The best content is money: Josh Brant

The CEO of Allegiance Merchant Services saw opportunities to apply technology to the movement of money by developing customized transfer services for companies. A one-size-fits-all approach may not work, he noted: “My daughter is three. She’ll never write a check. My mom is in her 70s. She’ll never pay with her watch.”

Transcript

Narrator:

Welcome to the Harbert College of Business podcast with your hosts, Sarah Gascon and Curry Dyess. Today's guest is Josh Brant, Co-founder and CEO of Allegiance Merchant Services in Charlotte, North Carolina. He's a 2001 Harbert graduate in Information Systems Management and a member of the college's advisory board.

Currie Dyess:

Josh Brant, War Eagle and welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today. You studied management information systems at Auburn University. How did that background influence your trajectory into the NT services industry?

Josh Brant:

So to begin with, I started in telecommunications and technology straight out of college, and then as I was in that business there was some convergence happening within a lot of spaces with technology and I wanted to find something that leveraged the content of technology, not just the technology itself. And through that found merchant services and figured that the best content is money. And if you could apply the technology to move the money better, faster, quicker, solve customer problems around the movement of money, that'd be a good opportunity there. For those unfamiliar with Allegiance Merchant Services, could you provide a brief overview of what that company does?

So at a very kind of fundamental level, we facilitate the transfer of a credit card payment. So as an individual or a business goes in to a retail establishment or they purchase something from another business and want to use our credit card, there's a company that needs to transfer money from the card holder to the business that they're purchasing the goods and services from. And that is what my company does is we facilitate that payment transfer in payment transfer. Merchant services industries gone through some significant changes over the years. How has Allegiance Merchant services are adapted to these ships? The biggest piece is we've, in the beginning we're very fortunate to be good at solving more difficult problems, and so we really try to find customers that have more difficult problems and we differentiate ourselves very well in that space. If customers send to have a little bit more simple problems, there's probably better solutions for 'em out there.

So we want to run to where the fight is. We want to run to where the more complicated problems are. And an example of that is a customer that their customers have multiple ways that they want to receive payment or to pay. And so some folks want to pay off of clicking an invoice and their email, others want to call in over the telephone, some people want to pay in person. So each one of those has a different set of criteria and complexity to it. And so finding those customers that have a lot of different ways that their customers want to pay them, things that we've used and what we've used technology to kind of leverage to help solve those problems.

Currie:

What are some of the common challenges businesses face with merchant services today and how does Allegiance address them?

Josh Brant:

That one is I think going to be different for every customer. I don't know if there's a common challenge. So I would probably say that the rule is an uncommon challenge and challenge within that is finding a company that can understand how to customize their approach and this solution to the particular problem or need that merchant has. So all too often there is a one size fits all and some of those are that work really well and the say the restaurant and the retail space. But as you get out of that, the requirements are quite a bit more customized. And so that is the challenge for the merchant is finding an organization and a company that can support them in those more challenging or custom approaches.

Sarah Gascon:

Where do you see the future of the payment processing industry heading? Especially since we have all of these blockchain and cryptocurrencies coming about and looks like maybe the landscape is they shift words towards

Josh Brant:

Those. I'll answer this way. My daughter is three and she'll never write a check and my mom is in her seventies and she'll never pay with our watch. So that's a way of saying there's a pretty long kind of timeframe horizon that there's not going to be any one thing that's going to changed everybody's behavior. All of these things, whether it be crypto or digital payments, payments, phone watch or other devices, they're all going to be slow entrance into the market and as customers and as users, but get more comfortable with those, then those are going to be what bribes the need for the merchant to be able to accept them. We help our merchants facilitate a whole host of acceptance options, and so it really is based on their customer need of their customer saying, Hey, I'd like my invoice email to me with a click to pay link. Then they get enough of those requests, then they want to deploy that technology for their customers. So it's pretty simple. I don't see any silver bullet so to speak, or any one thing that completely disrupts the system. It just doesn't happen. And I think that a lot of people have lost their enthusiasm on crypto and blockchain As the volatility has occurred over the last couple of years,

Sarah:

It seems like what you're saying is the business is pretty stable. And if that's the case, why do more people not pursue this as an entrepreneurial career path?

Josh Brant:

I think folks do from a career path standpoint, there's many opportunities within Allegiance and within the industry and whether you apply a sales engineering, an MISA logistics, computer science background, there's a lot of different opportunities, business development, marketing, so to speak, to create one. In today's world, I think it's quite a bit more complex than it was when we founded the company in 2011. And a lot of that has to do with compliance and payment security. Those requirements and the need and the threats have exponentially increased since 2011, and I frankly do not know how I would start from scratch today as we did in 2011. So I think that there are a lot of opportunities within the space, how you start something from a standing start, I think it's just quite a bit more complicated.

