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Clayton Achen (00:02):
This week’s episode of Your Business Unleashed is a pretty exciting one. We’ve got another founder with us of another FinTech company here, and they’re local, right? You guys are in Calgary?
Nic Beique (00:46):
We are, yeah.
Clayton Achen (00:47):
That’s super exciting. So this is Nic Beique. Thanks for joining us.
Nic Beique (00:55):
Yeah, thanks for having me , I’m excited to be on.
Clayton Achen (00:58):
Yeah. So we typically start out these things by, I guess asking about your journey. What made you decide to, because the whole sort of thesis of this podcast is entrepreneurship’s tough and we all wear all the hats, and this is really for a lot of us, a really painful slogging journey with some great rewards at the end. So I’d love to hear about when you decided to start out on your entrepreneurial journey.
Nic Beique (01:26):
Yeah. I think sometimes entrepreneurs, whether it’s by choice or not, is an interesting question on its own, but there’s definitely, we are the kings and queens of delayed gratification. Sometimes at least that’s what we tell ourselves, right? We’re just like, it will all be worth it. You keep getting older and you’re like, it’ll all be worth it, right?
Clayton Achen (01:47):
It’ll all be worth it. I might steal that. The kings and queens of delayed gratification.
Nic Beique (01:55):
In terms of a personal level, I was actually born in Texas, but I moved to Montreal when I was one year old. So I really grew up French in Montreal, and then I moved to Calgary. My dad worked in energy, so Calgary made a lot more sense than Montreal. That’s actually when I started learning English, when I got into computer programming and started my own small businesses. But on a personal level, I like to say I’m a Texas-French Canadian, and I speak none of the languages properly at this point.
Clayton Achen (02:36):
That’s all right. I don’t know a Quebecer that does a real Parisian it all. Quebec has its own version of French. I could say that because I’m married to a Quebecer, and I just got back from visiting my mother-in-law last week, and I actually learned Parisian French in elementary and grade school. And man, you get out to Quebec and it’s a whole other thing.
Nic Beique (02:59):
It really is. I mean, they look at us the way that we look at Australians or something. It’s kind of like we’re Quebec French is kind of like the slangy different one, right? So yeah, I mean, I visited friends a little while back and I could say one word and then they automatically knew that I wasn’t from there.
Clayton Achen (03:20):
So you said you started your original businesses, so Helcim is what you got going on in Calgary now. And we’re going to get into that.
Nic Beique (03:35):
I fell in love with computer programming and design. I was a bit weird. So I was on one side, I was doing coding, and on the other side I was doing web design and 3D design, and where the two smashed together is really around, and this is the early 2000s, was that you would build websites on the design side, and then you would build the programming and the backend of them. So one of my first jobs was actually working at a local computer company here called Memory Express.
(04:10):
And I mean, that was the playground for computer geeks. You just go there and build your own towers. So I went to them, they had a static website, and I said, I would love to build you guys an e-commerce website, because they had nothing at the time. They didn’t have a configurator or anything like that. And they hired me. I was in high school. I worked there in my afternoons for eight bucks an hour, and I was programming their first e-commerce website and their first configurator. And when I delivered that, I realized, hey, maybe I can build a business doing this.
Clayton Achen (04:56):
Destiny.
Nic Beique (04:57):
Exactly! So, my first company that I started, and it was at the end of high school, was really around web design, but it was more specifically around really building e-commerce websites. So this is pre-Shopify days and pre-WooCommerce or WordPress or anything. So you would start from scratch and you would just, you’re coding. Yeah, you’re coding and you’re an old school, PHP, and you’re just building things for clients and turn that into a business. And that’s actually was the spark for ultimately how I got into payments. As we were coding these e-commerce websites, there wasn’t many payment options at the time. There was like Monaris, which is a pretty awful experience. You go to your bank and they’d be like, well, give us a $10,000 GIC deposits to open an account with Monaris. It was really old school, or you had PayPal, which really wasn’t great. PayPal has never been great at any point in its history. Maybe there’s something where I can start mixing this kind of e-commerce experience, this programming experience with allowing businesses to accept payments. And while that turned into more than a decade-long story, it was the spark that kind of got me to where I am today.
