Timeclock Software

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Dean Mathews – On the Clock

 

Podcast Overview:

00:00 Introduction to On the Clock and Dean Mathews
02:55 The Journey of a Serial Entrepreneur
05:56 Transitioning Technology: Moving to Modern Solutions
08:48 Building a People-Centric Culture
11:59 Career Advancement in Small Teams
14:55 Understanding Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
17:48 The Importance of Culture in Modern Workplaces
20:57 Navigating Hybrid Work Environments
23:53 Fostering Team Interactions and Communication
26:58 Management Style and Learning from Experience
29:51 Insights from ‘Scaling’ by Claire Hughes Johnson
31:18 Effective Communication and Team Dynamics
33:01 Navigating a Crowded Market
35:58 Customer Service Excellence
41:06 The Importance of Payroll Solutions
46:48 Common Mistakes in Timekeeping and Payroll
51:46 Proactive Business Management

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Podcast Transcription:

Dean Mathews [00:00:00]:
Tracking payroll, all of those things are very complicated things to do. One of the most common mistakes we see people do is they try to do it themselves, like with a spreadsheet. If your business grows and you end up, you know, like Most businesses do, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 people, and you’re still trying to use spreadsheets and not use a system that ends up in a really bad place. You don’t have audit logs for traffic, you know, for, for, for history. You don’t have compliance, you know, you don’t have transparency a lot of times. So you lac of these modern features where, you know, you choose a system like us and like everything’s right here in your phone. That’s probably the biggest mistake is they’re either choosing the wrong system, not choosing a system at all, or they’re trying to like, leverage a spreadsheet or a word doc or a Google Doc to run their business. And that, that never turns out well.

James Kademan [00:00:54]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found@drawincustomers.com we are locally underwritten by the bank of Sun Prairie Calls On Call, Extraordinary Answering Service as well as the Bold Business book. And today we’re welcoming Slash, preparing to learn from Dean Matthews from On the Clock. So, Dean, how is it going today?

Dean Mathews [00:01:21]:
It is going wonderful, James. Thank you so much for having me. I can’t wait to chat with you.

James Kademan [00:01:26]:
Yeah, you know, I’m excited to talk to you for a few reasons. One, you’ve been in business seemingly forever, so that’s.

Dean Mathews [00:01:33]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:01:34]:
And the other is you seem to be pretty people centric, which is great, and I’m gonna dare say rare. And on top of that, you run a service, the timekeeping system, I guess that we. My gosh, when I was looking for a timekeeping system forever ago, it was bizarre to me how few options I found that actually could do all of the things.

Dean Mathews [00:01:59]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:01:59]:
And I’m like, I’m not asking for a rocket ship to the moon or anything. I’m just literally asking to keep track of employees hours. That’s all I want.

Dean Mathews [00:02:06]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:02:07]:
So how about you? Let’s just start from the very beginning, right back at the dawn of time.

Dean Mathews [00:02:11]:
Dawn of time.

James Kademan [00:02:12]:
When did you get started with? On the clock?

Dean Mathews [00:02:14]:
Yeah. So I’ll give you the quick rundown. So I’m kind of a, I guess you call it a quote unquote, serial entrepreneur, if you will. Quite A few startups, businesses, side projects, passion projects throughout the years. But with on the Clock back In like the mid 2000 era, I had several projects, passion projects going on. On the Clock was one of them. I’m always looking for problems that I can solve. So this is the kitchen story or the kitchen table story.

Dean Mathews [00:02:49]:
This was late 2003 ish. So like 20 some years ago now, sitting at the kitchen table, looking through forums, business forums, remember those business, small business accounting forums. And I saw this trend of all these small business owners and accountants in this forum, just talking. I just looking for something simple, something like you just said, that works well, something that can track my employees time. And I want it online and I want it easy and I want it reliable. That was their two requests. So I was sitting there and I was reading that and I’m like, I’m going to build that for them. So I’m also a software developer or in a former life I was a software developer.

Dean Mathews [00:03:34]:
So I set out to build it and pretty much within a couple months we actually had on the clock running. It was very simple, very bare bones, but it was up and running. Employees could clock in and clock out, managers and admins could get time for payroll. And it was really just a passion project at that time along with, you know, several others. And kind of fast forward to right around 10ish years ago, it had just been kind of organically growing on its own. Like I said, it was more of a side project. But about that 10ish years ago, Mark, really it started, started getting to the point to where I couldn’t ignore it anymore. So decided to go all in with on the Clock and want to just focus on one thing really, really heavily and put all my energy into it instead of half a dozen or a dozen different projects.

Dean Mathews [00:04:26]:
So focused on that and decided to turn it from a passion project to a real business. Got it into an llc. My brother Mark was also interested in doing some of these things so got him to come on board. And we hired our first employee, Samantha. She’s still with us today. She’s actually moved up a lot in the tier. She is now product owner. Super proud of her.

Dean Mathews [00:04:52]:
And so now we’re sitting where it’s 22 of us total and we serve about 18,000 customers, mostly here in the United States.

James Kademan [00:05:00]:
Yeah, 18,000.

Dean Mathews [00:05:01]:
18,000. Yeah. It’s crazy.

James Kademan [00:05:04]:
Holy cow.

Dean Mathews [00:05:04]:
That is a.

James Kademan [00:05:06]:
That’s a pool and a half.

Dean Mathews [00:05:07]:
Yeah, it’s a. Yeah, two and a half pools.

James Kademan [00:05:10]:
So crazy.

Dean Mathews [00:05:11]:
Yeah, it’s kind of crazy when you Step back and look at it and. But you know, it goes to show you, you know, you put your effort and your time and your energy into something and it can pay off, it can turn into something big.

James Kademan [00:05:22]:
Yeah, yeah, Tell me a story. You were doing software before you said so were your other passion projects software based?

