Ian Hillis: Hi, everyone, and welcome to PayFAQ: The Embedded Payments podcast brought to you by Payrix and Worldpay. I'm your host, Ian Hillis, and today I'm talking with Andrew Bouley, VP of Growth at Caterease, about how software companies can effectively go from selling one product to balancing the sales of many. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Andrew Bouley: Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.
Ian Hillis: Fantastic. Well, before we get into introductions, I just want to say that this is a particularly special episode for my career in the software-led payments space beginning back in 2016. Very quickly from there I went on my very first visit to a software partner's office. And that happened to be in Naples, Florida. And that just happens to be the home of Caterease. And fast forward eight years, here we are. And I think, Andrew, if my dates are correct, the Fall of 2016, you had just started at Caterease, is that right?
Andrew Bouley: It is, yeah. I know. I couldn't help laugh when you started introducing yourself because I knew exactly where you were going with that story. And I just remember y'all walking into the office and that sight that was there.
Ian Hillis: Fantastic. Well, let's jump in here. Andrew, can you give us a bit of background on Caterease? What you all do, your role there, how you got started with payments? And we'll go from there.
Andrew Bouley: Yeah, of course. So, we're mainly in the food and beverage space at this point. It's kind of our prime customer, working with both mom and pops as well as enterprises across the F&B space, primarily catering, although we do work a lot with event planners and wedding planners and kind of all the pieces that fall in between. You know, the company's been around for 30 plus years. Pretty interestingly, it started as just a spreadsheet for a local restaurant here in Naples, Florida, and has expanded to, having us own our own data center and being the worldwide platform that it is now today. I joined the platform, like you were saying, in 2016. I applied as a sales rep and was told that I wasn't qualified for the role and instead got put into like this weird strategy position, just kind of working with the owner to see what we could figure out to help the product expand. And I went from there, over the course of the past seven years or so, to the vice president of the company, expanding all our new operations, our new programs. In that time, we've launched, you know, three or four new platforms. We have two or three new ones on the way, including entirely other verticals. And a lot of that has been around the payment space, which is why I'm really excited to dive into this conversation as we continue on today. I mean, it, you know, it started with integrated payments, and it's moved now into, embedded finance, embedded payments, capital. It's a really cool journey. So, I'm excited to kind of see where the conversation goes.
Ian Hillis: We've got the right expert at play here. We happen to share the same title of growth, which sometimes can be a nebulous title because we're taking about a lot of different things. What's the day in the life of Andrew look like? I mean, what are the types of projects you're working on to drive growth—bring that to life for us?
Andrew Bouley: Yeah, so my day-to-day varies, right? Like a lot of times it starts with just our standard leadership calls, jumping in, giving the CEO an update on where things are in the applications. And that goes from our standard platform to our new online ordering solution, which, mind you, is built all around payments into just an overview of our payments experience. So, we're looking at, you know, the types of transactions that came in the day before, if there were any trends that have been broken or that are new. On top of that, we do a kind of dive into our new AI technology. We're using AI all across our platform now, from biz dev to sales to operations. So, I kind of give an update on how that's running across the company. And then finally we typically dive into some of those new projects that are on the way. And I think that sums up our morning, I guess you could say.
Ian Hillis: I love it. Well, you've alluded to payments a couple times here. Let's start with that. You talked about how there's been an evolution of the various model going from integrated payments to embedded payments and a couple models throughout that. What are the various components that went into getting that payments adoption that you're looking for? So, we're thinking primarily around the payment adoption by your customer base. What elements go into that? How has that changed over time? What does that strategy look like for you?
Andrew Bouley: Yeah, for us it was seeing where our customers were and what they were using already. So, you know, Caterease has a ton of different integrations out there, and we saw that customers were using PayPal and Intuit on a regular basis, and we were trying to see how they are using these tools. And mostly it was small transactions to kind of get deposits for larger events. So, we started our journey on the Worldpay side, coming into integrated payments. And we said, all right, let's build a solution where they don't have to use third parties. They can do it directly through us. And so that initial integrated payments model came into play. We definitely saw transaction volumes increasing, but there was no real way for us to fully market that and fully expand it. And we had 50,000 users and we saw over $6 billion in transactions running through our platform and we didn't know how to capitalize on that. And integrated payments for us was fantastic, but it didn't allow us to control that [payments] flow. It didn't really let us take sales into our own hands and really push forward. And so that's when we started getting into Payrix (PayFac-as-a-Service), where now it's amazing. We have our own sales team around payments, we have our own marketing division that's focused on payments, and we're talking with our users every single day and building new pieces of technology that they've asked for in the platform. For example, one of our latest tool sets is batch processing. So now a caterer can walk in, they can see that they have 300 catering orders going out in one day, and with one click, they can charge and process every single one of those. If it's an auth, it sends out the auth link. If it's the actual charge itself, it just processes it and dumps it into their account. So that has all come just from feedback and by having the sales team who's communicating with our customers every day and making sure that we're building technology that makes sense for them.
