Welcome to the Kingdom Crossroads podcast with Pastor Bob Thibodeau.

Pastor Bob conducts personal interviews with Christian influencers from around the globe, helping Christian authors, recording artists, CEOs, entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, and, yes, pastors and ministry leaders to get the word out about what they are doing to impact the world with the gospel.

Our podcast has been rated in the top 12% of all podcasts in the world by listennotes.com so you know your message will be heard.

Now, here is your host with today's interview, Pastor Bob Thibodeau.

Hello, everyone, everywhere.

Pastor Bob Thibodeau here.

Welcome to the Kingdom Crossroads podcast today.

We're so blessed that you're joining us.

You know, if you're a merchant of almost any kind, retail, brick and mortar, online, whatever, you are probably more than familiar with the dreaded credit card fees.

Amen.

That's, you know, 2, 3% that's deducted by the bank or the processing center, including PayPal or Stripe, before you even get your money.

Amen.

Don't shut me down.

I'm preaching good glory to God.

Well, today's interview is going to change your perspective on this for the better.

Amen.

I mean, with being that long in the payment processing business, you kind of think he knows a lot of ways to save you money.

Amen.

He can provide you clarity, honest answers to help your business succeed.

Whatever the case may be, he's your guy.

His goal with Pay Proudly is to give $10 million back to the community through charity.

And they've already given over a hundred grand to charity on behalf of merchants.

Amen.

To tell us more about Pay Proudly, help me welcome to the program Jeff Maine.

Jeff, it is a blessing to finally be able to talk to you, brother.

I've been looking forward to this conversation today.

I'm looking forward to being on your show, Robert, and, and taking an industry that, that's got a used car salesman kind of feel to it, right?

It's, it's just a, it's, it's an industry that's full of slick sales guys that sell something and walk down the road and don't ever walk back in the door and don't do what they say.

And there's a lot of negatives when it comes to this industry, unfortunately.

And, you know, that's our goal.

You know, we've been in this business, like you said, from 99, and we've owned and operated different companies.

And we had an opportunity three and a half years ago exiting a partnership to start a new company.

And we wanted to just, you know, we sat at the kitchen table, my wife and I, and talking about what do we want to do?

You know, what are, what does it look like?

And you know, we've been successful, we've been blessed in this business and we do understand the business and we understand what business owners need and what they want and how we can help them.

And so we started writing a mission statement that day.

And the first thing we wrote was we need to bring clarity back in an industry to these business owners that there just is no clarity in.

Right.

That they need to understand why they pay the fees they pay.

They need to understand there's opportunities.

If they don't want to pay the fees, they can eliminate them in a compliant environment.

They need to understand that there's not a one size fits all in this business, that there's multiple ways you can take payments, that you can take payments through point of sale systems, through credit card machines, through know, your phone, through a lot of different ways that you can take payments.

And different businesses, you know, they need to, they need to know about these different ways because your business and my business might totally be interacting with our customers on a different level.

And so we wanted to bring that clarity back.

And the second part was just, you know, down and true, just our personal values.

We wanted from the very beginning of this company to be.

To give back to our community through transactions.

And you know, we take 10% of our revenue and we put it into a charitable giving account.

And, and we give that back to the community through the payments that are done on our platform.

And you know, although we get, we get credit for that, we give the credit to our business owners, it's not us, we're just the vessel that's writing the check.

But because of them trusting us with their business and doing their payments through us, we're able to give these checks back to local organizations and support them through transactions.

And, and it's, it's a, it's, it's in our DNA.

It's who we are, it's who we're always going to be and we're going to continue to build that, we're going to continue to grow that.

And you know, what we found was it was so, it was such a big deal to my wife and I, it was important to us.

And, but we really felt the clarity piece would be the bigger piece of the business.

And it is.

But what we Find is businesses do do business with us because of it.

But more important than that, employees want to work for us because of what we're doing in our Give Back program.

That's a bigger deal to them.

And you know, there really is a lot of good out there in people and people see what we're doing and we just hope to be an influence on others to do the same thing.

Amen.

And this works with retail stores as well as online businesses as well.

Absolutely, yeah.

So any, we do electronic payments, so we do credit cards.

