months out of high school math.
so I started Paychex when I was 19 as a payroll specialist with every intention of retiring there after 30 years. worked my way up, moved around with Paychex quite a bit.
And then we had our first kiddo, and we realized that we wanted to kind of move back to Washington.
and that's how I was a payroll specialist when I was 29, just like I was when I was 19, 'cause the only job they had open when we moved back to Washington was a payroll specialist job.
Yeah.
Turns out I sucked just as at being a payroll specialist at 29 as I did when I was 19. Um, and did that for about a year, but realized that, uh, if I wasn't gonna continue to move around, I wasn't gonna be able to continue to grow my career at Paychex.
And so I started looking
Hmm
and landed at Pay NW, uh, at the end of 2010.
at that time, we had 95 clients on ExecuPay and five clients on SAS HR. And,
my first job was to figure out how to file year-end for those five clients that were on SAS 'cause nobody knew. And
no.
it was in that moment that I realized that, like, Pay Northwest did everything in that little office that Paychex did with thousands of people, right? Like, we still had people filing 941s. We still had people sending ACH files. And so it was a really amazing opportunity for me to take everything that I had learned in my career at Paychex and translate it into the operational side of, uh, Pay Northwest.
Yeah
and here we are, 16 years later, and we're just under 13 million in annual revenue, about 46 employees, and it's just been hard work and grit over these last 16 years, um, to kind of get us where, where we're at. Turns out that change from ExecuPay to SAS HR, which became Kronos, which became UKG, was the best that we could have done.
And you know, now, since I became CEO five years ago, I spend all, much more of my time out in the community and thinking strategically than I do on the business.
Yeah
I've really built a team that can kind of handle that piece. And so I spend my time outward. I spend my time on the MTL committee. I spend my time with IPPA leadership, uh, that kind of stuff. UKG advisory boards, that kind of thing, really lending my voice to the industry more than just focusing on Pay NW at the moment.
Yeah.
said, like, you went from Paychex to Pay NW, but,
Mm-hmm
how did that happen? Like, what was the transition? Like, how do you find a regional payroll company like Pay NW unless they just happen to be, like, the big one in your area, and they, they weren't that big when you found them, right?
No, they
a part their growth
tiny. They were tiny. You know,
there's a lot of fate involved in, in all of this, right? But, um, the technical answer to your question is through a recruiter. So I had gone to a
Right
connected me with Mike Anderson, who was the founder of,
Pay NW.
And that's certainly a way. Or reach out to any of your independents, right? Look at the IPPA website. Uh, just search for independent payroll providers. Us independent payroll providers are constantly looking for people who know payroll but want to,
deliver a different experience than the nationals do. Like, that
Yeah
our bread and butter. So if you're just looking to, to stay in this industry, but to do it in a more,
more service-oriented, more, uh, impactful way, then just write up a, a letter as to what you're looking for and send it to the CEOs of independents out there, because that's who we're looking for every day. I wouldn't necessarily just wait for there to be an opening.
Yeah
And the thing is, is this day and age, most of us have remote employees, so it doesn't even have to be somebody that's just in your neighborhood, right? Look at the IPPA or TPG's LinkedIn page and what companies are out there.
and see what resonates with you.
I mean, this is something that I think I've talked about a lot with other people that are in the entrepreneurship business world, this idea of you don't have to be the biggest in order to have a, a corner of the world that can
Yeah
I didn't realize when I started down the path of becoming a payroll entrepreneur, that there was so much camaraderie between the payroll companies.
Mm-hmm.
the first thing I did that got me down this path was I called someone who owned a payroll company, just called the front desk and was like, "Can I talk to the owner?"
Yeah.
'Cause I was a sales rep, so I was comfortable making that phone call. And it was, um, I think it was actually Danny Klein, 'cause I knew who he was, over at,
Yeah.
Like, yeah, he just answered the phone
Yeah
just gave me advice. And he was like, "You don't wanna do this. You wanna do that." And what I've found over the last, oh, geez, I don't even wanna name it, however many years it's been that I've been doing this now, it just feels like the one thing that's a constant surprise is how many people I reach out to and their response is, "Let me help you," for no reason.
100%.
when you had to make that migration, like, who was your mentor at that point? Like, who did you turn to in your life and say, "Should I do this?"
Yeah. So I feel very strongly about peer groups. And so even since before I was CEO, I was part of a Vistage group here locally in Seattle. Uh, in 2020, I joined a peer group of just service bureau leaders, so we meet once a quarter. And then in 2022, I actually created a company called Barker's Leadership Development that does peer groups in this space.