Dean Mathews [00:05:30]:
Almost all of them were, yes. So built a kind of like an online survey type tool similar to like a survey monkey where you could ask different surveys. Had a database type tool where you could just create a database for anything you wanted to contacts customers, sales online. Started that one, had another payments processing, a business to business payments processing, Ach type solution. Those are two or three of the ones that I started. There was a couple others as well. They kind of, some started, some really took off, some didn’t, some just kind of floundered. But yeah, so I always had that entrepreneurial spirit, just wanting to do something big, you know, just make a change, something I could just stand on and, you know, just be happy with.

James Kademan [00:06:18]:
Yeah, it’s interesting, I had another guest on the show, I don’t know, fairly recently and he said all we want to do is sell usernames and passwords. So I feel like you’re, you’re in that world, which is pretty good world to be in.

Dean Mathews [00:06:34]:
Yeah, yeah.

James Kademan [00:06:36]:
Tell me a story as far as the back end goes, because programming languages that were popular 20 years ago are not necessarily the same now. So has your platform shifted or had huge rewrites or anything over the course of the past couple decades?

Dean Mathews [00:06:52]:
Yeah, from a technology standpoint, the technology we wrote it in, you know, 22, three years ago now is an older technology. Right. And it, it still worked, but you really have to keep up with the times. You can’t just sit on these older technologies. You know, developers aren’t versed in them anymore, they’re inefficient. And the new technologies have so much more to offer for our customer experience. So we started a venture about three years ago, ish, where we called it Move and Improve, where we pick off a couple pages, a couple screens at a time and move those over to the new new technology. So now as of the turn of this year, there’s just a couple little pieces we’re picking up now, but we are going to be 100.

Dean Mathews [00:07:41]:
We’re about 99% moved over to the new technology now. And within the next couple weeks we’re actually going to be completely done with the conversion. It went really well, took a little longer than expected, but we were able to move our product to the new platforms, you know, new programming languages and such. And with that all the benefits that come along with modern software development. So yeah, super excited about that and super excited to be at the very, very end of that and now be able to release new features, new things we were releasing throughout the last couple years, but not at the rate we want. So, you know, mostly it was the move and improve section that we’ve been working on. But yeah, super pumped about that.

James Kademan [00:08:26]:
So you, you’re having to keep track of 18,000 companies, employees and PTO and clock in and clock out while you’re migrating all this stuff. Tell me about that transition.

Dean Mathews [00:08:37]:
Well, it takes a team, right? So, you know, one of the things, when I first started out back 20 years ago now, 20ish years ago, I was really of the mindset where I did not want a team. I had a kind of a very special viewpoint into companies and into their cultures where one of my ventures was a software consultant. So I would go into a company, I had a few dozen companies here in the metro Detroit area and I would build inventory systems, MRP systems, accounting systems. I would build whatever they wanted. And I’m a friendly guy. So I got to really know a lot of people. I got to meet the people up front, you know, the CEOs, CFOs and such. And they’re the ones that really hired me to build their software, you know, 20 some years ago.

Dean Mathews [00:09:28]:
And I, and I also got to make the people out back, right? The people that were running the software, you know, running machines, or the people, the individual contributors that were using the program I built. And I saw this, I don’t know what you’d call it. It’s kind of like a, like a real culture fight. You know, the people up front thought all the people out back just were lazy and they just wanted to stay home all day and didn’t really want to work. And the people out back, you know, were acquaintances of mine too. And they thought the people up front just played golf and were, and were in meetings all day, right? They weren’t doing anything. So in my mind I formed this concept that I didn’t want a team. But I was wrong.

Dean Mathews [00:10:07]:
What I really wanted was if I were to build a team, to build a team without that type of culture. So really when we started really building the team 9, 10ish years ago now, built that into the process that we would have a culture that is based on people first, always doing good, getting big things done. And one big thing for me is that the people that I work with. I want them to really see the work that they’re doing is actually helping people and is actually contributing to other people’s lives and making that better. And really at this point we are basically at a 0% turnover rate. With our, with our team, we have a extremely high like a 4.9 rating on, on our company and culture. And you know, we do a lot to maintain that. And so we built this team with intention and it’s really paid off.

James Kademan [00:11:08]:
Sure. What the 4.9, where is that? I guess I don’t understand the company culture.

Dean Mathews [00:11:13]:
Yeah, so there’s a couple areas. I mean you can definitely get it. Like a glass door rating, for instance. Oh sure, that’s like the, that’s our team rating us, but Internally we have ENPs where we’re asking the team. I don’t know if you’re familiar with ENPs or not, but it’s a rating system. It’s basically how would you recommend a family member or friend to come work at the company you’re working at? And it’s a 0 to 10, 10 being I would absolutely recommend them. 0 being I would not recommend them at all. And we’re, that’s not a one to five rating scale, but that is, we’re definitely in the higher end of that.

Dean Mathews [00:11:54]:
And, and you know, our, our, our folks are telling us that this is a good place to work. So, you know, taking all those ratings together and you know, we’re, we believe that we’re doing good. Always, always, always want to do better. Of course. So, you know, I’m, I’m always trying to up my leadership skills, empower people, look for people’s career advancements and help them. So. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:12:18]:
Tell me, you raise an interesting point, I guess about the career advancement because yeah, I have a company that I’m going to call smaller as well. Right. It’s not like we’re some 5000 person company where you have layers and layers and layers. So when an employee or a potential employee reaches out or in an interview and they’re like, what are the opportunities for advancement? And I’m like, you know, we got to two, maybe three rung ladder and the third rung is you own it. So if you’re interested in buying the company, let’s talk kind of thing. So when you’re talking about advancement in a company, you said you got 22 employees. I imagine you’re in the same world. Right.

James Kademan [00:12:54]:
You don’t have.

Dean Mathews [00:12:55]:
Oh yeah.

James Kademan [00:12:55]:
It’s not some 20 rung ladder or anything like that.

Dean Mathews [00:12:58]:
No. You know, and it’s really just tailored to the individual. Right. So we have a system in place where we have of course, our like annual meets, but we have our. We. We call them quarterly Connect and reflects. It’s kind of like a mini annual every quarter. And we also do one on ones every.

