JMS / John Mason-Smith (00:00)
If someone asked you today, Hey, Jeff, I'm thinking about quitting my job and starting a payroll company, what generally would you tell them? Is that a good idea? Is that a bad idea? And be honest, you can tell them it's a rough idea.
Jeff Plakans (00:10)
I would tell
it's a great idea. What's your value
JMS / John Mason-Smith (00:13)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (00:13)
proposition? And if the answer is weak, I'd say go think about it some more.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (00:35)
I know you on paper and like obviously we've worked together over the years, but like who is how do you describe yourself, Jeff?
Jeff Plakans (00:41)
Hmm. I consider myself a bit of an organizer. And I don't mean like an integrator in like the the EOS form of organizer, but I like to create things. I like to put them together. I like to put things in order. And you know, I don't know, maybe it's like mad like issues that I have with hey, everything has to be in order.
but for me, like that's the most important thing. So as an entrepreneur, and that's me first, an entrepreneur, is I'm an entrepreneur because nothing's ever set up to my satisfaction. That's also there's other words for that. It's control freak. Right.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (01:23)
Ha ha ha.
Jeff Plakans (01:24)
Right. and all of those things absolutely apply, but you know, for me, like that's where my
That's where the pleasure I derive from being in business is from like building things and then seeing them work or looking at things that don't work and trying to fix them. Like you haven't done here, but
JMS / John Mason-Smith (01:44)
You it's funny, we like I haven't done here, it was IT issues.
But you know, one of the things I've noticed is that I think a lot of the people I've met that become entrepreneurs tend to be bad employees. I I don't know if were you a good employee though? Like
Jeff Plakans (01:57)
Well, so yes,
no no question. unemployable is the word that I would use and have used
JMS / John Mason-Smith (02:02)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (02:03)
in many a conversation. So in fact, I've already been involved in the sale of a payroll company that my family and I owned. And I was in my mid thirties when that happened. And I had talked myself into the notion of
The fact that I could work for other people and be happy doing it. During the 11 months that I did, I was the most miserable prick on the earth. And my wife will stand as the primary witness to that. So when that was over, I couldn't have been happier and literally spent the next three months planning what now is Commonwealth payroll in HR.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (02:42)
So what what made you miserable about being an employee?
Jeff Plakans (02:45)
if you see a direction or a choice that gets made and you don't agree with it and you can see three or four or five, six or ten moves down the road, like what the impact of that is going to be. well, obviously you have choice. And some people say, good team players will just s sit by and let that happen. But
If you know the outcome's gonna be a mess, why would you sit by and let that happen? If that's politically unpopular, which in a lot of corporations today that is, then you speak up at high risk.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (03:19)
So like for you
Were you more onto the like I see problems and I want to be able to fix them as a leader, or I want
Jeff Plakans (03:26)
Well
JMS / John Mason-Smith (03:26)
to just do things the way I want to do
Jeff Plakans (03:28)
I have a this particular industry, I have a particular vision for what it is, what it could be, what it should be. And not everyone shares that vision. And you can see that when you look at the distinct differences between my company and many other companies that exist, large or small, in our industry. it's been my habit.
attitude that when everyone zigs, we zag. And like
JMS / John Mason-Smith (03:57)
Can you give me
w you y you gotta give me examples. You can't just be vague about this,
Jeff Plakans (04:01)
so in Massachusetts.
years ago, Massachusetts was one of the first states in the nation to require employers to provide health insurance for all their employees. if an employee waived the requirement.
Then they had to fill out a form that says, this is my waiver, you know, and that's not unusual. But then an employer has to
JMS / John Mason-Smith (04:20)
Yeah, I I was offered it and I said no.
Jeff Plakans (04:23)
right. So then an employer would have to offer and fill out what's called a herd form that talks about the plans that they offer and who partook and who didn't partake. And again, this is all pre-ACA. And every national payroll company in our market said.