We do ach.

We do any sort of electronic payment for from retail to home base to service businesses to websites.

We do focus in certain verticals.

Right.

That we have really good software and you know, and you know, restaurants for example, or you know, medical field, we do a ton in the medical field and then we do a ton of home service businesses that and we have a lot of retail.

So you know, it just, it really varies on who we're talking to and what we're doing.

But yeah, anybody that, that has taken any form of electronic payment, we would be an opera that we could help them.

Amen.

Amen.

Can you explain though how payment processing fees can actually impact a business over time?

Oh yeah.

I mean, you know, it's, you know, you know, we look, we work with businesses, you know, and you know, the payment processing fees, I mean business owners, you know, and so just to kind of give a little bit of a backstory for the listeners to understand a little bit is there's, there's what's called interchange, right?

And everybody works off of interchange.

Walmart, the big guys work off interchange.

So interchange is the cost of credit cards.

Okay?

So now different industries have different interchange categories that they hit.

Utility companies are going to hit an interchange category, right?

Restaurants are going to hit an interchange category.

But when these different industries are hitting these interchange categories, there's lots of different types of interchange that they can hit.

And those all based on, you know, based, are based on, is it a debit card, is it a credit card, Is it a reward card, Is it a corporate card?

How did you take that card?

Did you key it in?

Did you swipe it?

Did you get an EMV chip read?

How did you take it?

So there's all kinds of variables that start coming in and base those rates.

But as the reward packages have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger in credit cards, well, guess who sets interchange categories?

It's those same card issuing banks.

They all sit on a board, they set these interchange categories so they raise interchange to pay the rewards and then they give more rewards to the consumer and vice versa.

So, you know, a lot of those rates and fees, but it's, you know that your typical business today is paying, you know, two and a half to 3% credit card fees to take credit cards.

And we look at businesses all the time, they're paying 4 or 5%.

So, you know, it's out there.

And a lot of business owners have been sold something and they think they're paying 2 or 3%.

I can't tell you how many times I talked to a business owner, says, jeff, I think I'm paying about two and a half percent.

That's what the guy told me.

I'm like, okay, well we've got an AI proposal tool.

All we've got to do is take your last month statement, we throw it in our proposal to, and it's going to look at all those different categories and it's going to come back and it'll tell you exactly what your effective rate is, what kind of cards you're taking.

Because we want to look at all the different mixes, right?

We want to look at what percentage debit cards, what percentage of reward cards, what percentage of corporate cards.

If you're a, if you're a business selling B2B, you're taking a lot of corporate cards.

If you're a retail business, you're probably, you know, a local dog groomer is going to be taking more debit cards.

So it's all about the business and the, and what type of, you know, customers you have walking in the door.

But, but there's a lot of owners that think they're paying a 1 rate.

And then we look at their statement and they're paying a whole lot more than that.

They just don't understand how to look at the statement.

Yeah, those statements are very confusing to look at.

They're very hard to read.

And that's what we do.

You know, we want to take that and put it in an easy format and give it back to them and, and let them take a look at that and then make decisions on what they need to do.

Amen.

Amen.

So when you do merchants reach out to you or do you through marketing reach out to them?

You know, and how do you explain to them about payroll?

Yeah, so, you know, we both.

Right.

So we reach out to merchants all the time.

We've got sales people that are out knocking on doors.

You know, we also have some marketing that we do and we have, and the phones ring and we get referrals.

You know, our customers, you know, all these business owners have friends, and so they talk to people.

I do these podcast shows, right?

This, this generates phone calls and generates interest.

And so we do get phone calls in.

We get.

We, you know, we do some social media marketing, we do some marketing.

Um, and basically what happens is we want to have a conversation with them, we want to talk to them, we want to ask questions, right?

We want to know what kind of business they are, who are they selling to, how do they accept payments.

We're going to ask them as many questions as they're going to ask us.

And, and if they're out there talking to other merchant service companies and the merchant service companies aren't asking questions, they're not really giving them a fair proposal because we need to understand their business before I can just give you a proposal.

If you say, hey, Jeff, what would my rates be?

If I answered that, I would be lying to you because I don't know who your customer is.

I don't know how you're taking credit cards.

I don't know.

There's a lot of unanswered questions that I need to know the answers to to be able to give you a fair rate assessment.

So with a statement, I can throw that in our tool and I can push out a statement, and I can answer every question you have.

And that's why a lot of times, you know, business owners don't want to give up that statement because they feel like, well, I'm just going to tell you what I'm paying, and then you're just going to go based on that.

And I, and I totally get that.

I totally understand that.

And I tell business owners, you're right.

You are going to give me everything I need to know and what I need to beat to come back to get your business.

I understand you're.

You're totally right.

But what's in.

In this business if I don't know that stuff, I can't give you a price.

I can give you roundabout numbers of your industry because we've been in the business long enough, I can say, in your industry, it's going to look, you know, pretty similar to this.

And I'm.

I'm going to say I'm 95% probably right on those because I've done it enough.

But, but we'd really like to compare apples to apples.

We want to say, here's what you did last month, and here's what you did this month.

And basically what I tell these businesses now is, hey, our tool is Free.

Our phone call is free.

Give us a call.

If you want to take that proposal and go back to your current provider and just lower your rate, do it.

You can.

I can't stop you from doing that.

But I think after you talk to us and learn about our company, because it's, it's about more than rate.

It's not just the rate.

It's about what's going to happen after you get our business and how are you going to treat our business and how are you going to take care of us?

And that's the difference.

Right.

So I want to talk to them about the difference behind the sale.

It's not just the sale.

In fact, the second part is more important.

Right.

So.

And so we just want that opportunity to talk to them.

But it's a free tool.

It's a free conversation, and I encourage all your listeners.

If you own a business, take, take us up on it.

You know, it can only help you learn more about your business to have that conversation with us.

So how does the donation aspect come into play?

Yeah, so what we do is, so we have a charitable giving bank account, and so when we get paid, we shave that 10% off into that account.

And so we manage how we give based on that bank account.

But we ask all of our businesses, one of the things that we keep in our CRM is we ask you, what's your, what's your cause?

Like, what's important to you?

What's your why?

Right?

Is it, is it kids?

Is it your, you know, your Christian background?

Is it, is it cancer?

Is it animals?

You know, what is it?

And so we get broad terms back.

No, it's our local food pantry.

That's what's important.

Or it's.

And so when we give to the local food pantry, we're going to give you credit for that.

Or it's, you know, what cause it's really.

And a cause it's super important to my wife and I is our private Christian school.

We believe in that.

We believe that that's super important, and we give to that.

And there's a lot of our business owners that also believe in that.

And so we, we give to those organizations and then we go out on social media and we thank all of our businesses because of, hey, we were able to make this donation because of, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Because you guys are doing business with these businesses.

This is why we were able to write this check.

Amen.

Without these, we don't write checks.

So they deserve the credit, not us.

And Are the donations made in the name of the merchants or how does that work?

Yeah, so the donations do come from us because it, it's income to us.

Right?

So, so it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, obviously it's money that's come into our business, and so, and we have to give it away.

So we try to give them credit and, you know, through our social media post and different things.

And we send out a monthly newsletter to all of our merchants every month.

Tell all of our merchants what we're up to, who we're, you know, who, who we gave to this month, and what we're, you know, thanking them.

Right.

For their business.

Because we want our businesses to know that this isn't just something we're talking about.

This is something we're doing, you know, and, and, and it's important.

So we're, we're writing a, you know, we write checks every month.

And, and it's, it's, it's awesome.

We love it and it's great.

Amen.

But share us, share with us the program.

Planting shade for others.

What does that mean?

Yeah, yeah, you know, that's just something that's been a.

Something that we've, you know, kind of grown our company around that we want to, you know, we want to plant seeds with people that create shade for others.

And that's, and that's kind of, you know, I had a good buddy of mine that I lost to cancer, and, and that was a big saying that he had, you know, and picked up on it from him.

And when we were starting this company, we just said, you know, we want to, really want to put this as part of our value set of who we are.

And, and we, and what I said earlier is, you know, I actually wrote a TEDx speech about it, and I was unable to give it.

I was asked to come to this TEDx event and speak, and I had to back out.