Dean Mathews [00:13:19]:
Every two weeks. So every person at our company meets with their leader once every two weeks. And in a one on one, we talk about things that are, you know, a little more not personal personal, but a little more personal than we would in front of everybody else. And we have a rating system in there too. But I also ask people to write down three goals for themselves centered around kind of them and their career. You know, if they’re looking to move up in a position or if they’re looking for possibly to pursue some education. And then we take those and we bring them back and provide some level of accountability to the team member to try to help them move up those rungs if they want to. Right.

Dean Mathews [00:14:03]:
Not everybody wants to move up, and that’s fine. But if you have the will to do it, you know, we really view our, our company as a place that, where you can move up. For instance, John has been in customer support for a few years now, and he is now making a move up to a higher level customer success. So, so we had like an internal job offer basically, and he raised his hand and now he got the job. And this is starting like right now. So I am, I just, I love seeing that type of stuff. And if we could help internally, great. You know, we also will help, you know, if you’re looking to go to school, you know, we have some funding available for that as well.

James Kademan [00:14:43]:
Oh, nice. Now let’s go back to the employee something. The em. What did you call it?

Dean Mathews [00:14:49]:
Enps. Net Promoter Score. Yeah. E is the employee. So employee Net Promoter Score.

James Kademan [00:14:55]:
Gotcha. Okay. And is this something that you created or something you just bought into?

Dean Mathews [00:14:59]:
Oh, no. Ian, our NPS Net Promoter Score has been around for probably decades. It’s been around for a long time. It’s used to really evaluate. It’s kind of like a restaurant star rating, right? 1 to 5. If you rate a restaurant at 5, you’re telling people to go there that I recommend this place. One, you know, obviously the inverse. So I kind of look at it like that.

Dean Mathews [00:15:24]:
It’s, it’s, it’s a scale of 1 to 10. 10 being I recommend that close friend or family member to come work at my company. And if you get that personal recommendation, if you’re Getting nines and tens, eights, nines and tens actually are pretty good. That’s a clear signal that we’re doing something right. So. Yeah, yeah, it’s been around for a long time. I would. Any listeners, I would highly recommend.

Dean Mathews [00:15:52]:
It’s also. You can use it for your customers, too. We do it for our customers as well, where we ask them how, at 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product on the clock to a family member or friend? And that gives us a lot of feedback to drive our product in our company from a customer standpoint. But then you flip it around on the employee side, and that gives us the feedback we need to continue to build the culture, to improve the way we work, to. To improve our work environment and just make it the best it can be.

James Kademan [00:16:29]:
Gotcha. Interesting from a culture point of view, I guess from what I’ve seen, both in a business that I run, as well as just talking with other business owners, sure. There’s a lot of leadership that’s pushing for culture, culture, culture, culture, which is good. It’s incredible because I don’t necessarily know that even a decade or two ago, that that was really a thing.

Dean Mathews [00:16:51]:
It’s definitely become a lot more hot. I think it’s the newer generations coming in. They’re, you know, it’s a. It’s a little more, you know, work and. And working in your pleasure time kind of like get combined a little bit, I found. And people are looking to really just. They’re looking for more at work than just a 9 to 5. They’re looking for some additional fulfillment.

Dean Mathews [00:17:16]:
Right. I mean, the reality is we’re going to spend a huge portion of our life at work, probably in a lot of times, the majority of our time waking hours, at least. Why not make it enjoyable? All right. We shouldn’t dread going to work. You know, my goal is to make Monday as good as Friday, so. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:17:36]:
So I guess I say that to say a lot of employees, just like you mentioned, some just aren’t interested in growing. They’re just, you know, I’m just gonna. I’m gonna dare say coast through the life that they’ve been given, but they’re still doing okay. They’re doing well or ish. And they’re doing well. They’re probably giving you sevens, eights, maybe even nines, Maybe even a 10 just because they don’t want to have a conversation.

Dean Mathews [00:18:00]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:18:00]:
How do you. How do you weed through the people that are just giving you the high marks, even though, you know, like, is this really A nine or really at.

Dean Mathews [00:18:09]:
Yeah, no, you’re onto a really great point, James. I think the answer to that is, is really just knowing your team. Right. So I relate a lot of things back down to that one on one meeting to where they’re the manager, the leader I like to call them, really gets to know their team and care a bit about them. Also when we bring a leader into the company, we’re very selective on who we bring in that will lead other people. So I particularly when somebody’s coming in that is in a leadership position as opposed to an individual contributor position, am looking for values alignment. Are they going to fit our culture? Are they going to lead our people the way that we want and we believe that people should be led. So it really starts at the door.

Dean Mathews [00:19:02]:
Right. We only let the right people in.

James Kademan [00:19:05]:
So yeah, got it right on. And are there criteria that you put together right away when you started or just over the course of time you come up and said, hey, wait, wait, wait, we need to have someone with this trait kind of thing.

Dean Mathews [00:19:19]:
Yeah, yeah, that’s another really great question. For the most part I would really back that up to our values. So we set our values probably about seven years ago now. Your values are, they’re not things you create, right. You don’t invent them. They’re things that you already have. So what I did about 8ish years ago, I went around, we were smaller than, but I went around to everybody and I just really asked them, you know, what do you love about working here? What do you hate about working here? What, what’s important to you? And I got everybody’s opinion and I wrote everything down and I wrote down, you know, what’s important to me. And this took about three months.

Dean Mathews [00:19:57]:
You know, this was not a, not a quick process, but really took our time and really thought about it and was intentional about it and came up with a set of seven values. And really those values are what we use as a criteria when we’re bringing people into the company, particularly leadership people. So I’m looking for value alignment, you know, our very first one passion for people. That’s value number one. If you are coming in and you’re in a leadership position, it’s a, it’s a mandatory, it has to be there that you’re looking to help people and help them in their career. So it really starts to answer your question, starts at the gate, you know, who you’re, who you’re going to let in.

James Kademan [00:20:41]:
Right on. Are the, the employees that you have, are they work from home or they work in an office.

Dean Mathews [00:20:46]:
So we’re hybrid. Pretty much all but two are local to us and well, maybe three or four, they’re a little, little less local. But we’re in Tuesdays and Thursdays and Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We’re remote. The people that are local will come in Tuesdays and Thursdays. And the people that are not local, we try to get them in at least once a year, preferably two or three times a year. Like for Christmas. Crystal came in from, from out of town.