No, we're not going to do that for you. No, we're not going to fill that out. You're on your own. I looked at it and I said, great revenue opportunity, great administrative problem solve for clients who are like, I don't know what this is. So we just built a process to do it,
Just because the opportunity was there. lo and behold, a year or two later, everybody was saying, yeah, sure, we'll do it.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (05:08)
Well, you know what I'm hearing is like you looked at that.
Jeff Plakans (05:09)
Not that I'm a trendsetter, I'm just, you know.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (05:11)
I mean, first of all, you very much are a translator. But yeah, but what I'm saying is I think you looked at it as an entrepreneur and said, here's an opportunity to fill a need in exchange for money, which is what entrepreneurs do.
Jeff Plakans (05:25)
there's lots to consider. before I'm the owner of a payroll company, I am the owner of a small business. And that's how my mind works. So when I look at what we do for our clients, I look at
What is the problem, or what is the hassle, or what is the the challenge that the small business owner, operator, HR person, whomever, is having to deal with? And when I look at it from that perspective, it's very, very easy to see like what they need and what they don't, what they're gonna get excited about, what they're gonna happily hand off and pay whatever they have done on their behalf
JMS / John Mason-Smith (06:02)
Make it happen.
Jeff Plakans (06:04)
so they can continue.
Making widgets, selling widgets, whatever.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (06:07)
Yeah. I mean that's the the joy of specialization, right? Is like you focus on one thing and let someone else do the rest. But you know, you
Jeff Plakans (06:13)
Right. Well, and and
and like a lot of companies like to call themselves a payroll company. Right. I like to refer to us as an employment company. And what we're helping our clients with is how to be an employer. Right. And it's a different attitude than, yeah, we're going to calculate checks gross to net, we're going to make tax payments for you, so on and so forth.
We might throw on a little bit of HR on top of that. Very, very different approach in mindset first before we get into what we talk about in terms of, you know, the blocking and tackling of what we do and how we do it.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (06:52)
So, Jeff, you said that you come from a f like a payroll family legacy. Like you rewind for me here. So when did
Jeff Plakans (06:59)
Sure.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (06:59)
payroll first enter into your story? Was it before
Jeff Plakans (07:01)
Yeah.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (07:02)
you were born? Like I don't I'm trying to get my head around this. Cause I obviously you're an entrepreneur who does payroll, but was it like you're a person in the payroll space, what do I do with that? Or was it like a more broad
Jeff Plakans (07:12)
when
in the eighties
JMS / John Mason-Smith (07:16)
Was a different
Jeff Plakans (07:16)
when before there was a PC on every desktop, the internet didn't exist, mobile phones didn't exist. A mobile phone was not a thing.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (07:27)
Ha ha ha.
Jeff Plakans (07:29)
payroll got done by bookkeepers and accountants and ADP and paychecks. And it was all done on IBM System 36 mainframe computers and everything else. And
My father, who had been a CPA and was in finance, realized there was an opportunity, and he and some partners went out and built accounting software, bookkeeping software, and a bookkeeping and accounting service.
QuickBooks didn't really even exist here. Like none of this existed. Once they went out to market to go sell all this stuff to clients, the thing that that was most repeatable, most easy to duplicate, and there was the greatest amount of opportunity was in payroll. So I was I
JMS / John Mason-Smith (08:14)
How old were you when this was happening? When he went to market with us?
Jeff Plakans (08:17)
was a I was an early teenager. So I was 12, 13, 14, 15 years old. And
They built a company on dot matrix printers, if you remember what those are, green and white ledger paper, where they where you had to
JMS / John Mason-Smith (08:29)
yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Plakans (08:31)
change the check stock with every company because you know it was pre printed check stock. And my brother and I were free labor. So my father would go, Boys, wanna come down to the office today? I'll buy you lunch. We're like, Okay, yeah, lunch, great.
And then we found ourselves stuffing W twos by hand into envelopes and licking the envelopes closed and coming back like
JMS / John Mason-Smith (08:56)
I know I've been there.
