Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: This is Payments Ground Game, where we go under the operational hood of payments isos. Let's take a deep dive into the tactics you can use to strategically scale performance and your bottom line.
Hi, I'm here with Kevin Smith. I'm Elena Smith. We're here for another episode of Payments Ground Game. And today we have a special guest with us, Evan Wayne, who is president and COO of Order.
Order is an ISV relationship that we've been doing business with and we thought it would be an interesting episode just to get into the details of some of the things that we've experienced in this relationship because it's a little different than our other ISV relationships and that it might be insightful in the way that the needs that ISVs have compared to the other types of business that we do. So I'm going to hand it over to Evan and introduce. Evan, thank you for being here with us. And I'm going to let you tell us a little bit about Order.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. I'm super excited. You know, I get to try and be an Internet celebrity with the podcast, so I'm super excited, Jack, to be here.
Yeah. So my name's Evan and I'm the co founder as well. For Order and Order is on track to becoming the a premier payments solution for live experiences.
And we cannot be more happy with where we're going and how we have really exploded in growth over the last six months here since we announced two major partnerships at the end of 2024.
Yeah. So happy to be here.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: I think it's so fun that you guys are in the sports entertainment realm. It's fun for us. Certainly this is something that we don't normally work in.
What inspired the idea behind the platform? How did you kind of get into this vertical? Tell us a little bit about that.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: So this has been a journey that started about four years ago. And to. To be frank, the. The original vision was I wanted to get a frosty beverage in my hand without leaving my seat at a game. So I'm the type of person who never bought anything, never of them tickets whenever I've gone to games. So for me, it was a lazy motivation. I just didn't want to get up out of my seat.
But as we went through the sports and entertainment market, we. We found out that there's a lot of issues that were, to be fair, a lot larger than what I was trying to solve and quickly discovered that either through integration requests or just I don't need another payment system that there's A lot of payments and point of sale systems that aren't designed to capture the whole vertical of live experiences.
And started building other tools like point of sale and kiosk and kitchen management, but also partnering with folks like Secure Bank Card and being able to provide payments and consolidate a vendor relationship from what's usually around seven or eight different providers into one provider. And from there taking all the payment data has been something that teams have been looking for and screaming for for years and we've been able to solve that.
[00:03:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's really neat. Evan, you guys came to the table and you guys were describing what you were doing and it was like, click. I mean, wow, you guys taking the data and correlating it back for these teams so that they can look at, you know, hey, what else did this same person purchase while they were here for this experience? And how can we, you know, how can we utilize that data from kind of a data mining standpoint to help these teams better under, better, you know, educate themselves on how to market, who to market to, et cetera. And I think you guys, you know, putting that all together, it's, it's an amazing deal that you've come up with.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. It's been a lot of work and a lot of people put into it, so I, I have a hard time taking any credit. I'm a polite Canadian, as you both know, but, and so taking credit isn't necessarily something that comes natural to me personally, but it's a, it's been a great learning experience and seeing how we can best improve the fan experience. And it's honestly through that data, there's a lot of programs that teams utilize today like loyalty or opt in programs or subscription accounts or user apps trying to capture and data, but all of them have increased friction in compared to the base behavior of a payment.
[00:04:52] Speaker C: Well, I think it's also interesting. I mean, you guys came in, you said, hey, we're going to go out and we're going to talk to this team, we're going to talk to this team, we're going to talk to this team.
And you know, I've been doing this for more than a couple of days and I'm going to be quite honest with you, in the very beginning I'm kind of like, okay, these guys are trying to get their grips on payments and yet they're going to go out and get some of these big organizations to switch their payments over to them. I thought that was going to be quite the, quite the reach.
But you guys, wow, you have come through Holy smokes. Just to give everybody an idea. Some of the clients that, you know, Evan and Order have signed are the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Las Vegas Golden Knights, the US Fencing Organization, the Chicago sky, just to name a few. And, wow, you guys were able to get in there quickly. You were able to get in there and get their attention, and you were able to get them moved. I was going up against, you know, what are generally some powerhouses in the industry.
My hat's off to you. Holy smokes.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you for that. Like, I owe a lot of that to our team. I help where I can. I'm pretty humble. I'm not going to say that I haven't contributed, but we have a phenomenal team and leadership within Order that have come from sports and entertainment that allowed us to, say, jump the line in terms of getting into the conversation.
But once teams discovered what we're offering and what we have in front of us, it's been a lot easier of a conversation than you would think.
[00:06:30] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I would agree. I think that, you know, once you guys got the first one on, it was really kind of amazing. I didn't realize how much communication is not just in a particular sport, it's in the sports industry, so to speak.