Ian Hillis: I want to dive in a little bit on the team structure there. You mentioned that over time you've now developed very payment-centric teams, whether that be sales or marketing. Is it siloed? So, payments can be a complex topic. Do we let payments get run by employees who wake up every day thinking about payments? Are there some middle Venn diagram motions where they spend a little bit of time in payments, and some time elsewhere? And if that's the case, how do you infuse payment knowledge more broadly throughout the organization? I know it's a complex topic and I'm wondering how that hits the various teams internally at Caterease.
Andrew Bouley: Yeah, for us, we have siloed it off at this point. So, we started by letting just our salespeople sell and talk about payments. And while that was great, and we did see that initial uptick and of course that was coming from their long-term clients that they have great relationships with. But once we got outside of that low hanging fruit, I guess you could say we started to find that there was a bit more work that went into the sales process. And so, we brought on sales reps that are specifically focused on payments. We gave our marketing team a tool set and the structure they needed to build around the payment space for emails and for graphics and even for like Google Ads putting things out specifically around the payment space. At that point we saw a huge uptick. Just the ability to talk specifically about the benefits, we gave them the ability to negotiate rates, we gave them the ability to review other accounts that existed in the platform. So, Payrix (PayFac-as-a-Service), as amazing as it is with the great dashboard that it has, we're able to give our reps access to that so they can actually see how other folks are using it and it really helps guide and lead their conversations. And I think having teams that are dedicated to the payment space, I mean it's been the game changer, right? It's probably 20 or 30x our payment sales space. And because of that we've almost doubled the company's revenue just from payments volume by itself.
Ian Hillis: Wow, that is impressive statistics there. As you think about new customers. So, I'm a caterer, I'm thinking about using your platform. Am I talking to the same salesperson that's going to help walk me through the benefits of Caterease alongside payments? Or do you start with a person focused on the platform and then bring in the expert that's focused on payments? Or what does that top of funnel motion look like when you're talking through both a platform sale consideration as well as payments?
Andrew Bouley: Yeah, so everything starts with our standard sales reps. So, when you come on board, you're talking to a Caterease sales rep, they're pitching the platform all of the benefits that are included in it. Of course, they do focus on what we call HPay, which is our payment solution, and they talk a little bit about some of the benefits you get in the system, some of those cool features like batch processing that we were just talking about. But after that initial conversation if the person's ready to sign up. And they said, “Yeah, that makes sense. Oh, and I need payment processing as well.” Well, great. We can kind of pass them off to our deployment team and we're off to the races. If they don't have any interest or if they say, “oh, you know, I'll think about it,” or “let's kind of keep the conversation going.” That's when the Caterease rep will refer that account over to our payment specialist team. They'll then reach out post sale and kind of during that closing period to talk about some of the additional benefits of utilizing HPay and really help them kind of make sense if it fits into their business. The final piece to that comes post sale. So, our setup and support team have payments baked right in. Now, it's just part of their spiel when they're setting somebody's account up and they're walking them through those first training courses, we talk about payments, we show them how to set up their account and activate things. And we've seen a lot of customers say, like, “hey, I don't have that. How do I get access?” Or “Oh man, I tried to access that area of my program, and I saw that it was grayed out and I needed to get access to payments.” And at that point we jump in, have that conversation and then bring them into the fold at a customer standard rate.
Ian Hillis: That's really fascinating. I've heard that moment called the moments that matter, where you're having intersecting points with your customer base, where this becomes a natural part of the conversation and a moment of need across all of that. I think one of the challenging things that I'd love to unpack a little bit is payments isn't the only thing you all sell, I presume. How do you think about selling multiple products and what role does payments have alongside some of those other products? Just if you're waking up and you've got marketing teams, sales teams, and you have X amount of resources, how do you think about the different priorities across these different product sets?