Dean Mathews [00:21:19]:
She was, it was kind of rushed, but she was here for a day. I got to really meet her in person. So that was awesome. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:21:25]:
Oh, was that your first time meeting her in person?

Dean Mathews [00:21:28]:
Well, in person. Right. So yeah. So she is our payroll manager. So she’s a leader in the company. Had lots of inter. Just video interviews with her and such, but yeah, that was the first time meeting her in person. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:21:42]:
Nice. So with people being hybrid, that’s always a challenge. I guess I can tell you from our, I guess the business, the main one that I run everyone’s work from home. So the great majority of my employees I’ve never actually met in person. Very, very few. So I don’t even know what they look like from here down.

Dean Mathews [00:22:01]:
Yeah, I know, it’s kind of funny. Yeah, go ahead. I’m sorry.

James Kademan [00:22:06]:
Yeah. I mean, just like you don’t know their height, you don’t know anything about really where they live other than looking at a map and being like, okay. Or sending them equipment kind of thing. So I guess my point there is they are interacting with other employees that. Yes, it’s the same situation. Right. So the personality that you see is this much of the entire iceberg kind of thing. It is so shifting a little bit with what you guys do.

James Kademan [00:22:31]:
You got the sales side, you have the leadership management side, but you also have programmers. And some of those are going to be very different personalities, Correct?

Dean Mathews [00:22:41]:
Yes.

James Kademan [00:22:41]:
So I guess I’m wondering if they have to interact and if they do interact, how do those interactions go or how do you make sure that they go? Well?

Dean Mathews [00:22:48]:
No, great question. So we have as far as interactions, you know, we meet just like any other company. Right. So we have scheduled meets that are not set in stone, but they’re ones that like we have a monthly all hands meeting. You know, we have other meetings where everybody’s involved in particular leadership type people. So we’re meeting every week, sometimes once a month on different things. And the one on one again, I’m going back to that A few times. But the one on one is really one of those critical meetings that I believe every company with every team member should have.

Dean Mathews [00:23:30]:
And that’s a place where, where you can really learn about your person, learn about the person you’re leading and, and dive, dive deeper. So we’re, we’re, we encourage our, our leaders to, you know, really show a little personal care for your person. Right. I mean, it’s, I, I, you know, the hr, Human resources, I hate that term. Right. You know, humans are not resources, they’re people. Right. So really, I think just as a, as a, from a, just a culture of values perspective, we are just asking for our people to, you know, really put out their heart.

Dean Mathews [00:24:06]:
Let’s, let’s care a little bit. But also we’re selecting the people before they even come in the door to make sure they fit that bill.

James Kademan [00:24:14]:
What are some of the criteria? I guess better question would be what are some of the questions that you ask people in these onetoo, Get a feel for what’s going on. Imagine you can’t just meet them and just be like, hey, how about, how’s it going? Yeah, there’s got to be some thing to trigger a conversation.

Dean Mathews [00:24:32]:
It is. So what we do is, you know, during, in those one on ones, for instance, one of my questions and you ask it differently depending on the situation. But it’s like, how are you really? You know, really, how are you? Is everything going okay? Sometimes you have to ask some open questions. You know, maybe I’ll notice last week, maybe there was a, maybe a, an interaction that I noticed between two people that maybe looked a little heated. Maybe there was a little, you know, passive aggressiveness. So I’ll let a little time pass and you know, if I see it again, if I start to see a pattern, I might say to that person, hey, you know, I noticed a couple times there’s looks like there might be this, this little thing growing here, something brewing, you know. Tell me about it. What is it? You know, let’s just get it out in the open and get it settled before it becomes something bigger.

Dean Mathews [00:25:25]:
And for the most part, you know, once people get to know you and they realize that they can trust you, you know, people will be open, you know, they, they want to tell you what’s going on. But I think in America know we have this, this, this business culture where like your personal life stops at the door and, and you leave all your personal stuff behind. And I really don’t believe in that because you’re a person, you bring your Whole self to work. You really are. So let’s just talk about it, be open about it and acknowledge it that that’s really my, my answer to that.

James Kademan [00:26:00]:
Yeah, I would completely agree. The interesting part, I guess the challenging part that I have or that I see is that what’s legal to delve into on the personal side and stuff like that. So it’s not that I’m not interested in learning about their personal life and if there’s any way that we can help them or anything like that, it’s the. I don’t want to get in trouble for even asking the question. Yeah, it’s a very tight rope to walk.

Dean Mathews [00:26:25]:
No, you are 100% correct. And you really do need to have an understanding of the laws and regulations that surround that. But I think a lot of it’s really just common sense. Right. You don’t ask specific personal questions. You know, you just open the door and if somebody wants to talk, you know, never force anybody, of course, never would do that.

James Kademan [00:26:47]:
Right.

Dean Mathews [00:26:47]:
But we just provide a, a safe environment. Psychological safety is a, is a big one where the person can feel comfortable if they want to talk about, you know, something, you know, a problem they’re having at home or, you know, my dog died, whatever it might be. You know, it’s okay to talk about that a little bit. Of course, we’re not prying. We don’t want to know your personal business. But you know, if you’re struggling with something and you need to talk, let’s talk, you know.

James Kademan [00:27:18]:
Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting trying to show keep that balance of business side growth, Keep the king team going, keep the people happy, the clients, the employees, all that jazz, keep the systems rolling. But also taking the time to be, to have an open door, essentially it.

Dean Mathews [00:27:38]:
Does, it has to be intentional. Yeah. But again, you know, if somebody is not of that mindset, typically they’re not going to get in the door here. So, you know.

James Kademan [00:27:46]:
That’s right.

Dean Mathews [00:27:48]:
Yeah. That, that is a big prerequisite.

James Kademan [00:27:51]:
Sure.

Dean Mathews [00:27:52]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:27:52]:
Tell me a little bit from your management style. Is this something that you learned the how you don’t want to do it from previous jobs or how did you learn the basics of what you built here with on the clock?