[00:06:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Like our CEO, Ryan Bod, he was for close to seven years, the CRO for Sodexo and running on Sodexo Live. And they were one of the. Yeah, one of the largest providers in that space, I believe. It just had the Paris Olympic Games, if I remember correctly. And our Chief business officer, Dr. Dan Kaufman, comes from the NFL.
He. His most recent position was with the New Orleans Saints as well as Pelicans.
And just not only that understanding of how the industry works, but the connections and who to talk to and how to work the deals have been invaluable.
[00:07:26] Speaker C: I think it's amazing. I think, you know, a lot of the things that people that are listening to this are going to get out of this is, hey, you don't have to be afraid to go after some of these large organizations. You know, you can compete. It's not just about price. And I think, you know, you guys have done a great job of that, making it not about price. It's about what are you bringing to the table? What is it that your solution is going to do that others cannot.
And it's led you guys quickly to some large wins.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Absolutely. It's providing service. It's providing a platform that makes their life easier. Nobody. Nobody wants to have a more difficult job. And it's a. It's a multitude of factors, but, yeah, it's one of the biggest lessons I've had since I started my entrepreneurship journey is everybody is a person, and that seems really basic, but it doesn't matter who they work for. It could be the biggest organization in the world, but at the end of the day, everybody's the same. We're all people. We all have our own motivations. We want to look good at work, we want to go home, support our families, meet our goals, and if you can make their life a little bit easier, they're going to be willing to talk to you. So just talking to people and putting yourself in space has been probably my biggest takeaway in my entrepreneurial journey.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: I love that because I think one of the reasons you guys have had so much success is that many of these payment operations for these teams have been with these large legacy providers and haven't been touched or looked at or revisited for so many years. And so maybe they have a relationship manager or somebody that, you know was managing this, but they didn't have a lot of access to. To Q and A if they needed it. They weren't giving them a lot of insight into the payment operations. They weren't giving them a lot of recommendations on what they could do to maybe optimize their payment operations. And once you guys came in and peeled back that layer and offered that service, I think that's one of the big reasons you've been so successful, because that's something that doesn't really exist at the, what I like to call the ginormous payment processor level.
When you get to that level, those providers can be great, but they can sometimes be clunky because the service just isn't there often.
And they don't care whether you're, you know, optimizing interchange or not.
It doesn't really hurt them very much. They just don't really spend the time to dig in and take a look at it. So I think that's one of the reasons that you guys have really excelled and been able to provide such great service compared to what they had before.
But you were talking about, we're talking about gaps that you're able to fill with order, and you reference kind of the reporting consolidation that they didn't have before. So unifying the experience across all the things that happen in a sports entertainment event.
And I think that's part of what you guys try to accomplish. What were the other gaps that you saw that were missing that you were able to address? With bringing your software into the picture for these teams.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: Yeah. So obviously reporting is something that is really important to teams. Oftentimes they have a lead report that they have to send out the next day. And with these events happening at usually in the evening, that becomes a bit of a logistical nightmare. Coordinating people, consolidating accounts. So you did like we did touch on that in terms of other gaps that we provide. It's being able to have an active stance of an active participant, Being able to shed new light on existing systems has been another area of value that I wasn't necessarily expecting. But when you think about some of these agreements, some of These agreements are 20 years long and you have full careers that have happened in the time of these agreements. And so when even just as the simple, or what you assume would be as simple, we understand how to switch a payment system to a different provider.
There's institutional knowledge across multiple vendors. They just, they don't know how to do that.
They haven't had to switch a payment provider because these agreements have just been so long. And so being able to help all sides of the equation, ourselves, the ticketing platform and the team know how payments work better, know how to optimize set up, know their own products better, have all been cascading effects of when we've come in.
But the other area is just being able to see and have insight on how people are behaving. So being through the payments, like that ticket, that ticket person, the ticket season ticket holder who buys four season tickets, you know that he bought or he or she bought those tickets. But you don't know if they're buying any sort of food or beverages or merch. You don't know if they are even attending all the games. They could be just, it could actually be one of their children or a friend that's in their account badging in, or they could be reselling all their tickets. You don't have, you don't know if they're actually attending without having to go through a bunch of different spreadsheets and correlate and find all those trends, Spend money on infrastructure for data analytics, for example.
And so being able to piece that all together and provide that insight, like, oh, okay, so you're really actually helping us understand our fan better. Like, yeah, this fan has 4 tickets but only 3 people go with them every game.