Clayton Achen (06:14):
Neat, neat. Oh, that’s great. So yeah, programmer backgrounds. Did you go to school for that?
Nic Beique (06:21):
It was all self-taught. When I went to school, I ended up getting a business degree. I was like, well, I already know computers. What do I not know? I don’t know business. Let’s go learn that.
Clayton Achen (06:33):
Yeah, right on. And so what was the seed for Helcim?
Nic Beique (06:41):
Yeah, so that started over a decade ago. And the problem is that the banks were not going to give us access to the networks. I was in my mid-twenties and I had a shaved head, and I didn’t look like somebody, I didn’t look very reputable and they had no interest in helping me. Nobody was like, “oh yeah, here are the keys to the kingdom, so go ahead and build your own payments company.” So we really, really struggled to find a partner. And ultimately we talked to all the Canadian banks and nobody wanted to give us a time of day. And we got introduced to US Bank, which is one of the largest banks in the States. They were opening their payments operations in Canada. They had heard about us through the grapevines as were trying to talk to other banks. And they said, Hey, we have a reseller program. So essentially you don’t get to be a true payments company, but you can white labels our payment services and you can put your code on top. And ultimately we had no options. And we just said, yeah, sure. That sounds good. And I mean, that was in the 2008, 2009, so well over a decade ago.
Clayton Achen (08:00):
Wow. Okay. We’re just coming up on 10 years now. So that’s a long horizon. Yeah, 15 years now for you. 14. Yeah. And so it started with, so the initial idea, and we will talk about the metamorphosis, we should go through the metamorphosis of your experience there, but it started really as a payment plugin for any e-commerce payment platform for custom built websites.
Nic Beique (08:26):
That’s exactly it. So we would program e-commerce websites for companies and then we’d have the payment side to plug it into them. And we started doing a lot of that, and we really took, it was funny is that we just took a very transparent, I mean it’s just a nature of who we were, but we took a very transparent approach to the payments. We’re like, we’ll, just be honest with the rates. There’s always been a lot of, let’s say, dishonest approach to payment processing, like the hidden fees and the contracts and everything. And we’re just like, well, that’s not who we are. Plus we’re not going to do that to the clients we’re building e-commerce for. So we’ll create really simple pricing. It’ll be transparent and nice little easy backend tools like a virtual terminal where they can put in credit cards and just some stuff to troubleshoot. And what we found is that people started becoming much more interested in that than they were in our e-commerce. And they’re just like, okay, yeah, no, the e-commerce is fine, but I could really use payment services for this. And we like the fact that it’s transparent and it’s super simple. So we were going like, okay, I think that might be more the business. And so we started growing our company kind after client of just pure payment services, and we built that over a decade.
(09:47):
So we called it Helcim 1.0. We built a small little reputation, a few thousand clients of being just an honest, straightforward payment process. We were reselling merchant services, but we were doing it with an honest twist. But we always had this spark of wanting to be our own payments company. We really want to get back to that and be able to offer everything like A to Z and not be reselling somebody else’s because you’re still reselling a bank. So there’s still paperwork, and it was still kind of convoluted, but that took us almost a decade to be able to get to the size and level of relationships where we could actually go out on our own
Clayton Achen (10:28):
And be your own payment processor. Exactly. I think that likely resonates with a lot of listeners on this who have payment processing. I still don’t know what my payment processing actually costs, and I’m not going to talk about platforms or whatever. We will save that for another one, but I know what I pay, but I don’t know if that’s what it costs and why not just be transparent about that. Why not? I think a lot of it probably comes to, particularly in credit card land, is this idea that we all need perks for using our credit cards. And it was interesting, I was at an admission council event event in Chicago last year, and Guy Pierce said on the way from the airport, he’s like, I can’t believe all the billboards about use this card, get the points and the travel reward points. Apparently that’s not a thing through a lot of the world. It’s a very American North American thing to get all these rewards on cards.