So I had a lot of peers. And, and the reason that I'm so passionate about peer groups is because I went straight from high school Paychex. I learned everything I know about this industry from folks at Paychex. So Cindy, uh,
Cindy McLaughlin is her, her name now,
was a huge mentor to me at Paychex, and really just soaked up as much information from her, as I could. So there's a lot of people, um, that kinda helped me along the way, but the biggest thing actually that helped me transition from that operations to more leadership was taking a sabbatical in 2018.
So in 2018, I took my very first sabbatical. The blog today is about that. But the magic there as it relates to, um, switching to leadership is because I had been customer service manager,
director of operations, COO, like I had had all these titles across the time, and at that time my title was COO.
But because I had been there since, since we were so small, there was still a lot of things that I did that if I would have left and they hired a new COO, that new COO would never have done. So I think one of the biggest things for transition was that I had to give all of my tasks to somebody 'cause I was gonna be gone for eight weeks.
Yeah.
And when I came back, I only took back the tasks that a brand new COO off the street would've done.
Hmm.
If you wouldn't have given this thing to a brand new COO off the street who has lots of COO experience, then I'm not taking it back. And so you can do that through a sabbatical, or you can do it through something like a time study, right?
Spend a week writing down every task you do, and then at the end of that time, share that with your leadership team and say, "What on this list can/should you guys be doing instead of me?" And you'll probably find that they are annoyed that you're doing it just as much as you're annoyed that you're Like they want it.
you're hitting the nail on the head in the sense that
whoever is the initial founder of the
Mm-hmm
is gotta, they gotta know how to do everything. And
Yep
the reality is, is there can't be 800 Lori Browns. There can't be 800 John Mason Smiths. Like if you wanna get
You there
what one person can do... Oh my God.
It'd really obnoxious.
Um, I know. But, you know, at some point you have to say, "I'm gonna take, um, something that's 90% as good if it's done by somebody
Yeah
just know that it's worth the ROI of having that time back for me."
Yeah.
And, um, I struggle with that every day. Like, I still, like I I if you let me, I would do every single thing at my company from start to finish, not because I'm the best at it, but because, I mean, as a owner, I care most, right? It's
Yeah
that's where my passion is. So
Going back to that moment when you were switching from being COO to president, was there a conversation you had with someone in your life where you were like, "Hey, I'm on the fence about this," or was it like an instant yes, or what was that, what was that moment like for you?
Well, I was lucky enough to have been building towards this for years because Mike Anderson, the
Yeah
we had identified two or three years before he retired and I stepped in as CEO that that was the path we were going on. So we had been kind of working through that. I had been pretty much making all of the decisions for the last three or four years, um, just in practice.
And then in the last six months specifically, it was really important for me, for us to sit down and put on paper what the job description looked like,
Because I had learned through the, you know, COO example where I was COO in title, but I was still doing a lot of the day-to-day stuff that I shouldn't have been, and I knew I couldn't just take a sabbatical as soon as I became a CEO. So instead what we did is we took the lessons that we learned from the COO experience, and we wrote down the exact things that I would be doing as CEO, and therefore the exact things that I needed to get rid of off my plate, um, because we didn't replace that COO role.
But then it was also really important to understand, 'cause Mike retired, but he's maintained, you know, the majority ownership, and so it was also really important to identify what he was gonna do in his new role. Uh, we call him a chairman of the board of one. Um, in his role, what was important?
What was important for me to share with him, and what were things that he didn't need to know? right? Because I can't be asking him or making him aware of every leadership decision I make, but there are things that he was at that point still wanting to be kept in the loop on.
So we made job description for him and a job description for me, and just became really clear about what we were expecting, and then sharing it with the team, right? Sharing it with your leadership team so they understand why you're passing some of these things onto them,
reports
I wonder how much of that is, uh, Lori's ADHD saying, "I need to be checking things off-"
1,000%
down a list."
And, and, and I was diagnosed with ADHD three months after I became CEO. So that was all kind of at that time, and I think that's a big piece of why I was diagnosed, is because I was really struggling with that transition. Not... I mean, not really struggling with it outwardly, but inside, internally, I was
Yeah
that transition to CEO and recognizing, like, what is it that I'm supposed to be doing, and is what I'm doing the right thing? And, know, it wasn't as easily identifiable as the right thing. And then I didn't feel productive, even though everything that I was doing, I mean, we'd gone from 8 million to 13 million in that five years.
