Good Neighbor Podcast: TN-WNC-SWVA
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Good Neighbor Podcast: TN-WNC-SWVA
EP# 129: Transforming Side Hustles into Success: Dustin Magaziner's Paybright Journey in Payment Processing
What makes Dustin Magaziner with Paybright a good neighbor?
Discover the extraordinary journey of Dustin Magaziner, the entrepreneurial mind behind Paybright, as he transforms a college side hustle into a powerhouse in the payment processing industry. Join us as Dustin unravels the common myths surrounding payment processors, highlighting the crucial distinction between those who prioritize profits versus those who genuinely care about small businesses. Learn how Paybright stands out in a competitive field dominated by giants like Square, Stripe, and PayPal, offering a personalized and heartfelt approach to their services.
Facing the challenges of rapid growth, Paybright's story is a testament to the importance of strong infrastructure and innovation. From shipping terminals out of a college dorm room to managing up to 100 accounts daily, Dustin shares insights on maintaining exceptional service amidst an influx of new customers. By revamping their deployment processes, Paybright now boasts same-day or next-day shipments, setting a new standard in the industry. This episode is packed with inspiration and practical advice for any entrepreneur dreaming of scaling their business while delivering top-tier service.
To learn more about Paybright go to:
Paybright
(856) 904-6561
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Skip Monty.
Speaker 2:Well, hello everyone, and welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. We've got a very interesting guest with us here today on this episode, and so I'm very interested to hear all about him and his company and what they do, and I'm sure you will be too, because today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, mr Dustin, magaziner of Paybright Dustin, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me. Really happy to be here.
Speaker 2:Well, we're thrilled to have you with us and, as I said, I'm intrigued. I did a little reading on your website and was really interested in what you're doing. So, if you don't mind, why don't you kick us off by telling us about your company?
Speaker 3:we're a payment processing business. Right, it's what I know everybody listening to this grew up wanting to do and is jealous of what I get to do every day. But in all actuality it's a business that I fell into in college. I went to college in South Carolina Greenville, south Carolina, so in the upstate and kind of fell into the payments industry. And here I am, 12 years later still doing still in this business Very different today than it was then, but same business nonetheless.
Speaker 2:I'm sure, I am sure. So you touched on this, but how did you, how did you land in the payment business?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I mean, the short answer is it was a side hustle. Really. I needed to make about $100 a month to cover my fun expenses while I was in college, right? So this business was genuinely started with a $100 monthly revenue goal, which, of course, continued to grow. But I was looking to make a little bit of money and kind of found an opportunity to sell merchant services. I didn't know what merchant services even meant or was, went out and started talking to some businesses and just coincidentally happened to be a little bit better at it than I think I would have expected.
Speaker 2:Wow, and here you are. Here, I am there, you are here, I am there, you are.
Speaker 3:Well, Dustin, what are some myths or misconceptions in the payment arena? There are a lot, and I think it depends on the angle right. There's those that utilize our services, right, Business owners, and maybe misconceptions that they have. And then there's people within the industry, right, and so these are individuals who sell merchant services for a living and there are misconceptions on that side of things. Of course, they are different misconceptions, but looking at it from the business owner perspective, one of the big misconceptions is that not all processors are equal.
Speaker 3:There is no benefit to doing business with the, you know, the big Goliaths of the world, right, the banks or these publicly traded companies. They don't know who you are. They probably I hate to say this, but they probably don't care. The decisions that they're making about your financial, you know situation are being made on a spreadsheet in a boardroom by, you know probably, some you know financial individual and not somebody who actually is in this, you know, because they care about small businesses and small business owners. I know when I was out selling on the street and we hear this from our sales reps all the time. You know, one of the common things you hear from business owners is that all processors are the same, and I think the way I like to think of it is that a lot of processors are the same, but there are a handful of us out there that are not, and those are the ones you really want to be with. You want to look for the few that are in this for the right reason, who are going to care about your business and deliver. The same way any of us would want the level of service that's deserved.
Speaker 3:On the business side of things, there are also misconceptions that's deserved On the business side of things. There are also misconceptions Really referring to people that sell merchant services for a living, and some of the misconceptions there is that you, for example, shouldn't read the agreement you're signing. You should or that maybe the company that you're signing up with isn't willing to consider a red line to the agreement. These are things that are critical if you're getting into this business, because, unfortunately, a lot of what you're looking for is reasonable and you're probably not going to get a lot of pushback if the company's reputable. So there are a lot of misconceptions. I could probably take up the entire time with that topic, but those are some easy pointers.
Speaker 2:Very good, Very good. So you compete with PayPal, I guess To some extent.
Speaker 3:I would say PayPal is not really our main competitor. I would more so in terms of name brand companies. Say we compete with all of the large banks. Right, banks are probably one of our largest competitors. And then there's some other well-known processors like Square and Stripe, as well, as you know, toast. These are companies that are probably more direct competitors to us than PayPal. Paypal, yes, is in the payment processing business, but they tend to work with much more, you know, peer-to-peer transactions, of course, in the product they own in Venmo, but also in, you know, smaller businesses generally. Paypal has some very large customers. We would love to talk to those customers, but, as a general rule, we don't see PayPal as our largest competitor or our main competitor these days.