Nic Beique (11:32):
It’s a super interesting dynamic. And even you think about it in terms of regulation because there’s other countries like Australia and Europe where regulars have put caps on interchange and there’s not enough revenue there for the banks to give back points. But when you think about the politics and those dynamics there, if you have a million merchants in Canada accepting card payments, but you have almost 40 million card holders that are really enjoying their points if you’re aiming for votes, as you think about regulation, where is that weight in terms of, so I think merchants that are disadvantaged when it comes to those dynamics.
Clayton Achen (12:11):
Yeah, let’s take a bit of an off-ramp here because something that’s just happened in Canada, and I think it’s happening in a lot of places in the States, is we can actually pass back our merchant fees legally now. And I think you have some thoughts on that about to hit, we’re able to, now, I haven’t read the legislation, so please forgive me for pretending to be a lawyer, but the way I understand it is we can effectively just pass back our merchant charges to our customers and say that we’re doing that, whereas before you had to be sort of crafty with it. This is an admin fee or whatever, and now you can just blatantly say, sure, you want to use your credit card, it’s going to cost you 3% more, or whatever.
(12:56):
That’s sort of emotional and it’s like, what? I have to buy my own points?
Nic Beique (13:02):
You have to separate yourself from that. Or I have to separate myself of how do I feel as a consumer about it versus how businesses feel about it. So me walking into a major grocery store chain, or I’m thinking about the telco companies that shall not be named where they start charging that on your phone bill, that’s infuriating. It’s just like you’re already giving them your business. There’s always, I’ll read Duopoly and a lot of that in Canada, and you’re just like, you don’t feel like you have options, but on the other side you have merchants going, these are expensive, now I need something to help me. So we actually actually built a product called hell, some fee saver. We just launched it and essentially we were like, how do we make it so that we try to give options to both parties? So what we decided to do is we said it’s really geared towards a lot of our merchants are professional services and wholesale a lot of invoicing and accounts receivable.
(14:03):
So we said, okay, look, you have businesses that generally they’re selling a $10,000 service and the customer wants to pay by car, but they’re like, Hey, look, this is really expensive, but the customer really wants it. How do you give that optionality? So we said, let’s build a service. We call it fee saver. It’s like one toggle and you turn it on. And what it does is it actually, it’ll automatically pass the fees onto on the invoice. They’ll say online convenience fee or credit card processing fee or so on. But then they’ll give the and say to the customer, if you’re going to pay by credit card, it’s going to be an extra, let’s say 3% account adjust based on the regulations in the card, but it’ll say, or you can pay by bank accounts. So we have that automatically built in through a ECH in the US and EFT in Canada, and it’ll be free, and then the merchant will be happy either way. And then it gives that offer, it gives choice. And I think choice is important when you walk into the grocery store and you have no choice to buy your bread and it’s like 3% versus if you can give that customer and the merchant both them a choice and they’re happy no matter what, now you’ve got something that might actually work
Clayton Achen (15:11):
And it kind of goes back to what you said earlier about do you have a corporate vision at Helcim? What is it?
Nic Beique (15:20):
Our mission is to be the world’s most loved payments company, which we take. We very, very much take to our very much believe it, it’s a live-in oxymoron in the payment space because I mean, people just do not like their payments company, let alone love them. And we’re really trying to change that dynamic.
Clayton Achen (15:38):
And one of the ways you’ve mentioned it in two different spots so far since we’ve been chatting is really just about creating transparency and understanding and open it up. Why not let everybody see what they’re being charged? So why not? That’s exactly it. And so when you give people the option of how they can pay and it’s going to be more to use your credit card or less to use your bank account, and why not? So what was the growth of your team? So you started in 2009 ish. What was the trajectory there where you really started to hit your stride?
Nic Beique (16:15):
So the best way to look at us now, I’ll keep this story story short, but the best way to look at us is that you have the Helcim 1.0 and a Helcim 2.0. So 1.0 was that original reseller business. We built it over a decade. We grew it to about 40 people in the team in Calgary. It was a profitable business, and we slowly built it getting two clients and then four and then eight and grew business as a reseller. But we knew we could become more, and it took many, many years of building the size and the relationship to be able to make that happen. And finally we got to a position where it’s like we could become our own process, our own payments company from scratch. And we decided, we made that big pivot in the summer of 2020. So we’re just three years and now, and that’s the Helcim 2.0.
