Dean Mathews - On the Clock

On Watching Your Numbers: "They just realized that their sister in law who's been working for them for 10 years has been adding 10 hours onto every pay run for the last 10 years."

Dean Mathews, CEO of On The Clock, shares his journey as an entrepreneur and the evolution of his timekeeping software. He emphasizes the importance of building a people-centric culture, the challenges of managing hybrid teams, and the significance of customer service in differentiating his business in a crowded market. Dean also discusses the future of On The Clock, including plans to integrate HR solutions and enhance their payroll services.

Visit Dean at: https://ontheclock.com

 

Podcast Overview:

00:00 Introduction to On the Clock and Dean Mathews

02:55 The Journey of a Serial Entrepreneur

05:56 Transitioning Technology: Moving to Modern Solutions

08:48 Building a People-Centric Culture

11:59 Career Advancement in Small Teams

14:55 Understanding Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

17:48 The Importance of Culture in Modern Workplaces

20:57 Navigating Hybrid Work Environments

23:53 Fostering Team Interactions and Communication

26:58 Management Style and Learning from Experience

29:51 Insights from 'Scaling' by Claire Hughes Johnson

31:18 Effective Communication and Team Dynamics

33:01 Navigating a Crowded Market

35:58 Customer Service Excellence

41:06 The Importance of Payroll Solutions

46:48 Common Mistakes in Timekeeping and Payroll

51:46 Proactive Business Management

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Podcast Transcription:

Dean Mathews [00:00:00]:

Tracking payroll, all of those things are very complicated things to do. One of the most common mistakes we see people do is they try to do it themselves, like with a spreadsheet. If your business grows and you end up, you know, like Most businesses do, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 people, and you're still trying to use spreadsheets and not use a system that ends up in a really bad place. You don't have audit logs for traffic, you know, for, for, for history. You don't have compliance, you know, you don't have transparency a lot of times. So you lac of these modern features where, you know, you choose a system like us and like everything's right here in your phone. That's probably the biggest mistake is they're either choosing the wrong system, not choosing a system at all, or they're trying to like, leverage a spreadsheet or a word doc or a Google Doc to run their business. And that, that never turns out well.

James Kademan [00:00:54]:

You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link [email protected] we are locally underwritten by the bank of Sun Prairie Calls On Call, Extraordinary Answering Service as well as the Bold Business book. And today we're welcoming Slash, preparing to learn from Dean Matthews from On the Clock. So, Dean, how is it going today?

Dean Mathews [00:01:21]:

It is going wonderful, James. Thank you so much for having me. I can't wait to chat with you.

James Kademan [00:01:26]:

Yeah, you know, I'm excited to talk to you for a few reasons. One, you've been in business seemingly forever, so that's.

Dean Mathews [00:01:33]:

Yeah.

James Kademan [00:01:34]:

And the other is you seem to be pretty people centric, which is great, and I'm gonna dare say rare. And on top of that, you run a service, the timekeeping system, I guess that we. My gosh, when I was looking for a timekeeping system forever ago, it was bizarre to me how few options I found that actually could do all of the things.

Dean Mathews [00:01:59]:

Yeah.

James Kademan [00:01:59]:

And I'm like, I'm not asking for a rocket ship to the moon or anything. I'm just literally asking to keep track of employees hours. That's all I want.

Dean Mathews [00:02:06]:

Yeah.

James Kademan [00:02:07]:

So how about you? Let's just start from the very beginning, right back at the dawn of time.

Dean Mathews [00:02:11]:

Dawn of time.

James Kademan [00:02:12]:

When did you get started with? On the clock?

Dean Mathews [00:02:14]:

Yeah. So I'll give you the quick rundown. So I'm kind of a, I guess you call it a quote unquote, serial entrepreneur, if you will. Quite A few startups, businesses, side projects, passion projects throughout the years. But with on the Clock back In like the mid 2000 era, I had several projects, passion projects going on. On the Clock was one of them. I'm always looking for problems that I can solve. So this is the kitchen story or the kitchen table story.