Dean Mathews [00:28:04]:
No. Great question. So a lot of it goes back to. I’m a relatively a people person, so I talk to people. You know, I, I like to talk. But a lot of it goes back to those interactions I had when I was a consultant for these companies. My previous life, when I was a software developer writing these Softwares for different people. I got to meet the people up front and the people out back, if you will.

Dean Mathews [00:28:32]:
And, you know, I. Because I’m a people person and I get. I’m relatively friendly with people, people tend to always open up around me, that. It happens all the time. And I got to really see what was happening from really an unbiased viewpoint in a lot of ways. And I could see those negative interactions, and I saw how they were just one or two little negative things can really just corrupt a whole system. And I saw them happening there. And honestly, James, sometimes I, as their software developer consultant, sometimes became the mediator.

Dean Mathews [00:29:09]:
It was crazy. You know, they would. Yeah, no, it was. It’s. They would bring me in and ask me, you know, you seem to be pretty good around these guys, you know, tell me what’s going on. And I’ve actually a few times unofficially stepped in as a, you know, a people consultant. It was. It’s kind of interesting.

Dean Mathews [00:29:25]:
It was. It was fine. But, you know, we helped them out and I helped them out and, you know, it was good.

James Kademan [00:29:32]:
Yeah.

Dean Mathews [00:29:33]:
Interesting stuff.

James Kademan [00:29:34]:
You. Yeah. On your biography on the website, you mentioned your favorite book is Scaling People. Can you tell me a little bit about that book?

Dean Mathews [00:29:45]:
Yeah. So it’s Claire Hughes. She. She. She was the COO of Stripe. Stripe, you know, the big payments processor.

James Kademan [00:29:53]:
Yeah. Tough not to go Stripe if you’re in business, right?

Dean Mathews [00:29:57]:
Yeah, yeah. 100. So this was. I think this was like eight or 10 years ago, something like that, when she was there. But she came in as a seasoned business person, COO effectively, to kind of babysit these young entrepreneurs. So he wrote the story, which is a great book. It kind of reads like a textbook in a lot of ways, but I don’t mind textbooks. So.

Dean Mathews [00:30:24]:
So she goes in and she talks about all of these systems that she put in place to really scale people. Right. That’s. That was the title of the book. And she talks about one thing that we adopted from her. It’s called the Operating system. So the. Her operating system was kind of like an SOP on how we run people, how we run the, quote, hr, unquote, side of the company.

Dean Mathews [00:30:50]:
And I took quite a few lessons from that book, and probably the biggest one was building what we call our os, our operating system. And you know, in that operating system, it’s a slide deck, a Google Slide, a presentation. And in there we have anything from our vision, our mission, our culture, our values, the, you know, we have job descriptions and people. And one of the things that I really Liked that she did, in which I’ve done as well, is I’ve created a working with me doc. And my working with me doc tells people how I like to work together or how I like to work with you. For instance, I’m like a bullet points person. If I get paragraphs of text, I kind of lock up and freeze. Telling our people that understanding that I communicate with bullet points, like, really helps them to know how to work with me.

Dean Mathews [00:31:48]:
And very similar. Likewise with a few of them. We’ve done that in inverses too, where they’ve had a working with me and now I have a better insight how to work with them. So those. The operating system and the working with me docs were two really good lessons I took away from scaling people.

James Kademan [00:32:07]:
Interesting. I like it. So when you’re saying operating system, this is different than the EOS from the book Traction and stuff like that.

Dean Mathews [00:32:16]:
Well, it’s similar, though. Yeah, that’s a good book. I haven’t made it. I haven’t made it way all the way through that book, but it’s similar to that. Yeah. So EOS is kind of a version of that.

James Kademan [00:32:29]:
Got it.

Dean Mathews [00:32:29]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:32:30]:
Okay.

Dean Mathews [00:32:30]:
Yeah, that’s actually another really good book too. Traction. Yeah, I think I made about halfway through that last year, and I’ll eventually get through it.

James Kademan [00:32:38]:
There’s. I suppose if you’re like me, you have stacks of books and then keep plugging away. Take a nugget or two from each one and rinse and repeat.

Dean Mathews [00:32:47]:
I’m actually a listener. I listen to audiobooks more. I digest the information way better. But I typically will listen to the audiobook, but I’ll always purchase the actual book. And I have them. I have kind of a library at work, if you will, that anybody can grab from. And people do. They grab those books and read them.

Dean Mathews [00:33:08]:
And it’s. It’s kind of. It’s really cool. It’s nice.

James Kademan [00:33:11]:
Yeah, I get that. I have the same thing where I’m at here.

Dean Mathews [00:33:14]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:33:14]:
I have a couple bookcases where people can just.

Dean Mathews [00:33:17]:
Yeah, there’s a few in the background here. Right here. Yeah. And this isn’t. This isn’t my library. I’m at home right now, but. Sure, you have a little library at work.

James Kademan [00:33:25]:
Right on. Right on. I want to ask you from a sales point of view, you’re in what I would consider to be a somewhat crowded space. I don’t know if it was crowded 20 years ago, but there’s. I guess when we were shopping for a timekeeping system, there was no Limit to the number of timekeeping systems that we stumbled upon. But just like any software, you had to dig to try to figure out what does this one do? What does this one do? Does it do this and that and the other thing. So how do you market and differentiate yourself from the other timekeeping systems that are out there?

Dean Mathews [00:33:59]:
No, that’s a really good point. And you are correct. There are lots of them out there. Dozens. You might even approach like hundreds at some if depending on how you scope it out. But really, the couple differentiators with us are one, we’ve really built our system to be easy. You know, going back to that, those business and accounting forums that I was reading 20 years ago, they asked for a easy, a simple, reliable time tracking system. So I took those words to heart and we built it to be as simple and easy as possible.

Dean Mathews [00:34:38]:
Like for instance, with our system, you can sign up, get your team on board and actually be using our system within a matter. We timed it once, it was like four minutes. You could actually get going that quick. Now you’re not gonna have everything built out in four minutes, but you could start using it. So easy is a big thing that, that we really focus on. Another big differentiator with us is that we have like an amazing support team. Like I’m talking like literally top notch. The we answer the phone.

