It’s a bright morning in early November at Around the Corner, an old-school diner in the red-brick college town of Edmond, Oklahoma. The walls are plastered with college football pennants, but Chad Richison has a different contact sport on his mind. “It takes a lot of humility to just walk out on the wrestling mat in one of those singlets, and then you get pinned in 17 seconds in front of all your friends,” says Richison, 49. Richison wrestled in high school and college, often working hard to cut weight and make a lighter division. At his peak, he placed at state championships as a high school senior in 1989. Today he is founder and CEO of $695 million (LTM revenue) software firm Paycom.
The Rise of Paycom
Payroll may not be quite as gritty as wrestling, but it’s a task that impacts most workers. According to financial services firm Morningstar, about one out of every two new customers are poached directly from ADP and billionaire Tom Golisano’s Paychex. Tens of millions of employees across America must still manually input their hours on digital timesheets, which are then inspected and approved by their superiors. Paycom has cut all that out. A leader in cloud-based HR services, it offers location tracking on its mobile app to automatically record when a worker enters or exits the office with their smartphone.
While others offer a similar feature, Paycom was one of the first to completely process payrolls online and to integrate that and other services into a single app with an easy-to-use interface. Since the beginning, Richison has doubled down on beating his competitors in two key aspects: simplicity and security-offering a highly protected subscription-based model covering everything from recruitment to retirement in a single cloud-based database. His company’s hard-charging culture has also helped its sales and profits steadily climb. “Paycom has stayed one step ahead,” says Nandan Amladi, a software analyst at investment firm Guggenheim Partners.
Richison’s focus on employees grew out of respect for people’s hard work. “If you wanted something, you had to work for it,” he says of his childhood. The son of a milkman and a dental assistant, he spent his first six years in Oklahoma City’s low-income south side and later moved to the rural town of Tuttle. He began hauling hay for neighboring farmers at age 11 and eventually, at age 17, he earned enough money to buy his own truck.
At the University of Central Oklahoma, where he majored in journalism with a minor in German, he took only one class at the business school. But after graduation he jumped at a job offer from ADP, his first foray into payroll. He spent two-and-a-half years at the company, during which time he met Jeff York, his sales trainer, who joined him at Paycom in 2002 and became chief sales officer in 2007.
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It wasn’t long before Richison decided to return home. He sold his house in Denver, applied for a Small Business Administration loan and cashed out his 401(k) to start his company in 1998; he later used 13 credit cards to keep it running. The internet was in its early days and Google was in its infancy. And payroll processing, Richison thought, was ripe for disruption. The staid industry had barely changed since the 1940s.
“Chad was much earlier than others in seeing the value of the internet,” says Brad Reback, who covers Paycom as a managing director at investment bank Stifel. “He’s pushed really hard on mobile usage.
Leaning forward on a leather chair in his wood-paneled office in northwest Oklahoma City, Richison flips through a pile of plastic binders filled with software designs from the early days of Paycom. Sporting a crisp white shirt, he comes to a stop at a white page marked only by austere rectangular boxes containing simple instructions: “prepay check,” “void check,” and so on. Using forms from other payroll providers as templates, Richison designed every page and button of the online interface himself, relying on tools like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Word and Paint.
No one was interested in his product in Oklahoma City at first, largely because firms didn’t trust a newly founded local company with their business. So Richison drove out and tried his luck in nearby towns like Stillwater and Pauls Valley-where many prospective clients didn’t even have an internet connection. “I was literally the one showing them what the internet was,” he says, “They were scared to death of it.”
Richison had his way, and a few years later in 2007, the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe approached him for a potential buyout. It was Richison-then the company’s controlling shareholder-who won out. “That just sounded like a mess,” he says. “I said, I’m not going to let Paycom be part of a roll-up strategy, because that’s just ugly.” The investors decided to invest anyway, and the deal closed in July 2007 with Welsh Carson buying a stake for $56 million, according to Pitchbook. Paycom continued to grow, reaching $100 million in revenue in 2013-a milestone that set the stage for an IPO.
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But as Paycom began to prepare for a listing in early 2014, tech stocks were faltering, causing potential investors to become skittish and demand a lower price. When the scheduled day of the IPO came in April, Richison was forced to delay. Four days later, the company accepted a lower listing price of $15 a share and went public-at a market cap $20 million lower than upstart Paylocity, which listed a month earlier despite having net income that was more than 12 times lower. “Most public tech companies at the time weren’t profitable.
Four stories below Richison’s office, Paycom’s hulking modern-day servers are housed in a raised basement that is FEMA-certified, flood-safe and tornado-proof-all quite necessary in Oklahoma, which was hit by 147 tornadoes in 2019. Paycom pays the city to have on-duty police officers man its entrances. If those safeguards fail, all data is replicated in real time on the company’s servers in Dallas. Seven generators are on standby in the event of a blackout-enough to power the nearby Stillwater (pop.