(17:02):
We actually decided to keep the name because we had already built a little bit of a reputation as a good honest proser, and that’s hard to do in this space. And we’re like, we’re not throwing that away. We’re keeping the name even though the service was kind of net new. And that’s when we became, we really started offering our service A to Z. We really doubled down on everything we believed in, and we decided to build a service with three core pillars. And it was really based on when merchants are looking for a good payments company, what is it that’s important to them? Number one, pricing, transparency and affordability. That’s super, super key. It really matters. It’s a big cost to their business, and we think that that’s how you build long-term relationships. Number two, amazing customer service. Again, it’s your cashflow. If you’re crossing a few thousand bucks a month, it matters that you pick up the phone and you talk somebody competent. And we found that a lot of fintechs sometimes saw customer service as a nuisance to their growth. And we’re like, nah, we’re going to just embrace that and make it part of our pillar.
Clayton Achen (18:04):
And then the you’ve got an army of people to pick up the phone.
Nic Beique (18:07):
I wouldn’t call it an army, but our mindset towards customer service remains. It’s not an afterthought. So we hire people that are local, we give them good wages, we make it a priority as part of how we develop our software. We obviously want to use technology to scale, but it’s always like there are moments that need to be very human and never forget it, right? It’s really kind of like the mindset. And then the third pillar of bringing all the service together is like, let’s take a digital first approach. So this is where if you start looking at the, I’ll call ’em legacy old school processors that are owned by the banks, you sign up today and it’s still pretty cumbersome and it looks like the stuff was built in the 1990s and it’s still.
Clayton Achen (18:48):
And you’ve got to leave a 10,000 deposit.
Nic Beique (18:49):
Exactly. So we’re just like, no, no, no, we’re going to marry in instant self-service, all these great digital tools built in. And we really saw ourselves as like nobody’s bringing those three things together. Transparency, great customer service, digital-first, we’re going to be that process that when people discover, go, where have you been all my life? And ultimately tie it to that mission.
Clayton Achen (19:10):
Right on on. And so where are we now in the timeline? Are we 2013, 2014?
Nic Beique (19:19):
No, so that, that’s 2020 when we did that.
Clayton Achen (19:21):
Okay.
Nic Beique (19:22):
Yeah, when that pivot. So that’s the new Helcim. And to give you a scale of it so that we went from 40 people to, we’re now 150.
Clayton Achen (19:29):
Holy man.
Nic Beique (19:31):
So I mean, it was really by us becoming our own payments company and no longer being a reseller, we could really start driving growth and an experience that we knew was going to be really successful with our merchants.
Clayton Achen (19:47):
Would you say that, I talk a lot about being mission-focused and mission-centered and how that’s going to help your growth. Let’s just get really focused in on what you want to do. And I noticed there that you tied, we had our three pillars and then the growth, right? I think a lot of business owners, we get stuck in this loop of, okay, well I’m just going to take on whatever and I’ll fill sort of all the needs that are coming at me because I need to make money. But as soon as you get focused in on what you’re really good at and offer something to the market that they can’t easily find somewhere else, you three or four times times your staff, right?
Nic Beique (20:28):
It’s one of those things where it’s a really, really hard lesson because when you’re first starting as an entrepreneur, you’re so hungry that the idea of saying no is, and you almost don’t want to at that stage. You’re just trying to figure it out. You’re trying to understand what works, what doesn’t. And sometimes saying a lot of yeses and biting off more than you can chew is how you learn and how you ultimately find yourself in your process. But at a certain point, you need to have that haha moment of what you want to be when you grow up and then start saying no to everything else. And for us, I think a big part of it was there’s a lot of payments companies out there. You have the, I’ll name a few in terms of say Square is really good at micro-merchants in terms of a quick order restaurant or farmer’s market, and that’s a need in the market, and they do really well there.