Jeff Plakans (08:57)
So so
that company, which was called Payrolls Plus, my brother joined it like literally right out of college. He went to go work for my dad in operations. And I was in the DC area and worked in some sales jobs and so on and so forth. And then finally my father was I was kind of looking for an excuse to move back up to New England. And my father was kind of like, well,
We're at a little bit of a crossroads with the company. You know, he'd never been gr really successful building a sales organization. And he's like, Why don't you come up and, you know, lead our expansion? And so we did that. And that was in I think it joined or rejoined the company actually as a W two employee this time, not as a free lunch employee.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (09:43)
Not as an intern.
Jeff Plakans (09:45)
Right. In nineteen ninety-six, nineteen ninety-seven, something like that. and that's when I really kind of figured out like what the marketplace looked like and who was out there and who liked payroll companies and who didn't, and like what the thought process was there, and slowly but surely kind of developed an approach to this. So I've never worked for any of the big national payroll companies. So many people in our industry had done
Time at paychecks or ADP or whatever. I never did. And so I'm completely
JMS / John Mason-Smith (10:16)
Paychecks University.
Jeff Plakans (10:19)
self-taught, if you will. and but payrolls plus, when I got there, we had about 500 clients. We grew to about 8,000 clients, and that's in 2005 when we sold the company to a group of private equity firms that was creating a roll-up based on the what was then called paychoice software.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (10:39)
Yeah, I remember that. That was
Jeff Plakans (10:41)
Right. And
so that that's when I said, sure, I'm employable. I'll go work for these guys.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (10:48)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (10:48)
And it just didn't work. And so literally within that year, what's that?
JMS / John Mason-Smith (10:52)
W was that your first time was that
your first time being like an employee in a big giant machine?
Cause like all these other years.
Jeff Plakans (10:58)
No, I mean during during
my time in the sales roles, I was an employee, but an an employee a sales employee it it's a different set of rules. Right. But when you're an executive
JMS / John Mason-Smith (11:08)
Yeah. Bring in more money than you cost. That's the rule.
Jeff Plakans (11:11)
and I won't name names, but I will tell you that we used to have a game. Me and another buddy of mine who had sold his company, we would have conversations, competing conversations with the CEO.
And you can always tell who spoke to him last because that's who would get their way.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (11:28)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (11:29)
So our nickname for the guy was Winsock.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (11:32)
Ha! Which way is the wind blowing?
Jeff Plakans (11:33)
And we had a blast with it, but we
didn't accomplish much.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (11:38)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (11:39)
And so getting out of there was the greatest thing for my soul because I was able to go back and construct again. And the industry was changing at that point. So while we were going first of
JMS / John Mason-Smith (11:52)
Was. It I'd say it still is.
Jeff Plakans (11:54)
all, the internet showed up, mobile phones showed
JMS / John Mason-Smith (11:57)
a little change.
Jeff Plakans (11:59)
up, and all of a sudden
What was a discussion based just on payroll, everybody was looking to integrate benefit administration and time and attendance and other components all into the same platform. And that wasn't possible with the technology that we had back in the day, and needed to be possible. So what I
was looking
JMS / John Mason-Smith (12:22)
Well I I mean
Jeff Plakans (12:23)
to do is to go up market and
When I say upmarket, not necessarily bigger companies, companies that had broader needs.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (12:31)
At some point I feel like the payroll industry pivoted from being a primarily service play to becoming this broader technology play where it's like, yes, the core of it is this service that requires hands on it, but there's all these other things that you can tack on that are effectively just software, right? yeah.
Jeff Plakans (12:50)
So payroll turned into
HCM in my opinion in twenty fourteen.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (12:57)
'Cause A, is that what happened what what happened that made it change then?
Jeff Plakans (13:00)
ACA demanded
that companies' payroll data, their benefit data, and their eligibility data all were in the same platform. And that's what pushed a lot of the folks that are in were in the payroll industry and had been in to have to go find new software. Because they needed software,
JMS / John Mason-Smith (13:22)
So what was happening in your life?
Jeff Plakans (13:24)
they needed a solution to do that. And
You know, it's funny, there's lots and lots of companies that call themselves HCM companies. And I know lo I love that name. I know what it means. I think it's great. It's the rest of the world doesn't really know what it means, but they will eventually, I guess. We hope.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (13:39)
Yeah.