Dean Mathews [00:02:49]:

This was late 2003 ish. So like 20 some years ago now, sitting at the kitchen table, looking through forums, business forums, remember those business, small business accounting forums. And I saw this trend of all these small business owners and accountants in this forum, just talking. I just looking for something simple, something like you just said, that works well, something that can track my employees time. And I want it online and I want it easy and I want it reliable. That was their two requests. So I was sitting there and I was reading that and I'm like, I'm going to build that for them. So I'm also a software developer or in a former life I was a software developer.

Dean Mathews [00:03:34]:

So I set out to build it and pretty much within a couple months we actually had on the clock running. It was very simple, very bare bones, but it was up and running. Employees could clock in and clock out, managers and admins could get time for payroll. And it was really just a passion project at that time along with, you know, several others. And kind of fast forward to right around 10ish years ago, it had just been kind of organically growing on its own. Like I said, it was more of a side project. But about that 10ish years ago, Mark, really it started, started getting to the point to where I couldn't ignore it anymore. So decided to go all in with on the Clock and want to just focus on one thing really, really heavily and put all my energy into it instead of half a dozen or a dozen different projects.

Dean Mathews [00:04:26]:

So focused on that and decided to turn it from a passion project to a real business. Got it into an llc. My brother Mark was also interested in doing some of these things so got him to come on board. And we hired our first employee, Samantha. She's still with us today. She's actually moved up a lot in the tier. She is now product owner. Super proud of her.

Dean Mathews [00:04:52]:

And so now we're sitting where it's 22 of us total and we serve about 18,000 customers, mostly here in the United States.

James Kademan [00:05:00]:

Yeah, 18,000.

Dean Mathews [00:05:01]:

18,000. Yeah. It's crazy.

James Kademan [00:05:04]:

Holy cow.

Dean Mathews [00:05:04]:

That is a.

James Kademan [00:05:06]:

That's a pool and a half.

Dean Mathews [00:05:07]:

Yeah, it's a. Yeah, two and a half pools.

James Kademan [00:05:10]:

So crazy.

Dean Mathews [00:05:11]:

Yeah, it's kind of crazy when you Step back and look at it and. But you know, it goes to show you, you know, you put your effort and your time and your energy into something and it can pay off, it can turn into something big.

James Kademan [00:05:22]:

Yeah, yeah, Tell me a story. You were doing software before you said so were your other passion projects software based?

Dean Mathews [00:05:30]:

Almost all of them were, yes. So built a kind of like an online survey type tool similar to like a survey monkey where you could ask different surveys. Had a database type tool where you could just create a database for anything you wanted to contacts customers, sales online. Started that one, had another payments processing, a business to business payments processing, Ach type solution. Those are two or three of the ones that I started. There was a couple others as well. They kind of, some started, some really took off, some didn't, some just kind of floundered. But yeah, so I always had that entrepreneurial spirit, just wanting to do something big, you know, just make a change, something I could just stand on and, you know, just be happy with.

James Kademan [00:06:18]:

Yeah, it's interesting, I had another guest on the show, I don't know, fairly recently and he said all we want to do is sell usernames and passwords. So I feel like you're, you're in that world, which is pretty good world to be in.

Dean Mathews [00:06:34]:

Yeah, yeah.

James Kademan [00:06:36]:

Tell me a story as far as the back end goes, because programming languages that were popular 20 years ago are not necessarily the same now. So has your platform shifted or had huge rewrites or anything over the course of the past couple decades?

Dean Mathews [00:06:52]:

Yeah, from a technology standpoint, the technology we wrote it in, you know, 22, three years ago now is an older technology. Right. And it, it still worked, but you really have to keep up with the times. You can't just sit on these older technologies. You know, developers aren't versed in them anymore, they're inefficient. And the new technologies have so much more to offer for our customer experience. So we started a venture about three years ago, ish, where we called it Move and Improve, where we pick off a couple pages, a couple screens at a time and move those over to the new new technology. So now as of the turn of this year, there's just a couple little pieces we're picking up now, but we are going to be 100.

Dean Mathews [00:07:41]: