Season 7 Wrap-up (Episode 93)

[00:00:00] So protecting our data from a payroll sense

[00:00:03] and as a company or a payroll professional,

[00:00:06] you can't be all willy nilly.

[00:00:08] No.

[00:00:09] You can't send someone's PII personal information

[00:00:13] Yep.

[00:00:13] Via email unprotected.

[00:00:15] Yep.

[00:00:16] You can't send unsecured emails.

[00:00:18] Welcome to our podcast, It's About Payroll.

[00:00:22] We're your hosts, Brian Escobar

[00:00:24] and Walter William Duncan III.

[00:00:26] Whether you're new to the payroll game and all that, like sometimes my family don't mess it up and I'm like, that's nothing new in my head. Yeah, we have to, everybody's human, man. We're gonna continue to probably do it. And it's very easy to do because it's very similar. Man, it's been seven seasons, bro. Seven seasons we've been in at this, or closing in on our 100th episode.

[00:01:41] Think about that.

[00:01:42] Yes.

[00:01:43] And seven episodes are gonna be at 100.

[00:01:45] How are you feeling, man?

[00:01:46] How do you feel about that?

[00:01:47] Proud. huge gap in the payroll world where there just wasn't enough. And there still might not be enough creators out there, although there are a lot more now seven seasons later, right? Where we started this, right? We are trendsetters, right? We are pioneers in this. Because there was only like one consistent podcast before we started.

[00:03:02] And we know because we did the research, we were doing the and your team up and going in just minutes. Find out what a simply better solution can do for your business. To learn more and sign up for your 14 day free trial, go to www.timetraggo.com. That's www.timetrakgo.com.

[00:05:23] I've seen, and that kind of goes into the first question here.

[00:05:25] It's been seven seasons.

[00:05:27] What growth have you seen?

[00:05:31] So for me, number one is we've seen the podcast grow.

[00:05:32] Yeah.

[00:05:36] We've seen it grow like naturally and it's been growing very organically and steadily.

[00:05:37] Yep.

[00:05:40] And then another thing that I spoke to earlier is the community, bro.

[00:07:02] It's the connections that we've made, the that's been a part of the growth for me is that community. And then the last thing has been ourselves, man. I feel like we've grown so much and this is definitely pushing me from a personal standpoint, it's pushed me out of a comfort zone. I was, you remember when we first started this, I was saying like, we're gonna be exposed,

[00:07:04] we're gonna put ourselves out there.

[00:07:05] And I was the one who was a little bit more nervous

[00:07:08] about that, right? too low. It's not easy. I've been working at that skill and folks, you've even, oh, man, you got to rebalance and recalibrate and get back on it. So that's been my personal growth. We've each had our own, right?

[00:09:42] Yeah.

[00:09:42] Experiences in this personal growth, because like you said, it exposed our weaknesses.

[00:09:48] Yeah.

[00:09:48] Right? Because this was an established rock star payroll professional. I had already been following

[00:11:01] him on LinkedIn forever. Right? And for him to come really changed the game for us. That that's been something evolution wise, no challenges there. So the challenges there's just like evolving at those hitting those different crossroads and milestones and just you got to push through it. And like you said, get outside of our comfort zone. You like

[00:12:21] you noted here going into the unknown. This is we've never done that up. And so that's what I mean. That was some of the challenges. And it's not like hard stuff, but it's just like those different things and like navigating the avenues and creating the website and going through those different things and figuring stuff out. You remember the beginning when we sat down with Brian at Bigger Creative, and he was helping us go through and set this stuff up,

[00:13:43] making the brand, the re for a while. For years. Years before that, right? Because we knew each other for five, six, seven years before we started all this. And then, so then, so the boom, the business is going along.

[00:15:01] Then we started doing the podcast.

[00:15:03] So we picked colors and logo for the business but knows the branding and understands branding and has done it at a big level. And I said, damn, man, maybe boom. So that fast forward to where Walt is. Right. And we and we planned this rebrand. And Brian really helped us see like, you got two different things. You got to bring it together.

[00:16:20] And he was born. Right.

[00:16:23] It was so educational and eye opening.

[00:16:25] Right. Because we went into it not knowing.

[00:17:21] and our personal lives. And our personal lives.

[00:17:23] So it's sorting through all of that

[00:17:25] and making sure that we stay focused and honed in on this.

[00:17:28] And just being transparent, there

[00:17:31] have been moments where we've kind of fallen off a little bit

[00:17:36] and everything.

[00:17:36] And it's just like, OK, hey, we got to get back on.

[00:17:39] Brian is saying, hey, Walt, we got to get back on it.

[00:17:41] Or I'll say to Brian, hey, we got to get back on it.

[00:17:44] And those have been Part of the biggest part is time management.

[00:19:01] Time management, yeah, because we, oh,

[00:19:02] and let's clarify,

[00:19:03] because I feel like there's a great opportunity

[00:19:05] to tell payroll people what it's been And we have used people along the way to help us get better and vendors and this and consultants and absolutely But the full-time staff here is me and wall, right? So time management has been a thing but What we've learned how to podcast right? We've learned how to edit we've learned how to do these things

[00:20:21] And I love that. I love learning and then it's fun and this is cool

[00:21:22] I feel just so excited about that, right? Yes.