So what was happening in your world? Like what was Jeff's world like in twenty fourteen as that pivot was happening and and where like
Jeff Plakans (13:48)
Well, so we were
we saw it. I mean, we had started working a couple of years previous, focusing
JMS / John Mason-Smith (13:54)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (13:55)
on doing PEO takeaways, taking companies that were with PEOs and taking them out and having doing so in a way that was organized and sane and rational, which wasn't always the case. Getting into a PEO was very easy, getting out not so easy.
we had the platform to be able to do that at the time and knew how to use the platform. So it was just a matter of getting processes together to be able to do that. So when the ACA came on the scene, you know, the first thing you had to do was study and read and become an expert. And
JMS / John Mason-Smith (14:32)
Yeah. Yeah, it was like, congratulations, you have to learn.
Jeff Plakans (14:36)
you know, it was funny because I knew.
What I assumed at that time was that there was a classic opportunity for every benefit broker in the world to own the ACA, to to change the nature of their client relationship by being an ACA expert. Unfortunately, one in ten seized that opportunity. Most of them came running to someone else to solve it for them.
We knew that once I realized that we we could end up owning the responsibility for this thing, then for me it was like a no brainer to go out and learn everything about it. what I ended up being able to do was to go with my broker friends to their clients and to say,
I'm going to show you how we're going to do it. So it's low lift, low touch. You're not going to have to worry about anything. The only thing is you just got to work with me.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (15:31)
I mean basically it's here's the problem and I'm the solution. It's cla classic sales strategy, right?
Jeff Plakans (15:35)
Right.
Well, but again, it's about outcomes.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (15:38)
Well, so what platform were you on during the ACA rollout? Like was that a problem from you from a technology standpoint?
Jeff Plakans (15:42)
Well, we were and still are.
We were early, early in. We were
one of ISO's earliest licensees. We were using it before it was called ISOft, back in 2010.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (15:53)
Yeah. What was it called back then?
Jeff Plakans (15:55)
It was called Payroll Office first. Then it was called Ingenuity. And then they created the network in 2014. But by that point, we'd already been using it for four years. So the timing was great.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (16:09)
Okay, so you were like
Jeff Plakans (16:11)
And frankly,
JMS / John Mason-Smith (16:11)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (16:12)
as a as a payroll partner, they were awesome about building the tools in there. Like they saw the opportunity too. So they gave
JMS / John Mason-Smith (16:20)
Mm.
Jeff Plakans (16:20)
me the opportunity to go to market with that. Where were people that were still on that old platform that I had been on on the previous company that were like, damn,
JMS / John Mason-Smith (16:28)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (16:29)
now what do we do?
JMS / John Mason-Smith (16:30)
Yeah. Well, it's funny, when that happened, I was a Pelocy rep during those years selling for them. And it was like the best thing to ever happen to us because our our technology people on the Pelocity side had come out with a a turnkey ACA solution. They like spun it around really, really quickly and said, Go sell this to everybody. And then where we think I think where things really fell apart was
They bid off more than they could chew on implementation and service. You know, they w waved caps. They said, We're no longer gonna put caps on how many new clients can come in and all that kind of stuff.
Jeff Plakans (17:01)
Right.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (17:01)
Cause they, you know, they were excited for the opportunity. let's just say it didn't work out for everybody. But as
Jeff Plakans (17:05)
So the
JMS / John Mason-Smith (17:06)
a sales rep, it was nice. It demoed well.
Jeff Plakans (17:08)
So the funny thing about that
is that's still going on, not necessarily at payloadity, but every time you get
JMS / John Mason-Smith (17:15)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (17:15)
a payroll company that goes public
The the you the pattern is the same. They get a lot of money, they deploy the sales force into the market. The sales force
Buys significant market share and then they run into a brick wall because they don't have enough people that are skilled, knowledgeable, experienced implementation folks to adequately and accurately bring those clients on board. And so I still run into people every single day who tell me horror stories about their implementation.
And yeah, the technology looked wonderful, but then there was nobody that knew what to do with it.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (17:55)
Well, it's funny, like there's still people that have to like do stuff behind the scenes. It's not just the like that's the thing that always gets me about, you know, I I think people forget that there's different experiences other people are having in the world. So like you'll meet someone that's from an accounting firm and they're like, I don't get why payroll services exist because I just use QuickBooks. And it's like, well, yeah, you're a freaking accountant. You know how this stuff works. You know, tell that to the flooring guy who doesn't have a computer.
Jeff Plakans (18:19)
Right. Well that and
but the funny thing about it is, and I say this to people all the time. You can't go to school for what we do. Like the experience that you and I just went that I just explained to you, like never once did I actually go to school or take a class or anything for that. I love learning, but you can't. I mean, the best thing you can do is like the payroll dot
JMS / John Mason-Smith (18:41)
But that's called the school of hard knocks, Jeff.
Jeff Plakans (18:43)
org, but that's not
That's that doesn't teach somebody the industry and the ins and outs and the details and all this kind of thing. So the problem you run into, the problem are this whole industry is running into is there are not enough people there are more people getting out of it because they're retiring and you know, than there are getting into it. It's not like you can
JMS / John Mason-Smith (19:06)
Well
Jeff Plakans (19:07)
go to Wharton and take a and get your MBA in
payroll processing or, you know, there's some HR classes out there, but that's not talking about the stuff that we know. And so there's just not enough people.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (19:17)
Yeah. And Jeff, I do I
I have to plug myself here. I mean, if you do I
Jeff Plakans (19:22)
Look.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (19:22)
am put I'm trying to put that together. That's what the payroll launch lab project is, is me saying, How do I take this knowledge, the knowledge that you and I have from going out and getting beat up by the world and make it so that as an industry we're not left with basically the inshidified version of payroll industry,
there's a community of people that all license I solved. How connected to that community are you now or were you at the beginning?
Jeff Plakans (19:49)
n at the beginning I wasn't because
JMS / John Mason-Smith (19:52)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (19:52)
There there's there's one perspective that some organizations have, not all of them, that there is no safety in numbers. Right. So I can remember a situation where there was a guy who tried to kind of rally the troops together to create some kind of like a user group for ISO and it didn't go over well.
with the folks that were running the organization at that time. well
JMS / John Mason-Smith (20:19)
How how so? How did it fail?
Jeff Plakans (20:21)
they tried to discourage the whole thing because it had gone out, kind of under the auspices of this was somehow like approved or sponsored or so on. Now subsequent to that, gr buying groups
got together to work with them who had what I'll call aligned interests. And I'm part of a group that has aligned interests and all the same challenges and are all dedicated to the same thing, which organizationally is operational excellence. Right. So that's what we're what's that?
JMS / John Mason-Smith (20:54)
Yeah. What's your what's the name of your group that you're in? Do you guys have a name or
is it just like is there like a formal name for your group or is it just you you and a bunch of friends?
Jeff Plakans (21:00)
Yeah, it's called the Sherman Art group,
but it's just a bun, it's a bunch of folks that ultimately found themselves using the iSalt platform. And we have aligned values. I guess that's the best way I could say it. and you know, with that and with that group, the thing that's the most important to consider is to say, okay, what we're trying to do is
Solve the challenges that we have, give great feedback to our partners, iSolve being one of them. there's other partners as well, to make sure that everybody's in alignment, right? And so I don't I've been fortunate in that the amount of time that I've been using this platform, which is now
sixteen years. Like
JMS / John Mason-Smith (21:41)
Yeah.
A long time.
Jeff Plakans (21:43)
My business has been fortunate to be able to flourish because of the success and the things that iSolved has done. That's not the only reason we do well, but it's a big factor. It's v absolutely helped.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (21:56)
But it's helped. Well, and Jeff, you know,
you're interesting in to me in one way, which is that you come from a legacy of payroll. And that is not true for a lot of the people I interact with and I meet in the world. I meet a lot of people that come into the payroll industry because they had some other business that was parallel to it and they said, here's revenue I should go after. Or they were sales reps and they said, Hey, I I can do this
Jeff Plakans (22:17)
Looks easy.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (22:18)
on my own. I'm sorry.