And so they might be dropping a season ticket off of their account next year. So that's a season ticket that you then have to replace with a different buyer the next year. So you can quantify churn or potential churn and get ahead of it.
[00:13:10] Speaker C: One other neat things that I think that, you know, you guys are able to do, you know, and I. I'm speaking now from experience because of working with you guys, with some of these teams on some of this stuff. The, you know, just the un. You know, helping them understand, why do you want to do abs? How is that going to help me out? How is that going to prevent chargebacks? Okay, if I get a chargeback? Showing them how to quickly find that transaction so that they know back where it came from, you know, and easily correlate that back to help their back office move in a much more smooth. In a much smoother manner than it has in the past. And it's not that they aren't performing these functions. There was no education in the correlation of how one area worked with the other area.
And, you know, I think that's one of the neat things that, you know, we were together able to bring to them was that reporting capability, the ability to quickly search and quickly put things together so that they could resolve these issues that they were having, which were causing operational frustration, I guess is the best way to describe it.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. And even to add onto that is why do they want to set a batch time.
[00:14:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:14:18] Speaker B: Or change their batch time. Why batching? Whether or not that is a.
For just a cost structure. But you can have better cash flow with a proper batch time. You can have a better.
You can run and have better insight on your revenues with a better batch time.
Or why do you want to move larger transactions into a level three configuration like a secure invoice versus running as an E. Comm transaction? Those are all areas that we've been able to not only shift, but educate why they would want to do that.
And each one of these changes has multiple different effects for them as well.
They're able to prevent chargebacks or win more chargebacks and get better cash flow. But the why. The why they wanted to do those things was missing before. They had no reason. They had no knowledge or understanding of why they would want to do those things. It all seemed to them as nice to haves versus, oh, this is actually strategic part of our business that we should be implementing here.
[00:15:26] Speaker C: Not to mention the benefits of getting to go to the box at the, you know, at the hockey game and things like that. That's a lot of fun as well. Elena and I got to come out and spend some time with you guys in Vegas and go to the. And meet all the folks there. At the Knights and go to the, you know, kind of see the back operating of the, the nights. That was really pretty cool.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: And you know, that's honestly one of the biggest perks of the job is I get to travel along and see, travel around and see all these different events and meet people in person and bring those and give those experiences to you. And Elena is stuff that makes me super happy now in terms of if I, if I could go back in time and tell myself five years ago that you're going to see over 30, 30 games in a calendar year, but you'll probably watch only about 10 minutes of actual gameplay, I would have called you, called myself a liar. But that's exactly what happened over the last, over the last year.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I've loved that experience as well because even just the one game that we went to because I'm someone who loves to kind of peek behind the curtain and understand exactly how something is operating and what are you. What's all the behind the scenes things that have to happen? What are their needs in order for them to operate successfully? Because we only see the entertainment part of it, right? We don't know what's happening behind the scenes with all of this operations stuff. So it was super interesting to be able to talk to the team, hear from them firsthand what they really love about this new solution. I love as an accounting person, I love just hearing them say how much they love the easy ability to reconcile deposits and whatnot, that it's so much easier for them now, which to us is a very simple and straightforward kind of baseline thing that we deliver.
So I was a little shocked that they didn't really have easy access to that before. So those are some of the things that I was kind of shocked by when, when we were introduced to this space. Some of the archaic things that were in place that helped you guys land some easy. I hate to say easy wins because they take a lot of work to actually make changes. But for everyone else, most of the time they're doing these things normally, you know, like batch time is an easy thing to configure and change. Well, not when you have a gateway. Who's telling these teams that they have to batch out at this time and nobody can change? That's one of the examples that you were able to get. You were able to go in and say, hey, you guys need to. There has to be another batch time. We're missing the cut. Everything is delayed from the auth and where everybody's paying, not just our teams, but everyone who's using this gateway is paying more for this reason. And you guys were able to go in there and disrupt and change that. And that's a huge win, not just for the customers that you serve, but everyone on that gateway benefited. And I think that's just one of the examples of a space when you leave it and you don't, you don't have new and fresh eyes coming in and looking at it and saying, what can we do better here?
Things are stale and there's so much opportunity for improvement. And you guys have been able to get in there and, you know, clean it up, which is amazing to watch from the sidelines for the most part.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: I try to phrase it as you don't, they don't know. You don't know what you don't know.
And as long as you're the person teaching you something new is able to communicate in a way that this is for your benefit as well. And this is why you should want to do that. Then you have the seeds of a really good partnership and how you can work and help them in the future because now they're going to look great for all their other clients that they're now reducing their costs. So that's something that they're able to do because we kind of forced an issue, we kind of helped them understand.