[00:21:23] Man, it's dope.

[00:21:25] And you can also go to these people's pages too.

[00:21:28] Yeah, follow them.

[00:21:29] Yes.

[00:21:30] Follow them.

[00:21:31] Go to their social media.

[00:21:32] Go to LinkedIn.

[00:21:33] And you can learn.

[00:21:34] They drop nuggets all the time about things.

[00:21:39] All the time.

[00:21:39] Please, check them out.

[00:21:40] One more thing I wanted to share.

[00:21:42] Yeah.

[00:21:42] For anybody interested, because we're

[00:21:43] talking about the social media.

[00:21:44] We're talking about this.

[00:21:46] And we're talking about how we have fallen off Thank you for that. And that's it, man. I think that's I think there. I think that's the what I wanted to leave this section off with is just like there's opportunity in the failure. There's this learning in that failure. Don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to do things. There's growth in failure. Absolutely, man. Absolutely.

[00:23:04] Now, folks, we're going to get you into season seven.

[00:23:07] We just gave you all what I hope is. So for me, that definitely stands out. What about you? It took me by surprise. We started off with cybersecurity. We plan to cover it for one true payroll crime all of them. Exactly. Remember that one stat that we heard is that 300% is that cyber crimes are going to increase by 300% by what they say, 2035. 2025.

[00:25:40] No, 2025.

[00:25:42] That's a year.

[00:25:43] So think about that.

[00:25:44] It's going to increase that much. realize that it had something hidden in the background and it's still there and folks can pull things like that where you unintentionally violate your cybersecurity policy and put your organization at risk. Yeah, yeah, it's been crazy. But the biggest thing for cybersecurity has been education.

[00:27:00] We have to stay educated.

[00:27:02] We have to make sure our folks are educated.

[00:27:05] And I believe that payroll and HR,

[00:27:07] any folks that are dealing with sensitive data that got hacked on one of the shows. Well, remember that the payroll company that got attacked, they were using a third party. A third party. From the US. Do you see how we're trying to just summarize cybersecurity and we're going down the rabbit hole. Because it's so important. It is so important for us. It's part of that data hygiene and all that.

[00:28:21] Yes, cybersecurity has been huge.

[00:28:23] It will continue to be huge.

[00:28:25] The number one weapon it out, Rick. Rick is our, how can we say business development consultant? And he's don't curse guys. And yeah, so the sponsors aren't going to want that. We'll keep it as clean as we can.

[00:30:41] It's amazing. It's amazing to be a part of that.

[00:30:43] And we're a part of that.

[00:30:44] Yeah, you're a part of that.

[00:30:45] Listeners, you're a part of that.

[00:30:46] And we all are going to have to grow and evolve as payroll grows and evolves.

[00:30:53] Otherwise we potentially could get left behind.

[00:30:56] Absolutely.

[00:30:57] Yeah.

[00:30:58] I don't know.

[00:30:59] Think about time track go.

[00:31:00] They're a time track company is 40 year old company.

[00:31:03] 40 years in the game.

[00:31:06] Yeah.

[00:31:07] Right.

[00:31:08] Shout out to time track go again. Amazing, bro. It was amazing. Speaking about the guests, right? What? David. David started starting with one of the most recent going backward. David Zareski, CHRO of salary.com, host of HR data labs. Check us out on hit their show in the next coming weeks, couple of weeks we post on.

[00:32:20] The 4th.

[00:32:21] It's going to be 4th.

[00:32:22] 4th.

[00:32:23] Yep.

[00:32:24] January 4th.

[00:32:25] We were guests on HR data labs and that was an amazing time. up with him and we're like, Hey, what advice would you give? But we always ask our guests, right? What advice would you give? And he said, there's no better place right now than payroll or HR companies are realizing the effect of people operations, the impact of people operations, what's the impact of payroll? What's the stat you have, right? Like 52%

[00:33:42] of employees are looking to leave if after the second check era.

[00:34:41] No, that was it. Yeah.

[00:34:41] And then, so one of our guests, man, special to me,

[00:34:45] Tabitha Brown.

[00:34:46] I actually went to middle school with Tabitha

[00:34:48] in Eden, North Carolina.

[00:34:51] And she honored us, we're coming on the show,

[00:34:54] and it was God.

[00:34:55] It was God, it was energy, it was the universe.

[00:34:57] I reached out to her on Facebook and been following her career

[00:35:01] for a long time.

[00:35:02] And I was finally like got the courage to be like,

[00:35:05] would you do this?

[00:35:06] And she was like, heck yeah the furthest from that, right? And we miss our friends, and this sad to us,

[00:36:21] and they hurt us, and I was like, dang,

[00:36:23] I kind of did the same thing.

