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CoverStory

There was nothing we could do to stem the loss of It aligns every employee with the success of the
some great restaurants, diners and retailers. Fortunate- company, which in turn aligns them with the success
ly, many food businesses such as grocers, delis, pizza of our partners and customers.
places, meat stores and takeout restaurants increased
sales. 3. Our merchant customers have faced a number of
challenges over the past year, including COVID-related
2. In 2022 our strategy centers around ramping up re- business restrictions, labor shortages, increasing
cruiting, increasing our national brand marketing, re- supply costs and supply chain issues. We launched our
developing our entire marketing program and imple- Shift4Cares program during the early days of COVID
menting more efficient reporting. We also have plans to provide various resources to our merchants. This
to expand our POS capabilities and focus on expanding included an effort to raise millions of dollars for our
our multichannel gateway offerings. We will also focus customers by selling gift cards on their behalf and
on expanding our footprint with independent software contributing an additional 5 percent of all proceeds
vendors. We also plan on expanding into more high- directly to the merchant. We also offered free services
risk verticals with our groups. and equipment, waived fees, and more to provide
relief to our customers. We have since expanded
3. Merchants have been challenged with higher costs Shift4Cares to encompass a wide range of corporate
and lower margins. They, too, have seen shortages in social responsibility initiatives, and this program still
goods especially in retail clothing, furniture, electron- includes numerous efforts aimed at supporting our
ics, auto sales and appliance sales. We have introduced merchant customers.
various surcharge programs allowing them to pass
along some costs of processing to the end consumer. 4. The trend towards integrated technology solutions
We have also helped restaurants develop pay at the has continued to accelerate within the payments
table to save time and improve accuracy of orders. We industry. It’s important for payments professionals
have assisted restaurant merchants in setting up their to embrace this reality and partner with companies
own online sites to keep more of the phone order sales that can help them capitalize on this opportunity. For
they receive. Our agent trainings all focus on improv- example, Shift4 has launched a number of “Integrated
ing the technology at locations. Something as simple as Payments 101” programs that enable our sales partners
accepting Google Pay or Apple Pay can make a differ- to penetrate lucrative markets that were previously
ence to a merchant. unavailable to the ISO/MSP community. These unique
opportunities include hotels via our extensive PMS
4. The last two years have been difficult at best. I be- integrations, Micros accounts through our Micros
lieve the struggles we all had did make us all stronger. Center of Excellence, and ecommerce with our
With the challenges have come new opportunities that Shift4Shop platform.
exist because of some great improvements in technol-
ogy. Whether it has been the launch of multichan-
nel gateways, cloud-based terminals or iPad/Android Justin Millmeister, CPP
POS systems, the industry has lots of viable programs Elite Merchant Solutions
that, just a few years ago, didn’t exist for all. The huge
success of Clover systems is an example of a product
category we didn’t have a few short years ago. Success 1. 2021 was definitely a challenge to find the talent we
in the industry today still requires a motivated indi- are looking for at Elite Merchant Solutions, both on our
vidual who understands they must set goals and stay customer service/technical support and on our inside
the course. sales. The traditional means we utilized were not
producing the results we desired, so we explored new
mediums to attract talent, and these have paid off thus
Jared Isaacman far.
Shift4 Payments
The first thing we did was to hire a recruiting firm that
specializes in placement for a variety of positions, and
1. We have significantly enhanced our compensation we received a steady pipeline of prospective employees
packages for both employees and sales partners to at- based on our needs. We hired several people from this
tract and retain talent. We recently implemented a pro- channel and, of course, some didn’t work out; however,
gram to provide every new and current employee with we retained some very good talent utilizing this service.
$50,000 in restricted stock units (RSUs). Now, every
Shift4 employee is an owner of the company. This was The second and more dramatic of the two is we moved
a great way to reward our team for all their hard work the bulk of our Los Angeles operations to Plano, Texas,
and has also been an effective tool for recruitment and which is in the Dallas area. When we first placed ads,
retention. we were astounded by the number of applicants who

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