So clearly everything that I was
Not bad
was pointing us in the right direction, but I, I needed to give myself grace that it, it wasn't gonna produce results in the same way that it
had operationally.
Well, and, and something, um, that's bouncing around in my head hearing you reflect on this is one of the best things I've done for my business in the last, I'd say, six months or so, has been forcing myself to take executive lunches with my wife 'cause we
Mm-hmm
company together, where we, um, you know, at least once a week we try to go out to somewhere that's not our house. Just Even if it's
Yeah
we're gonna go pick up food and sit by a pond or something. And the point is to disengage from the operations and try to zoom out for a little bit. And I, I didn't realize how much value that had because as a former salesperson, like, being on sales calls and, like, being on Like, the, the measuring stick I was using for am I doing the right thing with my time as a salesperson was am I in front of people trying to get them to, like, give us revenue?
that, that was the thing that was my measuring stick. And that that measuring stick has to
Yes
when you pivot. And it, you know... And by the way, I think everybody in the payroll founding world seems to come from either an operational back end or a sales back end.
Yeah.
And so I imagine it's a lot of the same thing, where you come from that operational back end and it's like this checklist was the way I measured success. And now it's totally different.
Yeah, 100%. And understanding what drives you and what motivates you, right?
Yeah.
So success is really important to me.
I had to understand that feeling successful was, is really important to me, and that success previously looked like a completed checklist or a completed product or project or
this revenue line growing because I had talked to these clients. Whereas as a CEO and as a leader, success looks like low turnover, both client and employee. And that doesn't get
No
day-by-day basis. It gets measured over time. High client and employee engagement. Yes, good results at the top line and the bottom line of the financials, but you know, that isn't something that you sit there today and say, "How am I driving?" Like, I can't look back on yesterday and say, "What did I do yesterday to drive top line and bottom line results for PayFW?" It's It's a much bigger scale.
So you have to redefine for yourself what success looks like.
So, you know, one of the things that is really fascinating about your journey from my perspective is how much of it was built on relationships, right?
Oh, yeah, 100%.
Like, I mean, you must have had an amazing relationship with this guy that you met and started a job with, and then next thing you know, he's like, "I need you run my company." Like, that, that doesn't happen overnight.
You know, people always say, "It's not what you know, it's who you know."
How much do you attribute to your journey to just being really good at being friends with people?
Um, I wouldn't necessarily say it's the, it's being friends with people, but I think it's a
Yeah
of, um, manifestation and hard work, right?
Mm-hmm
Mike and I came together in 2010 and started to build this thing. We had the perfect combination of the experience that I had from Paychex and the capital and the idea for the company that he had, and we were able to make that work.
But it, was a lot of hard work, right? Like, I tell people all the you need to manifest what you want. I think the energy, I've already said it here, the energy that you put out is the energy you get in. So when you're driving home from work or when you're in the shower, I want people, I coach people all the time to be thinking about what, like, two years from now looks like.
Not how am I gonna get there, but, like, what does two years from now look like?
if you start thinking about that, the opportunities to get there will, will come up. And it's not that it's gonna get dropped in your lap. If you're trying to manifest a million dollars. You're not gonna open your front door one day and see a million dollars on your porch.
you might walk into a conference and talk to somebody who's telling you about this thing that they just started, that if you implement it, it can add a million dollars to top line revenue, right? Like, that's, I believe, how the manifestation works. And so you have to be willing to work, you have to have a lot of grit, and relationships help.
Um, but like I didn't know anybody. I had worked at Paychex for 11 years. I just happened upon Mike Anderson, who was introduced to me from a recruiter, and it really worked well. Even when I became CEO, I mean, when I became CEO, when I went to my first UKG conference, the only thing anybody said to me is, "Where's Mike?" Nobody knew who I
Yeah.
in 2021, right? They're "Oh, where's Mike? Why is Mike not here?" Right? People that
Hmm
literally had met for eight years, 'cause I'd been going to this conference for eight years, didn't know who I was.
And when I became CEO, I,
I set a goal with my husband that I was gonna be in every room. And so I put myself out there. I took the speaking gigs. I joined IPPA, I joined the board of IPPA, I started, I started working with this peer group, YPG, and I really started to put myself out there, uh, intentionally.
I very
Yeah
set this quest to be in every room and to give as much as I could, to
Hmm
for my experience. And I mean, at that point I had grown a company from half a million to eight million, so I had that credibility kind of under my belt, and there was a lot of people that, that, you know, were willing to ask and, and I was able to help.