Jeff Plakans (22:20)
I said, Looks easy.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (22:22)
Looks easy. Yeah, exactly. Payroll launch stuff.com. Anyone can do it.
that said, my question is for you as someone who was like you were never at a point from in that story where you were just like, hey, I've got nothing but time. What am I gonna do? At what point did you pivot from being Jeff, the individual who's just a part of a family business, to Jeff the entrepreneur who's gonna like think like an entrepreneur? Like when did that mental shift happen for you and your journey?
Jeff Plakans (22:50)
Well, when we were in the family business, I was in charge of sales.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (22:54)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (22:55)
and my brother was in charge of operations, right? So naturally, those are the two sides of the organization. when I started Commonwealth,
I was doing it all. And right. And so
JMS / John Mason-Smith (23:05)
You have to. That's part of starting a business, right?
Jeff Plakans (23:08)
it's it's actually interesting. So for those of out there who've heard of the predictive index survey, and you know that we use the predictive index survey, no one's immune to it. So when we sold payrolls plus, it was the first time I was introduced to it, and I have
I was forced to take the predictive index survey as part of like our onboarding process. And everyone else that had worked for us also. And so what I thought at one point was voodoo, I looked at these things and I looked at like my brother's report and I looked at reports for people that had worked with us for like 10 years. And I'm like, these are accurate. These are really, really accurate.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (23:52)
They're fortune tellers.
Jeff Plakans (23:54)
About and and and what it does for those that don't know.
Is it basically sets up like it's not a personality test so much as an appropriate test for your your individual tendencies?
when I took mine then, I had this little thing that's known as the corporate hook. And it is an attention to detail when it's necessary, but you generally only leverage it when it's necessary. And that was in two thousand and five. I took that thing. I took it again in twenty sixteen.
And that corporate hook on the pattern had grown into an extreme, extreme level of attention to detail. Why was that? Because
JMS / John Mason-Smith (24:35)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (24:36)
I got forced into for the next 10 years of being operations guy and implementation guy, not just sales guy. So all of these things above. And I think what you what you have in in this industry a lot of times is somebody they're either very sales oriented or they're very operations oriented. Rarely are they both.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (24:56)
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (24:59)
but I had to be both, and I was, and it was hell. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, but it's also kind of turned me into that, you know, super entrepreneur. Like I'm looking at this, and I look at it as as I said earlier, I look at it as a small business owner first, and as like a payroll guy or a employment guy second.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (25:22)
Well, so Jeff, you said something that that I still I like, there's a still a gap in this that I'm thinking about, which is when after your original company sold and you were working for a big company and then you went out and started a d your own bureau and you did the ISOL thing, what happened in that moment? Like where were you mentally why did you decide to just start something from scratch versus just like joining somebody else's thing?
'Cause like there are small service bureaus that you probably knew from being in the space, right? So I'm just what was that like?
Jeff Plakans (25:51)
Yeah, but they were all doing
at the time they were all doing the same thing. Like they were all still payroll companies. And my vision for what was to come was very different than that. You know, we we we had starting to see started to see early inklings of it with people asking, they just wanted like, my payroll data's here and my benefit data's here. Why shouldn't we just have it be the same data? Like that's a great question.
Unfortunately, none of the technologists
JMS / John Mason-Smith (26:20)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (26:21)
had answered that question. I'm sure at Pelocity, somebody was asking that question because they built a platform to be able to do it. And that's where HCM came from. Now, for me, though, it was more than that. It was trying to get a real understanding for what you know, as a business owner or as a business operator, like and the question I when I go out and talk to other entrepreneurs.
I asked this this the same question. I say when you started your company, or when you thought about starting your company,
Did you do so so you could be an employer?