Speaker 2:Cool, you can still be the new, the next Elon Musk, though.
Speaker 3:I'm trying now. But yeah, they're. They're definitely in a in an industry that's competitive, just not not as directly competitive, so to speak, as, as like you know, the Wells Fargo's and the bank of America's, these big national banks, which which have a huge advantage. Right, a business owner goes to open up a checking account and the banker is going to say have you thought about your merchant services yet? And a lot of business owners unknowingly sign up and oftentimes aren't getting some of what they could get offered from a company like ours. Right, local support, somebody who's really going to take care of them in a lot of cases, usually better pricing and so on.
Speaker 2:Gotcha gotcha Well, dustin, you sound like you work all the time but outside of work if there is an outside of work, what do you do for fun?
Speaker 3:Well, we all know the saying right, if you love what you do for work, you're never working right. But, you know, I Do certainly like to relax when I can, my main outlet is to get into the gym. I really enjoy, you know, physical activity as a way to relax. I think my main outlet, when I can find the time, is I'm really into jujitsu, brazilian jujitsu. It's something I've done now for I want to say, seven or so years since 2016. So maybe eight years at this point, or so years since 2016, so maybe maybe eight years at this point. Um, you know, so it's, it's a lot of fun. Um, for those that may be listening that have, you know, done it before. Um, and I like to travel. Um, I've traveled more than probably the average person. Um, but, uh, you know, those are just a few things. Of course, you know, I love to hang out with my friends, my family and my fiance, and so, on.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, Good answer. Got to have the fiance in there, so let's switch gears for a minute. Can you describe a hardship or a life challenge that you've experienced and when you got through it you came out stronger on the other side? Does anything come to mind?
Speaker 3:Business related, I'm assuming, or just in general Either way. So on the business side of things, I mean, you know the last you know roughly year and a half has really been an interesting, you know kind of position for Paybrite. You know Paybrite has, financially and revenue and sales, been on this constant upward trajectory without really you know some of the interruptions or struggles from that side of things that a lot of businesses face, and so we've been extremely fortunate. The challenges I think that we faced have been on the operational side, right, Keeping up with this growth. I think we're in a really good position today, but you know, 2023 and parts of 24, we faced our challenges.
Speaker 3:It's no secret.
Speaker 3:I still think we were, you know, in the upper 70 or 80% of companies in our industry from a service level perspective, but my goal is being the top 1%, right, I'm obsessed with service levels and the level of support and solutions that we offer, and I think we dipped a little bit compared to where we were, and it was because we started having too many customers.
Speaker 3:And you know the reality is you can't artificially create infrastructure. You know, at the end of the day, there's this idea of tribal knowledge and experience and I can't hire 20 people tomorrow and have them have five years of experience working with us. There's only one way to get to five years of experience and that's actually doing the job right, knowing the industry and knowing our business. So you know, the only way to have dealt with this would have been five years ago for me to have foreseen the growth and hire people. We didn't need them to do the job we're going to need tomorrow. And so you know we're fortunately getting out of that, that rut, I think every every week that goes by, you know it's better and and our numbers show it, but it's, you know, the opposite of a lot of businesses. We haven't had really any sales issues or, you know, distribution issues, revenue or profit issues. It's been on the operational side and continuing to grow.
Speaker 2:Wow, pardon me, what a problem to have Too many customers. I don't think I've ever heard that before, but I'll give you an example.
Speaker 3:So when we first started I told you our goal was to. My goal personally, was to make a hundred dollars a month, right. By the time I made I remember I made $250 in time I thought I was rich, like literally that was. It was all disposable income. I was in college. I had no like real costs, like out of pocket costs, right. So disposable income. I thought I was rich.
Speaker 3:And so when we built certain things, just even from an infrastructure perspective, we're limited, you know, I'll just use deployment. So in the business I'm in we have to ship equipment to business owners, right, credit card machines, point of sale systems, the ability for them to take payments, and so, thinking about where we started, when we first started it was me in my dorm room or in my apartment in college literally started in the dorm room shipping terminals myself. And then we grew a little bit more and we started to, you know, have a deployment operation and the deployment operation that we had we continue to use now for several years after that, and that deployment operation was probably only built to maybe ship the equivalent of five to maybe 10 devices a day. Well, when you're only doing one or five a week, that's totally fine, you've got. You can 10X your sales, no problem. Well then we started doing 25 a day, and then 40 a day, and then 50 a day, and your entire infrastructure, from the space you have to the shelves to like all of this. The infrastructure itself doesn't support the business and so you can keep adding people, but it's almost like adding new tires to a really old car. That's kind of rattling and falling apart. It'll keep driving, but eventually it gets harder and you have more repairs and more challenges.