But it, it starts with giving. You can't start that journey and expect to just with the goal... My goal was never to become one of the most influential people in our industry. My
Yeah
was to learn as much as I could and to be in every room and be in every conversation.
You know, you mentioned earlier that you, like, manifest things in your life. Like that's the
Mm-hmm
approach the world. But if you had no idea that you were eventually gonna be president, like how long before that transition happened were you manifesting that? Or
was it brought to you unexpectedly as a result of just being in the room?
Yeah. So I didn't manifest being president of, of IPPA per se.
Like I want to industry. I wanna be in every room. And then the opportunities to do that kind of, you know, appear.
and I have to do the hard work to maximize those opportunities. But I am constantly looking ahead. I am very rarely looking behind. That is 90% of the time a good thing.
If
your reputation precedes you to a degree, 'cause like every time I talk to anybody and your name comes up, they're like, "Oh, she's that rock star that grew that company from like this tiny thing to this big national thing."
Yeah.
And the question that I've had people ask me directly, and I'll, I'll ask you, is simply like, "What did you do? How did you do it? How come all these other people couldn't do that-" And you were able to do what you did with Pay & W. Like, was there something that you can point to that was like ostensibly different than what other people in the industry are doing?
So I think one step at a time is
Yeah
the I think when I first started, uh, we had 22 employees, and we were losing money. My first goal was simply to be, make money. That was it. I didn't, I didn't start on day one thinking I wanted to be a $10 million or a $13 million shop. I just wanted to start making money.
So just setting the next goal,
not the forever goal, but the next step, and putting all of your energy into getting to there and then taking the next step, right? So I think a measured approach is really key. Don't try to do too much at one time, um, and just, and, and give as much as you can to your community and the industry, and you will get it, you will get it back.
Are there turns at any point that you made where you thought, "Ugh, I wish I hadn't done that"? Like, what would if you could go rewind time, are there any parts of this where it's like, "Okay, I took a left and I should have taken a right"?
I mean, I don't want this to sound like I've never made a bad move, because I certainly have.
Yeah
one of the things that might be the answer to the question, like, what is it that I do or how is it that I did this, is regret is not an emotion that I feel.
Hmm.
Um, because I just don't waste any energy on regret. I honestly, like, that might sound callous, but if, if I've made a mistake, I fix it. I make amends to the people that I've hurt, if I've hurt people, and then I move on, and I don't worry about that anymore.
Hmm
They ask me that question all the time, too, is like, "How did you do that?" And I spent a lot of time trying to teach people how I do it, and then I realized that I have ADHD, and so I was trying to teach people to, to have their brains work in a way that it can't.
Like,
Yeah
you
I started having ADHD. Look
is a big piece of why I was able to do this. Like, I was able to focus on different things along the way that other people wouldn't have spent that many hours on. Like, they just have spent that many hours on it. So, um, I wish there was like a secret, a secret bullet that I could just say, "This is what it is." But, you know, it was surrounding myself with the right people.
It was setting one goal at a time and, and hitting it. You know, I mean, in '24, we lost a million and a half dollars of business. And they were all clients that had been with us for over seven or eight years, and so we realized at that moment that we we'd kind of taken advantage of those clients.
We hadn't spent enough time really digging in and letting them know how much the system had updated and that kind of stuff. Um, so yeah. Is that a regret? Sure. I would have loved to have, you know, gone back to that point and spent that time, uh, educating those clients and preventing some of those losses.
but there's no reason for me to worry about that now, right? It's just like fix that going forward. So we, we did. We fixed our communication to clients, and we changed the cadence in which we have. So as long as you learn from and pivot from mistakes, then it's not anything to, to worry about, I don't think.
But overall, one step at a time, get there, always be thinking about the future, don't worry about the past, um, and just do the slow march. The slow march is gonna get you there a lot faster than, than a run.
one thing that I feel like you've been exceptionally good at, and, and I don't know if you would agree with me on this, but I, I feel like you're very good at not just being in the room, but when you leave the room, people were glad you were there, you know?
I don't see people saying, "Oh, Lori was there, and she did X." No. People are just like, "Wow, that was valuable. I'm glad, you know, that she was there in that conversation."
so anything else, uh, that you wanna plug, by the way? I know we're coming up on our time. I don't wanna keep you too long.