Currie:

Are there any innovative products or features Allegiance is currently working on that you could share with the

Josh Brant:

Listeners? Yeah, there's some that everybody may not be familiar with would be, there's a lot of access in the text to pay. And so if you're your air conditioner repair guide is at your Allison wants to send an invoice instead of sending you to email, they can do it right on their tablet or their device directly to the homeowner and they can click text to pay, whether it's integrated with their Google wallet or their Apple wallet on the phone. So those are some things that customers are using. The thing that we use most and most of our customers are adopting today, and this is within the context of business to business clients, which is the majority of our customers, is the compliance surcharge, dual pricing or what's called cash discounting. And that is taking the fee that merchants pay and passing that along to the cardholder.

And so I think everybody is getting the sense that hey, those points and all of those rewards that you have on your credit cards as a user, those come at a cost and that cost and those premiums are sent to the merchant. Well, there's some regulation that changed in the last four or five years that's opened up the opportunity to say, Hey, we are disadvantaging our cash or check customers by having a ubiquitous price across the board. And so to be able to level set that, we're going to pass on basically that utility or that premium to the cardholder, and most of our customers are adopting that technology that allows 'em to do that. So there's some states that they can do that in and that's where they need the right software to be able to determine where their customer is, where their cardholder is so they can make sure that they're compliant with those state regulations.

Sarah:

Josh, we are very deeply interested in leadership management, the C-suite, that's where you're at, man. What are some of the values and the vision that you aimed uphold with your leadership?

Josh Brant:

So I go back and can really contextualize a lot of things into the Auburn Creed. I believe in a practical world, and then therefore I believe in work, I believe in a hard work. So talking about an organization that the most difficult thing to do is to find and train and retain great people, finding those great people that live in a practical world that have practical expectations and work ethic. That's the challenging and the fun part. So that'd be number one. The second piece is I do think that as education or even parental advisors, I think that we've done really a big disservice to students and young people as they're developing their career aspirations and career path. And I say that in the midst of, you got to love what you do. And I don't buy into that at all. I actually think it's probably one of the most damaging thing we can tell a young person as they're trying to develop a career path.

I didn't have the option whenever I was going to college or finished up around high school years to focus on doing what you love to do. It was, Hey, I needed to survive. I needed to be able to earn to pay for books or pay for tuition. And then the graduation was a awesome event, but then you had to go out and you had to get a job to pay for it all, pay for the education, pay for the student loans, things of that nature. So the luxury of loving what you do isn't afforded everybody or being able to pick to love what you think the topic that you would love to do. And so the thing that I was able to adopt even as I was going through college and then shortly thereafter is it is not what you do, it's how you do what you do.

And you could always find where you are in life that if you can convert to focusing on how you do what you do versus what you're doing, you can love that process given, I don't know the career stats right now, but so many people, I think it's like 3.5 different careers through a lifetime. And that's not jobs, but that is an actual career I got, Hey, I am a underwater welder and now I am a teacher. Those two different careers. And so people, that is the average where people are changing. And so how do you know what you love in each one of those, right? I'm, I'm sure there's some attributes, but being able to apply how you do what you do and loving how you do and can transfer and transition to each one of those. So I think that we set people up for failure and for huge disappointment when they realized that they were working to be a marine biologist and when they get to SeaWorld, they recognize that they're just shoveling a bunch of dolphin poop and it's not as glamorous as they thought. And so I think that focusing on how we do what we do is way more important than having to necessarily love what we do.

Currie:

Well throughout your career, did you have any mentors or influential figures that significantly impacted your professional journey?

Josh Brant:

Oh, a ton. My very first one, I was a 13, 14 years old and I worked at a baseball card shop and I learned a lot about profitability and the need to know your inventory, and I used a lot of those just lessons still use 'em today. And so yeah, there's been several folks along the way that have pointed me in the right direction. I think if I look back and say, well, how was I so fortunate to find those people? And as I look to now mentor other people, it comes back to that Auburn Creed. I believe in work, I believe in hard work and I do believe that I've had that work ethic from the beginning. And when people see that you're willing to do the work, they're willing to invest in you. And so if somebody is saying, Hey, I just can't find a mentor, maybe there's some effort that you need to display to where people that are wanting to, many people that I have as peers and myself, I want to find people, but I don't want to waste my time either. And so people that are willing to put the effort in that are willing to take the hard knocks, they're the ones that somehow seem to find mentors pretty quickly.

Sarah:

Yeah, I agree with that. I think I always tell myself, if you're showing up and you're not taking no for an answer and you have the enthusiasm and you're learning, you're going to get attention and behind that, whether it's customers, mentors, coaches, the money's coming

Josh Brant:

And it doesn't really take that much effort to rise above the crowd. It's really, it's simple. We're talking three or four extra hours a week of effort. Maybe you easily can surpass whether you're putting that into personal, whether you're putting that into your craft and making more sales calls, but you pretty quickly differentiate yourself from everybody else. If I put one other thing, a third leg on that, it'd be consistency in that all too often people say, you know what? I worked really hard this week well and nothing that happened for me this week or this month, it takes a lot more than that. It has to be a lifestyle, it has to be consistent, and you don't know when that next opportunity, mentor sale job, where it's going to come from. So if you're going to commit to the Auburn Creed, you have to do it every day and just so happens that you get really lucky when you do.