And in a room of a hundred entrepreneurs, when I ask that question, maybe one, mostly zero, will raise their hands. Now, if I then turn around and I ask the same question differently, and I say, Okay, you hundred employers or you hundred entrepreneurs, if you could get away with it, like and it wouldn't impact your revenue, how many of you would jettison all of your employees tomorrow?
JMS / John Mason-Smith (27:26)
Yeah, just
Jeff Plakans (27:26)
A hundred hands
go up. Why?
JMS / John Mason-Smith (27:29)
Well
Jeff Plakans (27:29)
Because being an employer is a challenge and no one knows how to do it. And just like I couldn't go to school for being a payroll guy, you can't go to school to learn how to be a good employer. You gotta figure it out. You gotta work with people who have the best practices
JMS / John Mason-Smith (27:44)
I mean, there's schools that'll sell ya that that'll tell you they can.
Jeff Plakans (27:49)
and who have learned and who have tried and failed and fallen on their faces and blown up employees.
and blown up employee relationships to prevent you from going down those same roads. And to me, that's what our industry is all about. And if you look at it as, well, no, we do this thing in that industry, I guess that's a way to approach it, but it's also, to me, I feel like that sells us short.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (28:14)
You know, earlier we were talking about the idea that a lot of founders are bad employees. And I feel like I feel like it goes back to the the example you gave me about raising hands in a room when you ask how many people want to have employees. Maybe the question maybe the answer is a lot of founders are not good team players. and I don't I'm not saying that as a blanket statement, but what are your thoughts on that?
Jeff Plakans (28:35)
I don't know that I necessarily agree with that. That's a generalization. I think that there's I think being a good employer, one of the fundamental components about being a good employer is to be empathetic and understand
JMS / John Mason-Smith (28:48)
Mm.
Jeff Plakans (28:50)
someone else's perspective. In this case, the perspective of the employee. Right? Now you gotta do that to be a good business owner too, because if you don't have the perspective of your clients.
or customers or ICP, then well, then they won't
JMS / John Mason-Smith (29:06)
They don't stay customers.
Jeff Plakans (29:09)
be customers at all. Right.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (29:11)
you seemed almost destined.
To do payroll based on having family that did it and having like, you know, it would it was the like the the devil you knew, from what I'm understanding. if you could go back in time and redo things, or if you had to start over from scratch today, is this the space you would go after? Or like if you didn't have that restriction of being not siloed, but starting from the payroll perspective, would it still be payroll that you ended up at?
Jeff Plakans (29:41)
I think that there's a lot of people that fall into this industry by accident. And in fact, one of my favorite questions to ask people is how did you get here? Like what's the what's the origin story? So
JMS / John Mason-Smith (29:52)
Yeah. Nobody woke up and said I wanna do payroll.
Jeff Plakans (29:57)
my daughter works in HR for a pro sports team. And when she brought me to the park for the first time, and she introduced she's like
Who do you want to meet? I'm like, introduce me to the payroll lady. Now, not because I wanted the
JMS / John Mason-Smith (30:11)
Ha ha ha.
Jeff Plakans (30:11)
business. I was just curious. And it's exactly what I thought. And I asked her when
JMS / John Mason-Smith (30:14)
Yeah. Which which sports team? Can you share?
Jeff Plakans (30:17)
I met her, what's that?
JMS / John Mason-Smith (30:19)
Can you share which sports team or or
Jeff Plakans (30:20)
Sure, Boston Red Sox.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (30:22)
Okay, that's awesome.
Jeff Plakans (30:26)
when I met her, I asked her how she came to be the payroll person for the Boston Red Sox. And she said, Well, I answered a classified ad for an accounts payable clerk in the Boston Herald. Now, all of those things say
Tell me you got hired in the early 80s without telling me you got hired in the early 80s and you haven't gone anywhere since. Right?
JMS / John Mason-Smith (30:52)
Yeah. A little bit of a legacy there.
Jeff Plakans (30:54)
But that's tell me if that's not representative of so many people on either side of the table in our industry, whether they're on the Service Bureau side or whether they're on the client side. But most of those people are going out. So what's next? I guess that's the big question. And it's interesting because.