So I have a blog coming out. Well, I mean, I have a blog. I have a series coming out on July 9th about ADHD, and I'm super excited about it. It's a six blog series. Uh, a little bit of a preview of to a book I'll be writing at some point when, you know, life
calms down a bit, if that's gonna ever happen.
Does it ever do that? I'm just
who's the audience you're imagining for the book? I'm just curious if you have, like, a vision in your mind of who that's gonna be.
Um, I think it can be most impactful, that series can be most impactful for humans that were born between, like, 75 and 95.
Yeah.
And the reason that I say that is because
I was born in '80, right?
And in those decades, if you could sit in a chair for two hours, you didn't have ADHD. And nobody paid attention to or asked the question of what was going on in these humans' brains when they were sitting in that chair for two hours. So I have always been able to sit in a chair for two hours without a problem, but I focus on what's in front of me, right?
My brain is going a million miles an hour, and so I'm getting bad grades. I'm perceived as being dumb because I'm not passing classes,
And the reality was I just wasn't focusing. And furthermore, if you couldn't sit in a chair for two hours and your parents gave you ADHD medicine, they were deemed bad parents, and they were deemed
Yeah
just not being able to control their kid.
Like, that was
Yeah
the societal expectation. And so while I think this blog series and the book mainly points at females, because that just tends to be kind of a female thing, I hope that everybody reads it and pays attention to it because
so many people were underdiagnosed. And I don't know for a that it was just females, but even if you're married to somebody or you're in a business relationship with somebody who might be struggling with some of these kind of things, it, it very well could be because they were, they're non-diagnosed, right?
And it's one of those that the more people that I talk to, the more I realize that I can really have an impact on, on folks because people think of it as a challenge. I think of it as a superpower.
Yeah
it's not something to be ashamed of. I mean, every entrepreneur out there has ADHD.
People think of it as inability to focus, but that is a false narrative. It's really the ability to focus with every fiber of your being on what your brain deems is worthy.
Yeah. The, the number of side quests my ADHD has brought me down,
Yeah
is shameful. So Marie and I were talking about this yesterday and it's just like, "Hey, how come you work till 7:00?" And it's like, "Oh, 'cause I went down this rabbit hole and was doing something that was technically work but, like, wasn't important." But to in that moment it became important, you know?
And you just a word that I think is the most important and really summarizes why I wrote this blog is that shame word, right?
Yeah.
Because I felt shame that I couldn't get good grades. I felt shame that I couldn't spell. I felt shame that I wasn't getting projects done even though I was hyper-focused in doing these things really well. The things that I wasn't interested in, I just couldn't do. And that brought shame.
And I think shame is the, is one of the worst emotions and 'cause shame is an emotion that is,
is always self-inflicted, right?
And so if I could just eliminate and give people grace to not shame themselves, that would be the, the biggest win. Because I just think that there's no place for that. Like, we all do things because we do them.
Yeah.
Um, but removing shame
from your internal dialogue is really big for me, and something that I really hope happens through the reading of these, this six blog series.
because I think so much, I believe so wholeheartedly in manifestation, and the energy that you put out into the world is what you get back. And if you are shaming yourself and that is the energy that you're putting out,
Hmm
you're gonna get that back, and that's not fair to you or anybody.
Yeah.
So try to eliminate that word from your vocabulary.
I really like that. Well, and I mean, this is something that has been a recent thing in my life too, because, like, I didn't, um, have an official diagnosis until, like, what, about a year ago at this point. And it's been really helpful to have kind of a context for when I when I get dragged down the side quest of ADHD rabbit holes, it's like, oh, I I...
It's not an excuse, but it's understanding of, like, this is why my brain is doing this.
Yeah
you know, you can interrupt that pattern. So I'm excited to read the post. And you mentioned... Did you say something about, like, are you on Instagram?
Yeah. So completely separate from this.
Oh.
Um, right? Because ADHD. Uh, I also started an Instagram page called Traveling with Lori, right? So we have
Oh
Lori is the blog. We have Traveling with Lori is the Instagram page. I have another Instagram page called Quilting with Lori. So I'm doing this whole, with Lori thing. But specifically, Traveling with Lori is a brand new Instagram page that
is really all about traveling hacks, my adventures.
So I just think there's a lot of stuff like that that I'm doing that, um, can inspire other people to do things, uh, a little bit differently.
What's the handle?
Uh, Traveling with Lori. So traveling_with_lori on Instagram.
Okay. I'm gonna follow you immediately after
Yeah
with all my accounts.
I would appreciate that.
you always do.