Speaker 3:And you know what did we do? Well, last year we completely redid our entire deployment operation, started over. I mean everything. And here we are and it is so much better. You know, we went from at the time three day deployment timeframe, sometimes four day deployment timeframes, which, for those that don't know our industry, obviously that doesn't mean a lot, but that's really bad right. That means a business signs up with us today and we can't get the terminal out the door for three to four business days. Then, of course, we got to wait on FedEx or UPS to deliver it.
Speaker 3:Now we're deploying almost everything within 24 hours, most of which is the same day of approval. So an account submits and gets approved today, in most cases it ships today and if not, tomorrow. That's where we need to be. That's, you know, very high-level service in our industry. That would be on the upper level of what our business I mean. You can't get much faster than the same day. So you know that's an example of a challenge we really had to deal with. You know it's easy to get lost in. Okay, well, we would love it to be in under 24 hours and you know we're just over that and okay. So now you get used to the new status quo, which is a day and a half. Then you get a little bigger and it becomes two days. It's okay, it's only a little bit longer than it was last week.
Speaker 2:Then you grow a little more and six months later it goes from two days to two and a half business days and slowly but surely you look back at where you were and you've drifted pretty far, wow. So, if you don't mind me asking, how many units can you?
Speaker 3:ship a day now? Oh, that's a good question. I would like to tell you that number is infinite. Obviously that's not true. There are, of course, limitations. I would say on a daily basis we could probably deploy upwards of maybe 80 to 100 units a day right now, under our current operational constraints. I should rephrase it's probably not units, that's probably accounts. Some accounts get more than one unit, but there are some easier pieces, like if I'm shipping five units to the same business, it's still one box, one label, right? It's not the same amount of work, but we could probably ship I would want to say somewhere on the high end up to 100 accounts a day, which would be a lot. I mean, that's 2,000 new customers, you know, getting equipment a month. Those are big numbers. So I don't think that that number is something we're going to have to worry about in the next. You know, two plus years. But if it is, it's of course what we all say. It's a good problem to have, but it's still a problem if you face that problem.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Wow, very impressive man, very impressive. So, pardon me If, dustin, if you could think of one thing, that you would like our listeners to remember about Paybright. What would that be?
Speaker 3:So you know I'm going to answer this in two ways, you know, based on who you may or may not be. If you're a business owner or somebody who knows business owners, which is probably most of you, check us out. We are really a great option. But, even taking out the shameless plug there, I would highly encourage working with a local rep for your merchant services. The value it'll bring to your business is tremendous. Whether that's a local rep for your merchant services. The value it will bring to your business is tremendous. Whether that's a local rep of paperites or not.
Speaker 3:If you find a reputable individual in your area that sells merchant services, you will have a better product, a better solution, a better representative and you are contributing back to your local economy. Right, somebody who is in your area is going to bring business back to you. It's a win win for those that may be listening that are in my industry. Somebody who is in your area is going to bring business back to you. It's a win-win For those that may be listening that are in my industry. I'd love to connect with you, right? This is what we do. We work with those that are in our industry, what we in the industry refer to as agents and ISOs. That's the backbone of our business. It's what's allowed us to grow to where we are and, you know, would love to personally or, you know, have my team connect with those listeners that may.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Now if let's say that it is somebody in your industry or not, how can they learn more about your company?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I mean, of course, anyone can go to our website, which, admittedly, has not been a priority. It's the same website I think we've had since, probably, college days. I think the picture of me is literally a picture of me from in college. You can see I don't look the same now as I did then. But you can go to our website. It's gopaybrightcom, but you can also, you know, reach out to our team.
Speaker 3:If you're in the industry, our email for you know, those looking to learn more, is relationships at gopaybrightcom. If you're, you know, prospective merchant right looking to learn more, you could, you know, prospective merchant right looking to learn more, you could, you know, reach out to that email as well and we'll put you in touch with a local rep. We only work through local reps in that area. So there's no 1-800 numbers. There's no you know, calling in and dealing with somebody in our corporate office or anything like that. It's. It's a local rep that's coming into your business, meeting you face to face. That's how we do business. It's the way this and it's how I started in this business. Right, it was all door knocking, going in and meeting people, shaking hands and building local relationships. So that's how we do it.
Speaker 2:Awesome. And what was that website? Again, Relations or email address. Relationships at gopaybrightcom.
Speaker 3:There is an S at the end of that relationships with an S at gopaybrightcom.
Speaker 2:Awesome, very good. Well, dustin, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time today. You're a busy guy. You work all the time. I read that on your website too but I really appreciate you being on the show and sharing all about your company with us and wish you and your fiance and Paybright all the best, moving forward.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I hope we can have you back on the show one day.
Speaker 1:Likewise, Thank you for listening to the good neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show. Go to GNP, try dash citiescom. That's GNP, try dashitiescom, or call 423-719-5873.