(21:21):
And then the Stripes of the world on the other end of the spectrums are more like if you are a Shopify, you’re a large startup that has a marketplace or something like that, Stripe might be the partner for you. But what we discovered is who are we really good at servicing? And we realized that we were really great traditional SMBs like doctors and chiros and accountants and wholesalers, and we felt like they were being really ignored by even the new kind of fintechs. They’re such a huge part of the industry. They’re like the heartbeat of our local communities and economies, but they were kind of stuck with the kind of old school processors and we’re like, we can be really good at that. And when we started saying no to everything else and started saying yes to those and then doubling down, that’s when we started seeing things finally click.
Clayton Achen (22:15):
Yeah. And there’s a couple capital raises in there, I imagine.
Nic Beique (22:19):
Yeah. So we were a little bit of a unique business, is that because we had built the first, the 1.0 on our own over a 10-year period, we had funded, we were like our own seed investor to that big pivot. So all those investments we made, but it got to a point, so we launched on our own, we were just a bootstrap company, and it got to a point where it was actually my CFO, Marge, who’s wonderful, and she came into my office in the fall of 2021 and essentially told me, she’s like, this bootstrap thing is done. We pushed it as far as we could. This business is really starting to take off. We’re going to need investors with deeper pockets to help us keep up with this thing. If not, we’re just going to choke the business. And we had never raised capital before, so it was a little intimidating. You hear the stories about bad VCs and taking bad deals. And so we went out and I reached out to other CEOs in the tech space, and especially Calgary’s got this cool underdog mentality of everybody wants to help each other out, and we show the world we can do this right here.
Clayton Achen (23:31):
Same in the beer scene. It’s the same. The tech scene and the beer scene in Calgary are just beautiful.
Nic Beique (23:37):
And everybody wants to help out everybody else, right? And I literally asked, I’m like, how do you raise money from venture capitalists? How do you put a deck together? How do you pitch? And we learned how to do that. And ultimately just over a year ago in the spring of 2022, we raised a series A. We raised 16 million bucks from investors, just wonderful investors out of Toronto and New York. And that’s really helped us kind of like you just propel our growth.
Clayton Achen (24:06):
Yeah, sure. I host a 3to5 Club, CEO mastermind at my office here for a few years. And this month we’re talking about cashflow and understanding your cashflow and collecting faster. And it came up about growth and how you go through your stages of your relationships with your P and L and your cash and everything. And once you get to this stage that you just talked about, this growth stage, it’s like that’s a really scary stage, particularly you’ve been sort of doing it for a decade it sounds like, internally financing this whole buildup, and you hit it right on the head, which is if you’re growing too fast, excuse me, and you’re undercapitalized, that can be scary. You can run out of cash fast growth is very expensive, right? So yeah. Yeah. It’s super interesting to watch the ebbs and flows of business. You go, Hey, I got all these sales happening in a lineup of new business and yet I have no cash in the bank. Why is that? Well, you need to hire new people. You need to build new systems and the new programmer and the C F O and all the things that cost money,
Nic Beique (25:12):
It’s one of those things where I think the advice I wish I had learned earlier was that there’s different types of capitals for different types of businesses and phases, and there’s pros and cons to all types of capitals, whether that’s private equity or debt financing or venture capital or loans for the bank or whatever is the case. But they do have their place, they each have their place in the market, and it’s important for you to understand what does your business actually need? What kind of capital does your business actually, where are you actually at? And I think I didn’t know that when I was a few years back and I was like, you end up wasting too much time talking to the wrong people and not knowing what you’re trying to do. And ultimately, when you have that haha moment of like, okay, this is how their model works, and this is the type of busy and there’s the alignment, you’re like, okay, that’s what I do. Yeah,
Clayton Achen (26:04):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. What else would you say through what are your big AHA moments that if you’d have just known it from square one, you could have just leapfrogged a couple of years of learning, right?
Nic Beique (26:15):
I’ll give you two. The first amazing advice I got from a Canadian expat, so Dave McJanick, who’s the CEO of a tech company in California, and he said, no, your job as a top executive is to always identify which phase your business is at. And he’ll say, because a lot of times you’ll get great advice, wrong phase. So you’ll read a book. So I’ll give you an example. You’re trying to out how to build a customer service team and you’ll pick up a book on it and there’s all these great examples and this is how you build it. And then you try it and it falls apart and you’re like, what happened? And you get really frustrated and it took six months on, but if you step back and be like, maybe that was the right advice, but it was for the wrong phase of your business.
(27:01):
Your business wasn’t big enough to incorporate these kind of processes. So I think it’s always what phase are you in right now? And match the advice to that phase. Because a lot of times if people will be like, oh, well I did this and I did that and this work and this didn’t, but they might’ve been at totally, might’ve been much smaller than you, or they might’ve been much bigger than you, and no matter how good you try to execute on it, it will not work. So I think that’s identifying what phase your business is at and then matching the advice and the execution to it.
Clayton Achen (27:31):
I love that. For years we tried too. I was reading all these, Alan Mulally saves Ford, that book’s called American Icon, by the way. It’s a good one. But it’s like, okay, I’m going to read about how Alan Mulally saved Ford in 2006 and try and apply some of that to my business. And all I actually needed to do was hire more people for things to start working properly. And so you go, Hey, we’re going to execute all this, and everybody’s going, no, we don’t have time for any of that. Right, exactly. We weren’t at the right place.
Nic Beique (28:02):
Right Advice, wrong phase, right? So what’s number two? Number two I found that to kind of jump to cut, not cut corners, maybe skip some of the hard lessons, the hard I call ’em tuition, the hard tuition payments that is sometimes a 30 conversation with somebody that’s done. It will give you so much insight. So for example, we are scaling out our, I’ll give you a more specific example. So we’re scaling out, we have a fraud and risk team. So we are a financial service. We have fraudsters applying to us, we have merchants that are getting over their skis and we’re constantly monitoring our transactions and making sure that we’re protecting ourselves and protecting our merchants. And so we’ve grown an organization, it’s gone to over a dozen, but now I’m going like, what’s next? How do I build this org structure further?
(28:56):
And so what I do now, whenever I start running into these questions is I go, who’s done it? And I go to my network and I go like, Hey, say somebody that’s worked at Square, somebody that used to work at Wave or name a business, or it could be in the same industry. It could be as something else and be like, can I get an intro? Can I pick somebody’s brain for 30 minutes? And people are actually pretty open with intros. And then I usually go in with a pretty specific question. For example, I’m, I’m trying to build org structure for this department. I have no idea what it looks like. I have no idea what they should be focused on, what kind of talent it should be looking at. So on how did you guys go about it? And then I just write a million notes for what I can get.
(29:42):
And you do that with a dozen people and all of a sudden you can look back and you can see some patterns and sometimes it’s actually like, oh, we actually are going in the right direction. Maybe the imposter syndrome is overweighted right now. Or sometimes like, oh my God, this makes a ton of sense and it would’ve taken us three hires and five different attempts to try to get to this. And you’re seeing the repeating pattern. So I’m a lot more comfortable at asking now, not pretending I know everything. I absolutely don’t. I’ve only built a business as big as it is today, and then not being shy to just go ask for, and it doesn’t have to be a whole afternoon of brainstorming. It gives usually 30 minutes and we’ll give you some pretty cool insights. And you do that with a half a dozen people and all of a sudden you come out on the other end and it’s like, I’ve got a direction, I’m going to go try something.
Clayton Achen (30:34):
Are you into Xero and QBO,
Nic Beique (30:35):
We are into Xero and QBO. So what we did is we actually built a great partnership with Xero late last year. And essentially what it came from is that they were really looking to offer more options to their customers and they were looking for something really specific, which essentially a payment facilitator, which is a fancy term in industry for somebody that can instantly deliver the service, that can do interchange plus pricing. Again, getting into terminology, but essentially that’s the type of credit card pricing structure we do, which is a lot more transparent and affordable and that had a great reputation as
Clayton Achen (31:13):
Opposed to what? Flat rate?