We're we're talking about and asking about and considering the notion of like the next generation. The next generation in our industry. And you're much younger than I am. So you're kind of on the other side of that. You might be the next generation in our industry, but like who's waking up when they're who's who at age 15 is going, Yeah, I want to go stuff W2s today for lunch.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (31:38)
But I but you didn't wake up at age fifteen. You were forced into it. It was internship.
Jeff Plakans (31:41)
No, no, no. Well, I wasn't forced,
but what I realized about this industry is, and this is this is actually a great way to end because what I realized about this industry was it's almost a higher calling, if you think about it.
I I people would be, you're in peril. Do you mind if I ask you some questions? Like
JMS / John Mason-Smith (32:02)
It
it's like being a doctor sometimes. You know.
Jeff Plakans (32:03)
It happens frequently. It happens frequently. And and I
look at it that way. Like I look at some of the things that we do, some of the information that we see, some of the craziness that we see
It's almost like a like a attorney client privilege or like the relationship between a doctor and a patient, right? That's that to me, that's how sacred the relationship that we have with our clients is. And as a result, that makes it somewhat of a special thing. It's not just a job to me. Because if we're then you doing that and we're enabling companies to be successful, why? Because
We're allowing them to scale. They scale through employees. Employees deliver what they do. And if we can help them retain employees, then we can help we're helping the economy. We're helping these companies. And we're going to be appreciated for it. What I hate to see is two payroll companies duking it out with the same client on the race to the bottom to try to sell for the cheapest price, completely commoditized our business and no value add being there.
And of course, at that, that ruins it for everybody. And so for me, that's why the addition of value into every engagement that I have, every conversation that I have, every social post that we put out there is so, so critical because I don't want anybody to walk away from a time with me or my people and say, I'm not getting that 30 minutes back.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (33:33)
Yeah. And Jeff, I'd argue that when your competitors are duking it out to see who can provide the same service for cheaper, that's a conversation that I know when I was running my payroll company, I just didn't want to be in it 'cause it's like,
Jeff Plakans (33:44)
Right.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (33:45)
why don't you figure it out? Find out who'll be the cheapest and then call me back.
I kinda asked this a minute ago, but I'm gonna ask it more pointedly. If someone asked you today, Hey, Jeff, I'm thinking about quitting my job and starting a payroll company, what generally would you tell them? Is that a good idea? Is that a bad idea? And be honest, you can tell them it's a rough idea.
Jeff Plakans (34:01)
I would tell
it's a great idea. What's your value
JMS / John Mason-Smith (34:04)
Yeah.
Jeff Plakans (34:05)
proposition? And if the answer is weak, I'd say go think about it some more.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (34:12)
That's a good answer. And then the last thing I wanted to plug or run by is is there anything that you want to plug that's happening in your world or your life that you want others to know about
Jeff Plakans (34:21)
No, it's business as usual for me today. Yeah. I just nose to the grindstone, John. You know that. Not too high, not too low, steady.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (34:31)
Well, how do people find you? I
mean, other than me harassing you on your cell phone, like what what's the way that people will find you? How do you meet people in this space? How do you
Jeff Plakans (34:41)
Well, you can
I'm pretty omnipresent on LinkedIn. I'm invisible on any other socials. I'm there, but I'm invisible. I'm not hard to reach. I share my cell phone with every single client we have.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (34:55)
So they have to become a client first. That's the trick.
Jeff Plakans (34:58)
And I well, I
share my cell phone with a lot of other people too. I'm just not I'm I don't hide from anybody.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (35:03)
Well, I can't thank you enough for letting me like harass you for an hour, Is there anything else you wanted to chat about before I I let you go on with your day?
Jeff Plakans (35:11)
No, I got a boogie actually. I have two clients waiting for me in my conference room.
JMS / John Mason-Smith (35:15)
Nice. Well I hope you have a tremendous rest of your day. And yeah, thanks again, Jeff. It's good to talk to you again.
Jeff Plakans (35:19)
Likewise, thank you.