I look back on that and you're frustrated in the moment because you're trying to get people to change things.
But looking back, the amount of effort and good that came out of that is just phenomenal.
[00:19:23] Speaker C: Well, and it's the approach you guys take. I, Elena and I preach this all the time. You know, the last thing you should, you should ever be discussing when trying to close a deal is price.
You should be talking about how are you going to improve things for that person, how are you going to make things better? You know, and then, hey, then we'll talk about price at the end. But let's make sure that these things meet what your needs are and that we're meeting. What are your concerns and what are your, you know, what are you having issues with? How can we better solve those things for you? And you guys are, holy smokes, you guys are the kings of that absolute.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: I used to be a teacher and one of the things that I love that we've adopted is it's solution based thinking.
Okay, what are the solutions that you need? What's the core problem and how do we solve that? And by focusing on, like what's solving it, they really see, okay, this is why I do Want to switch.
Right. I want to get all these different things.
I want to be able to do this. I'm not getting this.
You're exactly right. The price is the last thing people should be focused on.
And there's so many things in sales that we can help each other and that we can learn from.
And it's a cliche, but if the first thing that you bring up is price, it's kind of like saying, don't think about elephants. You're always going to be thinking about elephants as soon as you bring it up.
And if you can just get investigative and start with discovery and like, hey, this is. What do you do here? And how do you do this right now? And how are you solving this? Or do you have a solution for this? Do you have a simple question? Do you have a rep that you know and talk to?
Right. Discovering more about their business and being curious about how they do their job and genuine that you want to help them?
It goes miles above being the slickest salesperson that you could think of.
[00:21:20] Speaker C: Well, and I would say, you know, the other thing that we, you know, preach all the time, and we're very big about here, and I know you guys are huge about it as well as, answer the damn phone.
There's money on the other end of that call. Answer the damn phone.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: I.
[00:21:38] Speaker C: It's amazing to me how many merchants we speak to that just say, hey, if I could just get ahold of somebody, man, I don't care what the price is. If I could just get ahold of somebody and actually have a conversation and resolve my issue, that's one of the greatest things in the world. That's. And it's one of the easiest things for us all to solve.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Just being available.
Just being available is probably the biggest superpower for a salesperson, because they're going to call somebody, they're going to get somebody on the phone, it might as well be you.
Right? It might as well be you. Eventually they'll stop calling you. It's kind of like when you're dating, if you don't talk or text or try to contact somebody, eventually they start dating somebody else.
[00:22:20] Speaker C: Absolutely. It's called attention.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: Everybody wants your attention.
[00:22:25] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: And even if you don't have the answer, if you pick up the phone and it's a question that you don't immediately have to.
The answer to, I think there's appreciation for just. Just, you know, somebody being on the other end of the conversation and saying, I don't know, but I'LL get back to you. You know, like not everything is immediately solved, but just knowing you have the peace of mind of someone who's going to go chase it down for you, I think, you know, is huge.
[00:22:50] Speaker C: And be accountable for it. And be accountable for it.
Hey, I don't know the answer, but let me go find out and I will call you back.
And then even if you don't have the answer, which sometimes we don't get the answers as fast as we want them, still call them back and say, hey, I just want to let you know I'm still working on this for you.
You know, I'm waiting on getting one more answer. And then we're going to put this all together and put this to bed. You know, you can't just leave people hanging.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
Or even if it's finding a solution for them and this is going to sound counterintuitive, that isn't you. Right. Sometimes the solution doesn't include you and sometimes you have to be fine with that. But they're still going to be thankful that you help them. Right.
Even back I used to rent construction equipment and every now and then I would have some. Somebody come in and ask for a piece of equipment or a model or something that they needed that I didn't have.
And even though I wasn't able to provide it, I found the solution for them so that they were able to at least go somewhere else and get it and then they would come back to me. I didn't lose them because they went somewhere else. I actually gained them at their later business.
[00:24:05] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: Because I helped them.
[00:24:07] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. 150%.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: Well, I know we jumped into some of the details in the ways that we've been able to work together to kind of help these non traditional merchants, I'd call them, because they're a little different than the ones that we have been used to working with, helping them work through some of these issues. But Kevin, I'd love for you to back up and kind of just give an overall context of the way that secure bank card and order are working together. Because we have some other ISV clients, some like POS clients, one that owns their own gateway. This is unlike anything that we've done before.
And so I would love for you to just kind of give an overview of how we're working together and how that's worked and some things that maybe we've had to figure out some different kind of needs and whatnot that we've had to navigate through.