Nic Beique (31:15):
Flat rates, exactly like the 2.9% kind of thing. So a digital first processor, interchange plus pricing, great reputation, great customer service. Well, there’s really wholesome. So they got to finally landed on, they’re like, okay, you’re the one we’ve been looking for. And we just made a partnership with them late last year in across Canada US we’re super excited. We’re starting to build that out. So we’ve really worked on bringing our zero integration to the best it can be. And now it’s just like we’re so proud of it, the simple little wizard. And it even reconciles the fees on the other side. It’s super slick. We’re super happy with it, but then we’re like, okay, well let’s go build out a ton of relationships with accounting partners and bookkeepers. And the feedback we got is like, love what you guys built. Why don’t you guys put that level of effort on your Q B O side? And we’re like, got it. Okay, good feedback. So that’s the next evolution that we want to do in the second half this year is we have a basic integration. It doesn’t have the same tender love and care and precision as the zero one, but we’ve learned so much from it. We want to bring on both sides. So yeah, right on. It’s part of the journey.
Clayton Achen (32:34):
Do you foresee that being the main way that private companies, my customers, are going to find you, is through these integrations or are they out searching? Am I searching for ‘what integrates well with Xero’, or am I searching for, ‘I need a simple payment processor?’ How are people finding you and what’s my quickest path to finding you?
Nic Beique (32:52):
Yeah, I mean for us, the quickest path to finding us is doing Google searches. So a small business, whether that’s a dentist or a plumbing parts wholesaler is going, I’ve got a problem. I need to accept credit card payments. What are my options? I guess they’re square, I guess they’re stripes, I guess there’s an old school bank. I don’t feel so good about any of those. And then all of a sudden they discover us and whether that’s search, ss e o and review websites and so on. And then we really try to create our website so that what we have in mind is that if you’re a small business owner and it’s like 11:00 PM on a Saturday night, can you get everything you can out of this website and have enough trust and information that you can sign up instantly and go the next morning.
Clayton Achen (33:37):
The next morning?
Nic Beique (33:38):
Exactly right. So that the rates are on the website, the information’s on the website, the signup can be self-service.
Clayton Achen (33:46):
You have a great website!
Nic Beique (33:47):
Great. Thank you. Yeah, we’ve worked very hard on it. Your Many, many iterations. It’s probably version 22 at this point I bet. But it’s our biggest sales rep, right? I hate as a small business owner, when you’re looking for a service provider and you’re like, okay, this might do it for me, but you’re like, I got a call to get any information, or I’m going to get thrown onto a sales rep and I, they’re just going to give me the rate of the day as opposed to actually telling me how much this thing actually is going to cost me. And so we’re like, no, no, no. Let’s make it so that our team is there if you call ’em to talk to them, but let’s just make it so that merchants can just, they can open up man’s website, PayPal’s website, our website and be like, okay, this is the one. And kind of go,
Clayton Achen (34:31):
It seems, I mean you’re on iteration 20 plus, but it does seem so simple. It just do the great website from the beginning, but it’s wild how long it takes to, we’re constantly dealing with iterations on ours too. Yours is fabulous. And I see you’re doing recurring pricing, so I can put people on subscriptions and you can actually do inventory management.
Nic Beique (34:55):
There’s a point of sale system and a card present component to it.
Clayton Achen (35:01):
That’s pretty great.
Nic Beique (35:02):
One thing we try to do with the website is, and it’s actually comes from, I think the fact that English is my second language. I’ve been speaking it enough now that I feel obviously pretty comfortable with it, but I think it made me a good copywriter because it forced me to use something that was simpler, simpler words, simpler language, straight to the point. And even as my English got better, I kind of retained that. And that’s why I trained my team. I’m like, just pretend you’re explaining it to your aunt. She’s great. She’s starting a business. She’s not super tech savvy. Just write the copy and the websites and the headlines and everything for
Clayton Achen (35:41):
Your aunt,
Nic Beique (35:42):
For your aunt. And they’re like, okay, got it.
