YPP Spotlight – Setting Sale: Charting a Course as a Payments Entrepreneur

Add up Chelsie Cooper and Charlie Schloredt years of age and you’ll find their collective age is much younger than the first mass-market credit cards. And even as individuals, their ages post-date the forerunners of digital and computerized point of sale terminals by nearly a decade.

Cooper and Schloredt are millennials. The oft-discussed fledgling generation, now advancing into the upper echelons of the economy, command attention. There are the ubiquitous articles on home and car ownership, the dime-a-dozen think pieces on the work habits of young people and the half-baked analyses on industries millennials are supposedly killing this week. Not to mention the oft-lambasted avocado toast commentaries.

But these stories are mostly noise to these payments entrepreneurs; both have founded, own and operate new and growing ISOs in the highly-competitive and fast-paced payments world.

“I desire to be in the driver seat,” says Cooper, an ETA 2017 Young Payments Professional Scholar and the owner/founder of Afirmpay, “rather than passively watch our industry grow.” After graduating from the University of North Florida with a degree in business administration in 2011, Cooper, a second-generation payments entrepreneur, branched out on her own when she founded her ISO Afirmpay in 2015.

“Growing up, I remember watching my father develop his ISO to serve a niche market,” Cooper says, “and so I had an opportunity to learn a niche market. I discovered on my own some of the biggest challenges ISOs share in the space. Having early access to the inner workings of my father’s company allowed me an opportunity to grasp the industry early in my career.”

Like Cooper, Schloredt, also an ETA 2017 Young Payments Professional Scholar and the founder/owner of Merchant Financial Services, benefited from a lineage of payments entrepreneurship. “During high school, I watched my father build a payments company from zero, and saw first-hand the benefits and struggles of entrepreneurship,” Schloredt says, “so rather than taking my parents suggestion of focusing on my academics through the last few years of college, I decided I was going to begin building an ISO in California from zero. I scheduled all night classes, and spent my mornings and afternoons cold-calling and prospecting new business.”

Since those early days, the focus for both young entrepreneurs has changed as the industry continues to evolve. The sales environment is changing, the young ISO founders say, and it is important that their businesses and employees adapt to it.

“While we at Afirmpay still understand and respect the need for call centers, the days of the ‘boiler room’ sales are on the decline,” Cooper says, “we instead focus on bringing on new talent from outside our industry, and setting them up with tools and education they need to be successful in this business. We want each employee to be a steward of specialized industry knowledge that are always available to solve problems for our clients.”

Taking advantage of the entire payments ecosystem — outside of traditional sales channel methods — has been important to growing their client base and strengthening relationships, Schloredt says.

“In 2016, I stepped back from the day-to-day sales calls and appointments and began working to train sales agents to join my team,” Schloredt says, “I have expanded my company from just payment services to full-service business financial services including merchant lending, consumer financing, and equipment leasing.”

And for these YPP Scholars, anticipating the changes in stride has been a motivator and a way to keep their work successful. “There is a constant evolution of technology in our industry, and figuring out how to harness technology, innovation, relationships, and how to combine them to stay at ahead of your competition is the biggest challenge,” Cooper says, “this challenge is the driving force that keeps me engaged every day.”

Using personal experience and tapping into some of his own frustrations and triumphs has helped the entrepreneur grow, Schloredt said.

“I watched first-hand the struggles and frustrations that restaurant owners and employees faced while dealing with payment systems and point-of-sales,” Schloredt recalled of his early days working in the restaurant industry, “I saw the need for simplicity and true 24/7 support, which I believe these two differentiators have greatly contributed to my success.”

But even for the most motivated millennial payments entrepreneur, being a young person in the space can be challenging. “I think that my young age can at times make potential customers initially hesitant to trust me with the most important aspects of their business” Schloredt says.

But through their “millennial brain,” Cooper says, they have to keep a keen eye on the future of technology in payments. “I am crazy about payment technology into software applications, particularly the Internet of Things. As we become more connected, consumers make purchases by choice less and less. We know that by 2021 expectations are that over 80% of vehicles will be sold connected,” Cooper says, “we should be ready to capitalize.”

YPP Spotlight Features is a new editorial feature that highlights ETA’s Young Payments Professionals (YPP) Scholars to emphasize thought-leadership, storytelling and payments news. The 2017 ETA YPP Scholars — the program’s inaugural class — represent the finest young minds across the payments technology ecosystem. Read more about the program here.