Richison’s trademark intensity permeates Paycom’s 500,000-square-foot headquarters, from the everything-proof servers to the large screens tracking employee performance in every department. “In Silicon Valley they have beanbags and beer on tap,” says Amladi of Guggenheim Partners. On the floor that houses Paycom’s customer service representatives, a screen mounted to the wall shows rankings of each representative based on various metrics like call volume and response time. Despite this competitive environment, turnover in the service department is down by 50% over the past two years, insists Richison.
Those who stay are rewarded well. Promising managers are tasked with opening new offices and training a new sales team from scratch-a departure from the industry norm, where competitors generally hire experienced salespeople from each other.
It’s been more than two decades after Paycom’s founding, but Richison insists it’s just the start. “We've got a fast growth rate, and we’re getting stronger,” he says. “We’re still the little guy ... there are still companies out there larger than us. No matter the size of its customers, Paycom is counting on the rapid advance of technology to give it an edge.
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“It’s very important that we continue to innovate for our clients so they can stay ahead of things,” he says. “Our goal here is to ... “We’re going to see things that people can’t imagine now but are being enabled by technology, like changing shifts by talking into your iPhone,” says Mark Marcon, a research analyst at investment bank R.W. Baird. “It’s all about magnitude and to what degree you’re pushing it, and Paycom has pushed it to a greater extent than others.
For Richison, Paycom exists to make life easier for workers across America, whether they fix tractor parts in Oklahoma or staff healthcare providers in Tennessee. “At Paycom, we’re always searching for a deficiency in the process, not the person,” he says. “The American worker is a very hard worker and wants to do a good job.
Chad Richison's Real Estate Portfolio
Richison, who's worth $3.6 billion according to Forbes, also owns homes in Edmond, Oklahoma, and Florida's Marco Island, according to Dirt.
The home, known as Il Pelicano, boasts a secluded location on the beach that sets it apart from the nearby homes above on the cliff, Shawn Elliott of Nest Seekers International, who co-brokered the sale with Douglas Elliman, told Business Insider. "This is really the epitome of luxury," Elliott said of the home. "You can be in anywhere in this house. You can be in the South of France, the Cote d'Azur, and you wouldn't know it. This house is just a piece of heaven. "To their credit, this couldn't have been an easy build and I'm sure it cost them millions of dollars to build it," Elliott told Business Insider.
Philanthropic Endeavors
In addition to his professional achievements, Chad Richison is deeply committed to philanthropy. In 2015, Richison founded the Green Shoe Foundation, an organization devoted to helping functioning adults reconcile childhood traumas so they can live a life of peace and maturity. In addition to Green Shoe, Richison also created the Richison Family Foundation, which provides funding for organizations in children's education, foster care, food supplies and mental health.
In 2021, following a $10 million donation from Richison, the University of Central Oklahoma's football stadium was renamed the Chad Richison Stadium. Their gifts span the arts, education, mental health and social services. Among these is a $5 million donation to complete Oklahoma City’s American Cancer Society Hope Lodge, now bearing his name, providing free lodging to cancer patients and caregivers.
The American Cancer Society Hope Lodge program provides a free home away from home for cancer patients and their caregivers. Support from volunteers and local organizations is critical to the American Cancer Society’s mission of providing free lodging to cancer patients and their caregivers. Each Hope Lodge community provides the essentials needed during your stay: towels, blankets, sheets, pillows, laundry detergent, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, hair dryers, etc.
Actively involved in the Hope Lodge program until she was 105, Margot was the longest-serving American Cancer Society volunteer to date. Her attitude of gratitude, despite being forced from her home during the Nazi occupation of Germany, still inspires us today.
In addition to his earlier philanthropic initiatives, Richison and his wife Charis have expanded their focus to community transformation within Oklahoma. They are also expanding their focus to community transformation within Oklahoma.
Richison was ranked one of the top 100 CEOs nationally in 2019 by Glassdoor, and was the only Oklahoma executive on the large business list.
The land is on the southeast side of Sorghum Mill Road and N. Pennsylvania Avenue, north of a housing subdivision at Coffee Creek Road and N. The entity Sorghum Penn LLC purchased the farmland for $1.008 million on Sept. In state records Richison is listed as the registered agent for Sorghum Penn LLC.
Kathy Oden-Hall, a spokeswoman for Paycom, said the company was not behind the purchase. Through Arcadia Farm LLC, McClendon owns more than 6,000 acres of land in northern Oklahoma County that he has amassed over a period of several years, according to property records. The Land Report, a quarterly magazine aimed at landowners, listed McClendon as No. 100 on its list of the 100 largest landowners in the country in 2011.
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