Andrew Bouley: Yeah, for us, we've realized that payments doesn't exist without our core platforms. So, first and foremost, we put a lot of marketing and a lot of effort into getting those platforms out there. We've realized though, that payments just go along with them. So, like I was saying, we've kind of baked it into the setup process. We've kind of baked it into the startup. Even our sales manager reaches out right after a sale and talks about some of the great benefits of using our entire suite, which of course involves payments. So, one thing that we've been doing over the past probably two quarters is every one of our software platforms now has a path to payments. So, we had an event diagramming platform as well as online ordering. Both of those now have HPay baked right into them. And the whole point behind that is every time we make a sale and bring our customers into the Caterease family and get them into our suite, there's now a direct path to having them use payments to better their business. Right? And giving them tools. We found that if you're just saying it's a payments environment, right, like that's enticing. But they've got to, they have to do that anyway, so they could use anyone. But when we've really evolved it to say, “hey, look, we can now look at ways to offer you capital to help expand your business, and we can now offer you bank accounts to quickly receive those funds same day and get them out to make purchases for gas, for your trucks, or for the new food that's coming in and allow all those systems to work together between our entire suite.” It just makes sense. And we really don't have to focus on those little bits because it's very natural.
Ian Hillis: You've talked about a couple of products that naturally fit together there. Embedded bank accounts, commercial charge cards, working capital, all those pieces. Sometimes this is framed as the path towards the everything app within that particular sub vertical. Is that a strategy you all think about? And if so, how do you think about the various horizons of products that you would continue to put into your ecosystem that may traditionally be provided by horizontal players? But as you have this captive customer base who probably wants to spend a lot of time in one system, how do you think about all the things you could do versus what you should do and what kind of roadmap look like there?
Andrew Bouley: Yeah, you know, it's a great question. I think it's when we've been leading the strategy over the past couple of years, I'm a creative. I have a master's in media design, and I spend a lot of time in like the Adobe suite. And it's something for me that I've always loved. Everything in one spot. If I'm working in Illustrator, I can send something directly to Photoshop, right? Then I can pull it up in PDF, send it out, get signatures if we need it at the end of the space. And it's enticing for me because everything is in one spot. It's all one icon. Everything looks the same and everything acts the same. And for us, that's kind of what we've been trying to do; is build that one suite, right? When you're thinking about food and beverage, you think about us. We have event diagramming in one app, we have online ordering in one app. We have your base event management and kind of core marketing aspects inside one application. All that's tied together to the cloud, all that has our payments infrastructure tying it all together and making sure that it all just works seamlessly. And I think that for us it’s the future, right? It's just one application, one program. You log in, you can launch any of our different systems from. We've even got this real slick portal that's in development, little sneak peek for what's to come where you can launch any of our different applications from. You can fire them up, you can access them with one login. And then, of course, your payments will all be feeding into one portal. So, you see everything that's happening across your applications in one simple spot. So, I think that is the gameplay.
Ian Hillis: I love the framing across all those pieces. And if we think about the scaffolding required to get to that everything app status, clearly Caterease is very far along on that journey. And still some exciting pathway to go across that, huh? For some parting thoughts here. If you think about some of the software partners out there that may be listening that are maybe in the 101 or the 201 stage of this journey, what parting advice would you have for them as they're thinking about growth, particularly as it relates to payments? Any parting advice you'd share with them?
Andrew Bouley: Yeah, I think there's two pieces to that. I mean, first it's: listen to your customers. I think so many entrepreneurs and so many software builders try to build what they think their customers want. Caterease was founded on bringing our customers out to our office and asking them questions about what would be beneficial to them. And we're doing the same thing with our new platform. Now. On the game side, we're asking developers, does this make sense? What would you want to see and what would make your life easier? And we're building around that. And I think the second piece to it then is watching trends, right? Subscribe to Google Alerts and subscribe to podcasts just like this, where you can learn about what other folks are doing and find ways to blend those two kinds of main components. You take what your customers want and what's successful, what other people are doing to really see rapid growth and find a way to marry them. And you should put yourself in a really good spot.
Ian Hillis: Andrew, this has been incredibly insightful and really fun. Honestly, I appreciate you being on the show and what a fun way to circle back after eight long years.
Andrew Bouley: Absolutely.
Ian Hillis: Everyone. We want to be a trusted resource for software providers who are out there trying to make sense of embedded payments and finance to help them get the education they need to make the business decisions their customers and investors will thank them for. Thank you to everyone joining us today and I look forward to continuing the conversation in our next episode.