[00:36:24] They blew up, and I was like,

[00:36:26] I'm not gonna what the concept tipped employees get a different minimum wage because of the expectation of tips. Right. But as restaurant waiters and waiters service If we're not healthy, right? If we haven't balanced out our mental, what is money? Money doesn't matter at that point, right? Our health comes first, our wellbeing comes first. And then we can be impactful in a monetary way. Just, oh man, I could go on and on.

[00:39:00] Let's just switch.

[00:39:01] She said a lot of the riveting stuff, right?

[00:39:03] She said a lot of great stuff.

[00:39:05] She is great, great personality, great heart. I don't want to get you out. Hey, wherever your gifts take. Oh, yeah. Look, you got to do. Yeah. And before you go to the next, hold on now. What I want to point out and why that is important to Wahl and why that even came up. And I let you listen to the episode to get it all. But Wahl also has this gift where he feels and sees.

[00:40:20] And he had a dream, basically, with Tabitha in it

[00:40:24] way before we even.

[00:40:26] Years ago.

[00:40:27] Years before we even anything. in my sense, to give you insight and prepare you for something. Right? The last point, well, thank you for putting that out there, sir. The last point, the last thing that stood up to me that Tabitha said is hiring the right team is everything. Yeah. Right? Because she even shared some experiences on the show briefly about people trying to steal from her,

[00:41:42] stealing from her and stuff like that, and everything,

[00:41:46] and somebody she trusted.

[00:41:47] You know what I'm saying? It's people. Yep. Yep. Yep. Even even. Well, first off, Becky and team were a great it was like first time we had such a big group on the show as well. I want to get them back one by one so we can drill into their skill sets and see how they like payroll. But we wanted to do something fun first to introduce the team. We had Becky on before as well. So she's a

[00:43:03] repeat is a second time Becky was on but we had her whole team on there. That was the they import your data into it. And even in historic payroll data, and it's a learning software. So it can learn your data and basically it will find errors that may have been missed in current payroll or historical payroll data. So I think that's fascinating for them to be able to say,

[00:44:22] hey, this is what we found.

[00:44:23] This is where you can approve your payroll

[00:44:25] to have the software. a payroll run, the whole run, not randomly, right? A check date or many, maybe a quarter. I believe you mentioned a quarter and running it through their AI, their software and what it does or one of the things cause I would imagine it does many things

[00:45:40] is it can point out outliers that you may have missed.

[00:45:45] You got three to, if you have thousands of employees, audit layers helps payroll teams identifying trends, finding inefficiencies and discrepancies that may not be visible on a spreadsheet, right? And that they can run hundreds of tests in one go to find miscalculated pays, unauthorized overtime, inaccurate deductions, etc. So there's so many different things that

[00:47:03] you can check because think about it. right? She said, put simply, you don't need to collect 100 invoices. You don't need to transfer 100 payments in whatever number of currencies, whatever number of payment methods. You have just one invoice, Transformify sits in the middle

[00:48:22] as an agent of record, mitigating all the compliance

[00:48:26] and risks and write the code for Buddy for the first version. And that right there, I stopped right there. I'm like, damn, all right. And I'm just like, I have so many questions for him from that, but he's building a payroll system in Malta and they're wildly successful.

[00:49:42] And he was willing to come on the show and talk about it.

[00:49:44] And we want to talk about things like

[00:49:46] from being from the island of Malta and stuff like that. and they crash. And our system's not working. There may be a glitch in their system. And you'll have to pivot and find a different solution along the way. Yeah. We got to persevere. Got to push through, right? Those challenges. Got to stay focused. Yeah, it's just like you were saying earlier. Don't get too high. Don't get too low.

[00:51:00] Don't get too low.

[00:51:01] Victory and defeat.

[00:51:02] Yeah.

[00:51:03] Stay balanced.

[00:51:04] Stay balanced, man.

[00:51:05] Where I'm taking it from the employer, the employee, and the payroll processor. Right? Without those three pieces, you can't have a good payroll. And he's absolutely right. Right? That's so it's like a different angle on it. And I love this. So we swapped our versions of what Holy Trinity is for me.

[00:52:21] Holy Trinity is HR payroll and finance.

[00:52:24] If HR payroll and finance can't work in lockstep,

[00:52:27] you're going to have the shows yet. We didn't do the shows. I really, I love the season and reviews. And then, so what's up? What about season eight, bro? What are we doing in season eight? Season eight, we're really gonna focus. Yeah, we're gonna focus in on the, bringing more attention to the younger people in payroll and bringing it to younger folks mindset,

[00:53:42] because as we know that the bulk of the people

[00:53:45] in payroll right now are probably around our age. degree. I think it could go all the way to master's degree. So we have a huge opportunity. And it's funny because I guess it might be, well, it's not funny really, but it's interesting because it might be a consistent thread across finance and financial world where You should be right. 48. We should be looking at retirement and start planning and God willing. You can retire young and enjoy life because retiring at 80 at 70 is not it.

[00:56:21] You know what I mean?

[00:56:22] That's a whole nother show.

[00:56:24] And that's the anticipation that like more of these people than not are not

[00:56:27] going to be paid doing youth we got some great surprises planned stay tuned for season eight folks yeah that's it right yep all right yeah folks we love you till the next time happy new year happy