Currie:

Can you share with us some pivotal moments or maybe some very difficult decisions you've had to make as A CEO that significantly impacted the trajectory of Allegiance merchant services?

Josh Brant:

When I first hear that question, I think, man, difficult after you go through it and you look back, it doesn't seem that difficult. So yeah, because you've done it right and so well that the situation you're currently in seems really difficult because you may not know exactly how you're going to get to the other side. So there's been some pivotal moments where, and one it was, I'll say that looking back was really understanding the stratification of our customer and understanding where we fit the best and where there was a good marriage between us and the opportunity. And when we first started the company in 2011, you take anybody and everybody a deal, a customer, a opportunity, you're hungry for it all. And I would say around the four or five year mark, we really started to stratify and understand the data in our customer base and understand the feedback we were getting from our customers and decided that it was time to focus in on the customers that one that were the most profitable, that where our team was geared to be able to solve their problems and where those customers had the highest rate of longevity.

And so we looked at the first last longevity piece, what customers are sustainable, and so customers in the retail restaurant space were the least likely for longevity, and so we didn't spend as much time in that segment. Then the profitability piece, well, what are customer types that appreciate high margin? Well, ones that have high margin themselves, so in those spaces, whether it be a law firm or especially medical or in business business that have high margin themselves, they want a higher value solution and they understand the expense of their time and that their time is more valuable than them adding on or thinking that they have to add on another expertise to their organization. So they partner with an organization like ours to be able to have that expertise and so they could dedicate more time and energy to what their core business is, which is the highest margin thing that they could do.

So that would be a moment in time where now it seemed very simple and obvious, but at the time it probably seemed very difficult to say, well, where should we be spending our time, money, and resources? Where are we the best fit? I'll caveat the one that's probably the comment for everybody. Mark 17 of 2020, what do you do? That's the one that I remember calls with peers, business peers in all industries, and nobody really knew exactly what to do and there was no charted territory, but everything seemed to work out and for the payments business, it accelerated a lot of the technologies that we were already speaking to our customers about where they needed to be able to process whenever you were in front of somebody all the time. And so there was a lot of action around that on accelerating those items that we've been speaking to our current customers and new customers for some time.

Sarah:

Josh, you've climbed the ranks from the time that you were at Auburn University studying MIS. Now you're at the CEO of Allegiance Merchant Services. What advice would you give to young professionals looking to carve out a similar career path as you

Josh Brant:

The broke record pieces, the work, the hard work. If seven to seven working half day Saturdays, that scares you. Don't set yourself up for it. I mean, I don't set you an expectation for it. You could be one of the lucky ones and find this really interesting kind of lane or path like a lottery ticket that wasn't mine. I've had this philosophy after failing quite a bit early on in my career that there was another path to go and it was called the get rich slow scheme, and when you didn't try to have to hit a home run every single day, but you knew that you had a goal that you could break into smaller parts and you just start doing the work for solving the problem bit by bit, so you got to be able to do the work. You can't be scared of seven to seven and some Saturdays, and the expectation that there is a fast track to it. Once I dropped that, it seemed to then just get more comfortable and was able to just put in the time.

Sarah:

I think everybody can grasp the idea of hard work being the seven to seven and work in some Saturdays, and really I think what I'm hearing is that is the price of admission that's just getting in the door. Are there some other things that you would classify as hard when it comes to making this work?

Josh Brant:

No, I wouldn't say it's hard. I think that it is time and what is hard is what you sacrifice along the way. Those are the things that I would say would be hard, but you are financing your time somehow are either using it today for leisure or non-core business activities or you're using what you could have later and anybody in finance one-on-one, the more you could put in the market in the beginning and allow that to grow over time, the more that will compound well just as it happened. It works with money. It also happens with your time and your effort, and so the more time and effort you can put in the beginning, that will compound and will give you back a rate, a greater rate of return on your time later. And so there's things that I could do today. I graduated Auburn in 2001 that I wouldn't be able to do if I didn't put that time in the beginning, and so I have an abundance of time now that I can do what I choose to do. Most of it is still within the business world, but it just looks different than it did then had I not done that in the beginning, I wouldn't have that luxury, and I do think I consider a luxury and a blessing to be able to do that today.

Currie:

That's really great advice. It's been a pleasure having you with us today. How can our listeners get in contact with you or follow your journey?

Josh Brant:

Josh@algs.com. Probably the best way to be able to get ahold of me.

Sarah:

Josh, thank you so much for your time. You've really provided a lot of insight into the industry and our listeners are going to be able to take away so much business utility here. Thank you so much again. War Eagle.

Josh Brant:

War eagle. You guys have a great one.

Narrator:

Harbert, Inspiring Business.