Clayton Achen (35:45):
Yeah, that’s what, anytime we’re doing something for our customers here, I say, well, my grandpa’s got to be able to use it. So Right, exactly. Let’s keep it that simple. Last question and then I’ll let you go. I mean, you’d mentioned some huge growth in people. You’ve got a lot of, and I personally, I love adding people to the team. It’s kind of neat. You go, okay, we collectively are putting food on everybody’s table and it’s really neat. I get a huge reward coming in and seeing when more people work with us. And that’s fabulous, right? It’s really great. And so how do you at 150, we’re 18 to 20 depending on the day, 150. I mean, how do you keep your culture alive and what kinds of things are you doing differently from when you were at 40 compared to what you’re at 150?
Nic Beique (36:30):
Yeah, everybody warned me that the 100 mark gets really tough because that’s when you stop knowing everybody and you stop knowing even people’s names. You run somebody at the elevator and you’re like, I know you work here, but I dunno who you are. But then you’re really trying to create this super special place and how do you bring the two together? So we did a couple things. So we were super intentional about figuring out our culture. And I know that’s easier said than done, but if you go to helcim.com/the way.
(37:04):
So we decided to make our culture book public and we put on our job posting things and we really get people to consume it. And the way we look at it’s culture is a little bit like a flavor of ice cream is that every company is a little bit different, but problem is that you don’t always know what you’re going to get until you’re there. And when you go get ice cream, you get a sample and that’s great, and you’re like, you know what? I don’t like the mango one, but I like strawberry or whatever. So for us, we’re like, let’s really show everyone up front what kind of flavor of ice cream we are before they start with us. Some people are not going to resonate with it, but the people that this flavor are really going to like it. So first of all, that helps bring the right people in the door.
(37:46):
You lose control at a size, you lose control. You can’t be in every interview, so you’re really hoping that the right talent’s being attracted. And then communication. I started something during the pandemic and it was just as a way to try to keep the team together. We were about 40 people at the time, so it was much smaller. But I started something, this is the geeky side of me called the daily Captain’s Log, and it was essentially the Picard style captain’s log this day, this is what happened. And during the pandemic it was just to keep the team motivated, here’s what we talk to and here’s what we think’s happening and so on. So we turned that into a weekly new newsletter that I write once a week now or that the other executives help me write. And essentially it’s a super candid, here’s what’s happening, here’s the top of mind. But initiatives like that are so crucial when you get to a certain size where you can’t have that one-on-one conversation with everyone. So those are some of the things that we started doing. And we do a monthly town hall with the whole company. We get everybody in the room, and part of our policy there is we say anybody can ask any question. We do a QandA at the end and every question will be answered no matter how spicy. So just like that really intense. How
Clayton Achen (39:00):
Much did you make last year, Nicholas?
Nic Beique (39:04):
No one’s asked that one yet, but I’ve had people ask about unions or some spicy topics like that and we tell ’em when we’re not aligned with a certain decision or a certain whatever, but just being like, you know what? Let’s keep that level of transparency alive. You just have to commit to it as you keep scaling. If not, you’re going to lose that specialness that you’re trying to create
Clayton Achen (39:31):
Good ideas. I’m probably going to use a lot of the stuff that I’ve learned in this one. I want to thank you so much for popping on and having this chat with me. I think a lot of people are going to find it very helpful. How do we find you and find your product, Helcim and where should we look for it? All that?
Nic Beique (39:48):
Yeah, I mean, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I’m really honored and thank you. In terms of having for the website.com, HELCIM.com. Merchants can find us there or just search for best payments company on Google and you’ll land on us. And then in terms of for myself, I have a policy for myself, which is like, I accept every LinkedIn request, so just Nick beak, find me on LinkedIn and send me a message and I’m happy to chat.
Clayton Achen (40:21):
Right on. I can confirm that your LinkedIn feed is an interesting place to be for a while too. So yeah, I appreciate it very much, Nic. We will have to catch up for a lunch or a pint soon and rap on more on payments for
Nic Beique (40:34):
I don’t think you’ve visited their offices yet, so come for a visit. It’s 150 people. The median age is 29 years old, so it’s a bunch of super young, driven Calgarians. It’s fun to see. So yeah, come by.
Clayton Achen (40:49):
Yeah, I’d love to do that. I appreciate that very much.
Show notes:
Helcim Merchant Services – Feel Good About Your Payments