[00:24:55] Speaker C: Well, and you're right, it is a little bit different. You know, generally, one of the things that we do with ISVs is they are very niche oriented, Even more niche than order. They're not just sports, they're soccer or they're football, but they're not both orders spread across all of the sports and entertainment industry.
And being that their clients are, you know, almost individually unique, you know, we had to work together better in putting together the products that were coming together. So basically what happens is, you know, we work very closely with order on a daily basis to figure out, you know, hey, what is the solution we need to put together for this one group and are we providing the right reporting? One of the things that we can do is change some of that reporting if needed with our system to help enhance the sales capability for Evan and his group.
But unlike most ISVs, like I said, that are very cookie cutter, theirs is a little bit different. And it's been entertaining for me because a lot of this has been, you know, us just having to get together. I mean, we still get together every Friday, you know, to discuss, hey, what is it that we need to do to solve the one solution that we're working on for this one client?
Because, hey, order is not turning in 50 deals on a monthly basis, but they're turning in, you know, the one deal that we've put the custom solution together for with them so that, you know, that's bigger than literally 100 deals. So it also brings in that stickiness in with the client. It makes it more difficult for that client to lead because they become more reliant on both order and us to meet and maintain and help them now that we've brought these new operational capabilities to them.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd have to agree with that. Normally for us, ISVs equals rinse and repeat. So you establish a model, you put a few pricing options in there. It's pick the pricing option on board. It's all very quick and efficient.
And this kind of breaks the efficiency model a little bit because they are also custom, but they're usually so big in size that you have to do it that way. It's all a specialized solution. Whether it's a different ticketing platform or a different gateway, Every one of these teams needs to be looked at differently and needs a custom solution. So that's been super interesting for us because it's not the typical thing that we do. So it's been a lot of fun to work through that with you. I don't know if you would say the same thing, Evan, but it's fun for us at least to try to navigate this and figure it out as we go.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: Hey. I refer to you all as my best friends because I sometimes talk to you more than I talk to my actual family within a week. So it's.
These deals are large and complex and they take time to get done. But at the same time, you're right. The reward is at the end of it.
I enjoy working with all of you because all of you are, to quote you, Kevin, you answer the damn phone.
And I'm. I'm in a different time zone. So I. I'll be in the middle of my day and like, oh, shoot, it's probably your dinner time, but you.
[00:28:11] Speaker C: Answered the phone and money on the other side.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Because there's money on the other side of the phone. Right. So it's. It's been a great relationship and I can't wait to see where and what we build in the future together, because it's going to help not only us, it's going to help everybody that you service as well.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: Agreed. So speaking of that, can you tell us a little bit of what's next for order? What do you have, you know, planned moving forward? Is there anything new you're introducing or what are you working toward now?
[00:28:43] Speaker B: So right now we're working.
We have a thoroughly backed up business development pipeline. We have, I think, ongoing 80 or more conversations within our pipeline.
So trying to manage what's the best opportunity. And I'm big on like, what's the open door I can walk through versus what's a closed door or semi closed door. What's the. And so identifying qualifying where what opportunities are fast compared to other ones. Now our fast is different than other people's fast, obviously, but managing that pipeline, we. I have a significant hiring regimen that I want to do over the next six months here. We want to expand our team, but we're really working on moving through the major leagues as well as there's a giant opportunity for us with organizations like USA Fencing, these events that are all around the United States.
One of the biggest things that we've learned is, and we didn't touch on it, but we started this in the middle of COVID when there was absolutely zero events going on and nobody really knew what was going on, but we made a solid bet, live events that people are going to want to be entertained, people are going to go back to live events. And I don't think there's been more live events than any, any time in our history. There's so much stuff going on right now?
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, for someone who wants to learn more about order, where can they learn more about order?
[00:30:22] Speaker B: Yeah, so you can go to order IO that's O R D R IO for our webpage. We are also on LinkedIn for you to follow and interact. I'm on LinkedIn as well so if you send over a connection request I add everybody to the betterment and detriment. I do get a lot of spam people adding me on LinkedIn but I also have met pretty much everybody of meaning to my business over the last five years here on LinkedIn. So please follow me, connect with me, LinkedIn, follow us on order on LinkedIn and then you can check out our website ordr IO well, thank you so.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: Much for being here. This has been a lot of fun.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: Oh, it's my pleasure. I'll have to make my way down to Atlanta and we can go for some barbecue again.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:31:11] Speaker C: Anytime you want. Evan, come on down.