Dean Mathews [00:35:10]:
If you call, you have a extremely high likelihood of somebody picking up the phone.

James Kademan [00:35:15]:
That’s incredible.

Dean Mathews [00:35:17]:
Oh yeah, we actually answered the line here. Can you imagine that?

James Kademan [00:35:21]:
You’re talking to a guy that’s got a call answering service. So that’s a huge deal. I appreciate you saying that.

Dean Mathews [00:35:26]:
Yes. And you know, our ratings for our support team are literally tied. When I say literally, I mean like 99 satisfaction rate. It’s phenomenal. These guys and girls are amazing at their jobs.

James Kademan [00:35:41]:
That’s incredible. Yeah, that’s super.

Dean Mathews [00:35:44]:
Yeah, we get all the feedback from tickets, calls, all that. And that’s all very close to 100% satisfaction.

James Kademan [00:35:52]:
Let’s delve into the whole customer service aspect a little bit because I can tell you yesterday I was calling a bank that I’m working with and I. So I have a call answering service, right. So I like to look on the timer, on the phone to see how long does it take for me to actually get to a person and from that point, how long does it take for my problem to get solved. And the problem, like I’m just trying to transfer money between accounts, whatever, and online wasn’t working. So I mean, I think I was on the Phone, I think it was 25 minutes. And I was like. And the last, whatever, four minutes, I actually talked to a person. But the 21 minutes prior to that, you’re pressing the digits and you’re listening to the recording and then they’re always telling you, you know, we got a lot of people are calling us.

James Kademan [00:36:42]:
Like, they never say, you know, not a lot of people are calling. So you’re next in line. So coming from that, which seems to be, I’m going to dare say, the norm, almost to the point of being expected. And you got this thing where you’re like, we answer the phone, we take care of you. Which is what I feel it should be, of course. How. I guess, how do you get in that mindset versus what I imagine? I don’t know for sure, but I’m going to speculate that a lot of your competition doesn’t.

Dean Mathews [00:37:12]:
Yeah, actually a lot of our top competitors actually don’t offer support at all, which is. Or they offer like a very limited amount of support.

James Kademan [00:37:22]:
All right.

Dean Mathews [00:37:23]:
You know, they offer like a. An online forum. You can go in and look.

James Kademan [00:37:27]:
Sure. You can talk with the. The other people that add the problems. I love how they say. Exactly.

Dean Mathews [00:37:31]:
Yeah, yeah. Everybody’s just complaining about the same problems. Right.

James Kademan [00:37:37]:
Yeah.

Dean Mathews [00:37:38]:
So, you know, I think with us, though, it really goes down to really just associating the fact that the person that you’re chatting, emailing, talking to on the phone is an actual person and that you’re there to help them and, you know, really just bringing that feedback full circle and letting people know that you’re actually helping people. I have a very strong conviction in life. This is a. Basically a rule of mine that the only way that a person can really find joy in their life is helping other people. It’s kind of a universal truth. So if you can tie that back, you will. You will be amazed at the hoops that people will jump through to actually help people. We have our kind of a slogan or a mantra for each department, and our support department’s mantra is we have time for you.

Dean Mathews [00:38:40]:
So it’s kind of a play on the time thing, you know, time tracking. But it also is realistic. You know, we will spend an hour on the phone if we need with you. It’s in from a management, like, leadership position. We do not mandate a lot of managers. If you will dictate time to resolution time on the phone. Oh, of course you want people’s resolution to be fast, but they will say if you’re on the phone for more than X minutes get off and. But we don’t do that if it takes, you know, if it’s a.

Dean Mathews [00:39:13]:
It doesn’t matter. If you’re a small account, you’re paying us a few bucks a month. We’ll spend an hour on the phone with you. It doesn’t matter. Another really cool thing we do is we in our monthly all hands one of the sections, we have feedback from the customers and it’s great to see our customers actually talking about, you know, Alicia helped me the other day. She is so awesome. You know, she deserves a raise. And they’re talking specifically about individual people at work.

Dean Mathews [00:39:39]:
And that’s just awesome. I love it. So that’s how you create that culture. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:39:44]:
That’s incredible. You know, it’s interesting to say that because we, we with the call answering world, we have to tell agents if you’re on the phone for a given time frame for this client past that somebody’s just talking about their cats or something. So you got to get them off the line. They just needed a friend. So I suppose it’s different, different areas of what you’re, what you’re taking care of people for.

Dean Mathews [00:40:08]:
Well, yeah. I mean if the conversation starts drifting and it is getting off into something that is not perfect, productive. Of course, you know, we don’t, you know, or if the conversation gets heated too much, you know, I, there’s been times where I’ve taken a call that people have gotten real heated about and I’ll jump in to settle things down. Not too often, but on occasion that’s happened, so.

James Kademan [00:40:28]:
Oh, he got 18, 000 clients. Sooner or later one of them’s going to be pissed.

Dean Mathews [00:40:33]:
It’s bound to happen. Everybody has bad.

James Kademan [00:40:35]:
Maybe, maybe not even from something you did, but they just had a bad day and you were the whatever. Your email showed up in their inbox and they wanted to use Dean as a punching bag.

Dean Mathews [00:40:46]:
You know, we actually, there’s a few of our partners that we work with. They’re not associated with us directly, but some of the payroll partners, you know, we do time tracking. So what’s directly after time is payroll. We also do payroll now too. So that’s super exciting. But we still have customers that are with other payroll solutions. We’ve gotten so good that we can actually answer our con. Our, our partners questions for them.

Dean Mathews [00:41:16]:
So there’s times where they actually call us to talk about, you know, x payroll company and we can sometimes give them the answer. So we’re actually supporting other companies sometimes. But whatever. As long as people get their solution. We’re good. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:41:31]:
Oh, that’s interesting to tell me about the payroll side, because that’s a huge undertaking.

Dean Mathews [00:41:37]:
Yeah, payroll is a huge part. Right. Every single company has it. And in my opinion, it’s. If not the. It’s definitely one of the most important things. Right. People got to get paid.

Dean Mathews [00:41:51]:
So payroll can be approached in a couple different ways. We know that our customers all do payroll right after they track time. That’s one of the primary reasons you track time.

James Kademan [00:42:03]:
The whole point of tracking the time. Right.

Dean Mathews [00:42:05]:
Yeah, exactly. So what’s been. What’s come up in the last four or five years are what’s called embedded payroll solutions. Kind of like a white label, like an extreme white white label to where we can leverage a company’s. A partner’s payroll system, bring it right into our product through APIs and webhooks and different technologies to where you don’t have to go to another system to run your payroll. You can collect your time, review your time, you know, schedule your people, and then just click the button and the. The paychecks go out. So we brought it all under one hood, and like I said, that is.

Dean Mathews [00:42:50]:
It is a huge undertaking, but we leveraged the skill set and the expertise of a partner for that, because that’s their job. That. That’s all they do is payroll. And it’s been a great relationship. And at this point, you know, our customers are loving that as well. We’ve had really, really good response with the payroll.

James Kademan [00:43:11]:
Gotcha. And you’re doing payroll for all 50 states, is that correct?

Dean Mathews [00:43:16]:
We are correct, yes.

James Kademan [00:43:17]:
Okay. Yeah. That’s from a guy that said, deal with employees in multiple states. Oh, my gosh.

Dean Mathews [00:43:24]:
Oh, yeah.

James Kademan [00:43:24]:
What a pain. What a pain.

Dean Mathews [00:43:28]:
Payroll is even more sensitive because there’s all sorts of different tax laws. And, you know, the particular county you live in in a state may have some particular labor law that has to be accommodated in the payroll system. So, you know, if there’s probably tens, if not hundreds of thousands of different scenarios that they have to, from a payroll and time perspective, manage. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s very complicated. And you do not want a newbie running payroll.

James Kademan [00:43:58]:
No, no. Goodness, no.

Dean Mathews [00:44:00]:
God, no.

James Kademan [00:44:01]:
Tell me, where do you project the business going over the course of the next. Let’s call it five years.

Dean Mathews [00:44:07]:
Five years, yeah. So we actually. We are continuing to add more and more features. We really listen to our customer. Customer has a lot of input, but from a product standpoint, you know, I have a product team. I’m actually Product director as well as CEO. So myself, Steve and Samantha, we’re a small product team, but we listen to the customer. But one of our jobs is to see in the future.

Dean Mathews [00:44:34]:
Right? Right. So we need to understand what our customer is going to want one year from now, two years from now, three years from now. We call it our intuition. Right. So we listen to the customer, we look at the industry. You know, we look at competitors too. You know, we take a full 360 view on this, but we rely real heavily on our intuition. And we just continue to build the features that our customers want, hopefully even before they know they need it.

Dean Mathews [00:45:03]:
So we’re continuing to build, build out our scheduling system, continuing to improve our time tracking, continuing to improve our payroll function. And we’re bringing on what we call HR light. So HR Lite is like your human resource type functions. But what we’re doing is we’re looking to find roughly the top 5 to 7 hr type features that our type of customer SMBs really need and build those right into the product so you don’t have to bounce from one system to another. You know, SAS sprawl they call it. You know, I mean you’re a business owner, you probably have dozens, maybe hundreds of logins right to the bank and to this system, into that system. So our aim is to centralize the most of your people type operations, or quote unquote, HR type operations into one system and have it all right there and really just be the solution, the people solution that your company needs.

James Kademan [00:46:11]:
Nice. That is very cool. Yeah, I imagine so. That’s. So wait, wait, wait. That’s coming up you said, right?

Dean Mathews [00:46:20]:
Yeah, those are. Well, we have them built in now, but we’re continuing to build. We have about a two to three year plan where we’re going to be bringing all of those HR type features into our product.

James Kademan [00:46:32]:
Yes, gotcha. Okay, so we’re talking employee handbook and I suppose some conversations that, to the.

Dean Mathews [00:46:40]:
Point that’d be like employee handbook, ats, you know, applicant tracking, onboarding, employee directories, one on ones, annual reviews, you know, compensation updates, messaging between the team, those types of things.

James Kademan [00:46:59]:
Right on.

Dean Mathews [00:47:00]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:47:00]:
For the, the clients that you work with or have tried to sell to, what are some of the common mistakes that you see them making in the, the payroll and timekeeping world?

Dean Mathews [00:47:12]:
Yeah, so a lot of times what we find, you know, time tracking, payroll, all of those things are very complicated things to do. One of the most common mistakes we see people do is they try to do it themselves, like with a spreadsheet so you’re talking, like, Excel. That’s a. Really. That doesn’t work. And it. It might work for one or two people, but if you. If your business grows and you end up, you know, like Most businesses do, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 people, and you’re still trying to use spreadsheets and not use a system.

Dean Mathews [00:47:43]:
Oh, we’ve seen it. It’s crazy. That ends up in a really bad place. For one, you don’t have audit logs for track, you know, for. For. For history. You don’t have compliance. You know, you don’t have transparency a lot of times.

Dean Mathews [00:47:59]:
So you lack all of these modern features where, you know, you choose a system like us, and, like, everything’s right here in your phone, you know, so, you know, that’s probably the biggest mistake is they’re either choosing the wrong system, not choosing a system at all, or. Or they’re trying to, like, leverage a spreadsheet or a Word Doc or a Google Doc to. To.

James Kademan [00:48:18]:
To.

Dean Mathews [00:48:18]:
To run their business. And that. That never turns out well.

James Kademan [00:48:22]:
No. I remember meeting with a business owner. This was years ago, probably 15, 20 years ago, and he did not have a computer on his desk. He didn’t have a spot to put a laptop. And this was before main smartphones. I mean, there are blackberries and stuff like that. I’m trying to think what was before Palm Pilots, maybe.

Dean Mathews [00:48:42]:
Oh, yeah. Anyways, I remember those.

James Kademan [00:48:44]:
I’m meeting with this guy, trying to sell him on a different business, and one of his employees comes in. Employees like, hey, boss, I was shy 100 bucks on my check last week. And he’s like, oh, that’s weird. And he goes to this filing cabinet, and he pulls out this manila folder, and he goes. And he has handwritten their hours. Oh. And then he does some little calculations on his calculator, and he’s like, you’re right. And then he cuts her a physical check, and there was no documentation shy of the carbon copy of that check.

James Kademan [00:49:20]:
It didn’t go into any system anywhere. And then he just tucks the manila folder in the file cabinet. Away you go. And I was like, man, how many employees you have? And he’s like, I think we’re at 60. Oh. Oh, my gosh. If this place ever burns down, you are screwed.

Dean Mathews [00:49:40]:
Yeah. You know, that’s actually really dangerous territory. I mean, you could be tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and such, you know, I mean, I. I’ll applaud the person for fixing the situation on the spot. That’s great.

James Kademan [00:49:54]:
Totally.

Dean Mathews [00:49:55]:
You Know it not having record of that and not having, you know, you, you can have a dol investigation and that could cost tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes and it could be, you know, back back fines and fees and you know, error, you know, correcting of errors and such. Yeah, that’s, that’s scary, scary business. And actually a lot of times we find people like the guy or lady you were just talking about when they hit an event like that, guess what they do? They go to their Google and they start searching, you know, payroll systems for small business. That’s a lot of times when they start coming to us when an event like that happens.

James Kademan [00:50:36]:
So yeah, it’s so interesting how that pain has to show up for somebody to actually realize that they have a problem. Instead of anticipating, they’re reacting, which in the end they’re solving it. So life goes on, it’s all good. But we find the same situation. People come to us. You are often when the pain gets so great that they have to make a change. There’s no longer I can get by with this kind of thing. Interesting.

Dean Mathews [00:51:00]:
So I talk, I talk to a lot of the business owners. There’s this email that sends, that goes out from me. It’s not from me directly, but it’s my words and everything. Every time an account signs up with us and I get the replies from those directly to my inbox. And a lot of times we’ll talk to these customers and a lot of times it’s exactly what it was. They just ran into an event, you know what you’re talking about as an event. They just realized that their sister in law who’s been working for them for 10 years has been adding 10 hours onto every pay run for the last 10 years. Or they found that they were underpaying their employees for five years or, or their scheduling was, was not right and people haven’t been showing up on time, you know, all these different things, these events that happen and that’s probably 50% of the cases, James.

Dean Mathews [00:51:56]:
It’s like they just, they run into this big emergency situation. But yeah, to your point, what if we just thought about this in advance, got a system in place so we don’t end up at that emergency event, you know.

James Kademan [00:52:11]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anticipate man, don’t react. Problems will find you either way.

Dean Mathews [00:52:17]:
But reactivity is not a good thing in business. I mean, only when needed, of course, but.

James Kademan [00:52:23]:
Correct, correct. Yeah, the random pandemics and things like that.

Dean Mathews [00:52:26]:
Yes, yeah, exactly.

James Kademan [00:52:29]:
Dean, where can people find you?

Dean Mathews [00:52:31]:
Probably the easiest thing is LinkedIn. So search my name. Dean Matthews. M A t h w s 1t. I think I’m probably one of the first ones that’ll pop up. Look for on the Clock. We’re on there as well. That’s probably the best, best way to get a hold of me.

James Kademan [00:52:50]:
Right on. And what’s the website?

Dean Mathews [00:52:54]:
Oh, LinkedIn. I’m just saying. LinkedIn.

James Kademan [00:52:56]:
Oh, right, right.

Dean Mathews [00:52:58]:
Our website is. Yes, it’s on the clock dot com.

James Kademan [00:53:03]:
All right. Super easy.

Dean Mathews [00:53:04]:
That’s on the clock dot com. Yep.

James Kademan [00:53:06]:
Good domain to have, right?

Dean Mathews [00:53:08]:
Oh, yeah, that’s a great one. Yeah. I paid 300 bucks for that.

James Kademan [00:53:12]:
Nice, nice way back when. That’s cool.

Dean Mathews [00:53:15]:
Actually, I think I. I think I. I think I negotiated down to 250 is what we paid. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:53:19]:
Oh, there you go.

Dean Mathews [00:53:20]:
The best 250 I ever spent.

James Kademan [00:53:22]:
Yeah. Fair. Fair. I love it. This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. My name is James Kademan and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls On Call, offering call answering and reception services for service businesses across the country. On the web at https://callsoncall.com and of course, the Bold Business Book, a book for the entrepreneur in all of us, available wherever fine books are sold. If you’re listening or watching this on the web, if you could do us a huge favor, give us a big old thumbs up, subscribe and of course, share it with your entrepreneurial friends, especially those friends that have some employees that need to do the punch in, the punch out and the payroll.

James Kademan [00:54:05]:
We’d like to thank you are wonderful listeners as well as our guest, Dean Matthews from On the Clock. Dean, can you tell us that website one more time?

Dean Mathews [00:54:12]:
Our website is ontheclock.com all one word and you can find me on LinkedIn. And I will say, James, any listeners out there, I’ve listened to a few of your episodes and they’re great. So anybody that’s listening to this one, click that subscribe button and. And register to. The Authentic Business podcast. Did I get the name right?

James Kademan [00:54:33]:
Authentic Business Adventures. You got it.

Dean Mathews [00:54:35]:
Adventures. I’m sorry, yes. So, yeah, please register. There are actually some really good topics out there. I really like the one, I think it was one or two ago on writing, you know, being an author. So that was great.

James Kademan [00:54:45]:
Yeah, yeah, that was super cool.

Dean Mathews [00:54:48]:
Yeah, yeah.

James Kademan [00:54:48]:
It’s interesting. We try to get some incredible entrepreneurs on the show, yourself included. So thank you for being on the show.

Dean Mathews [00:54:55]:
Thank you much, James. Appreciate it.

James Kademan [00:54:57]:
Past episodes can be found morning, noon and night at the podcast link found https://drawincustomers.com thank you for joining us. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome and if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.