It was my son, senior year of high school, and he was playing football.

And the speech landed on the last home football game and probably the last time you'll ever put on football pads.

I was not going to miss that.

There's nothing that could make me miss that.

You know, that outside of my, you know, health.

Right.

That I couldn't be there.

But, and so I wasn't able to go.

But the whole speech was around, what if every business did what we're doing?

Okay.

And so I wrote about that saying, you know, the amount of money that all businesses, if we were rolling 10% of proceeds back into the community.

That money would be spent back in our community and every nonprofit would be funded.

It would be a.

It would just circulate the money and every nonprofit could be funded and, and it would roll back in.

I don't think you would lose a dime from your business because that money would come back because it would be spent back in your economy.

And, and so, and so I wrote a whole paper about that.

But that's what planning seeds to create shade means to me is.

Amen.

We're.

We're creating shade for others through our actions.

Amen.

Amen.

Are the charities that receive these donations from your organization, are they local to you?

Are they nominated in some sort of way?

Yeah, so a lot of them are local to us because we do a lot of local business obviously because we're here and we're, you know, planted into this community.

And.

But we have a lot of businesses outside of this community too.

And so we do look for organizations inside of the towns of the towns that we do a lot of business in.

And so.

And we also have some national organizations that we, that we also give to man.

I mean do charities apply for these funds or are they distributed only to.

Yeah.

Members that process credit cards through pay proudly?

We've thought a lot about that of, of having an application to apply and we've also.

Right now what we do is we ask our business owners, especially the non local ones, we know the big organizations in our town, so that's easy.

But like the non local ones will say, well, you know what's important.

And they say, you know, the local food pantry or the local animal shelter or the local this.

And so we will have them help us get in contact with those organizations and then we'll put them on our cycle right of we want to, you know, touch these local organizations.

We want to touch a local organizations to all of our businesses at least once a year so that we can do some social media push and let that business know that we're putting, you know, money back into their community because of their processing.

Amen.

Amen.

Jeff, this is so interesting.

If someone, a business owner, etc is listening right now and they'd like more information on this concept how they get in touch with you to ask questions.

Yeah.

So you know, check us out on our website, obviously payproudly.com all of our contact information's out there.

Please feel free to reach out to us and, and call us.

You know, my email address is J M a I n eayayayprobably.

Dot com.

They can also look us up on LinkedIn.

I've got a LinkedIn account.

Business and personal.

We just love to have conversations with anybody that would like to have a conversation.

Our office phone numbers on the website.

We answer the phone, you know, when you call us, you get one for sales or two for customer service and you go to a live person.

So, and that's actually here in our office as well that you can understand.

So that's very key and very important to us.

And like I said, we just love to have a conversation with you.

Amen.

Amen.

I'll put links to this down in the show notes below.

Glory to God, folks.

Pay Proudly's unique model, backed by their strong industry relationships, just streamlines the cost effective credit card processing that it saves you money, it helps you promote your business growth all at the same time.

Jeff Mane and his team are committed to this mission of giving $10 million back to the community.

Amen.

Pay probably has already donated between 75 and $100,000 on behalf of merchants that they represent.

Folks, this is more than just a business.

Basically it's becoming a movement connecting businesses to helping the greater good, helping you to quote, unquote, live proudly by supporting meaningful causes.

Amen.

I already drop down the show notes and reach out to Jeff man and his team over at Pay Proudly right now.

While you're thinking don't wait, do it now.

You know the devil and how he works.

He's gonna try and distract you and make you forget this is too important for you to wait.

If you have a business right now, do not fall for the devil's trap of waiting till later because you're just gonna forget all about it.

Drop down the show notes, click the links right now and talk to Jeff, his team over@payproudly.com Jeff, thanks again for taking the time out of your busy schedule to come on the program.

Share all about pay proudly.com I do appreciate your time, brother.

Thank you so much, Robert.

I appreciate being on your show and look forward to talking to your listeners.

Amen.

Folks.

That's all the time we have for today for Jeff May and myself, Pastor Bob, reminding you to be blessed in all that you do.

Thank you for listening to today's episode of the Kingdom Crossroads podcast.

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for more information, until next time, be blessed in all that you do.