People love perks. Employees love them even more. Unfortunately, startups looking to make employee perks easy, scalable, and tax-compliant have come and gone over the years. Compt.io thinks they have a better mousetrap. That’s why Amy Spurling, CEO, and founder, has come on the Firing Squad. In a market expected to reach approximately $346 million by 2025, the stakes are high. Does Amy make it out alive? Gotta listen.
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Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids, the Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level.
Joel: That's right. It's another Firing Squad, everybody. If you don't know, ask your parole officer. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. Joined as always, the rick to my Morty, Chad Sowash is here. And we are welcoming to the squad Amy Spurling, CEO and Founder of Compt. It's Compt and not Compt.io or Comptio? Let's get that out of the way real quick.
Amy Spurling: It is just Compt.
[laughter]
Chad: Joel likes to add the io on all of the dot ios.
Amy Spurling: Yeah. No io.
Chad: Yes, he loves that.
Joel: Comptio.
Chad: Comptio, JobBoard.io.
[laughter]
Amy Spurling: No, just Compt.
[laughter]
Joel: JobBoard.io. [laughter] All right, Amy, welcome to the show.
Amy Spurling: Thanks so much. Appreciate you having me here.
Joel: All right. You know the rules. We gotta get a little bit about you 'cause most of the world does not know what makes Amy Spurling tick. So tell us a little bit about you and then we'll get to the rules of the game.
Amy Spurling: Sure. So I'm a first time founder, but I've been in tech for 20 years, been part of building six prior companies and CFO and COO suites, so I've been in the tech industry, raising money, selling companies for a long time. I'm an avid hiker, spend a lot of time outside and trying get off the grid as much as possible.
Chad: Love off the grid.
Joel: Hiking Boston, that sounds fun.
Amy Spurling: Oh no, I'm not hiking in Boston. I'm hiking outside the country for the most part.
[laughter]
Chad: There we go.
Joel: Oh God.
Chad: That's what I'm talking about.
Joel: Chad just got excited.
Chad: That's right. Amy and I are gonna share notes on...
Amy Spurling: We are.
Chad: Where to go in Europe for all the good hiking.
Joel: For those that weren't in the green room, it was an episode of HGTV about how many international homes these two can purchase. As with kids are land-bound by the US state side. Anyway, enough about home shopping. Chad, tell Amy what she's won today as a guest on Firing Squad.
Chad: Well, Amy, welcome to Firing Squad. And this is how it's gonna play out. At the sound of the bell, you're gonna have two minutes to pitch Compt. At the end of two minutes, we're gonna hit you with about 20 minutes of Q&A. Be sure to be concise or you're going to get hit with the crickets. That just means tighten your game up, okay? Joel loves the crickets, but still, tighten your game up. [chuckle] At the end of Q&A, you're gonna receive one of these from both of us. Big applause.
[applause]
Chad: We think you've got all the firepower necessary to win this one. Golf clap. Man, you've got the right idea, but you're probably going to need a little bit more ammo for this work. And then last but not least, you brought a knife to a gunfight. Time to adios and start over. That's the Firing Squad. Are you ready?
Amy Spurling: I'm ready. Let's do it.
Joel: Two minutes starts.
Amy Spurling: So Compt is employee perk management software that helps companies design and administer employee perks so that everyone can get exactly what they need and want most. That's a lot of words. Let's talk about it a little bit. Now, the way we compensate people has really changed in the past two decades. Candidates walk in the door expecting a competitive salary for their industry, for their role. In a lot of industries, they also expect health insurance. These are now table stakes. So if you want to attract new talent or retain the folks that you have and make sure you're not poached by competitors, then you need to do something different to stand out. And I'm a three-time former CFO. I've been pitched every single perk company that is out there. They all say they help you attract and retain talent, this is not something new, but the problem is that no matter what you bring in or how amazing it is, if you're lucky, 5% of the team uses it. So it's really expensive and very ineffective, and CFOs hate this. So the thing is that you need to make sure that you find something that can actually engage everyone.
Amy Spurling: I decided to start Compt because I believe that everyone should have personalized employee perks and they should have access to it because it's part of their compensation, but that this also needs to work for companies on a budget and compliance side as well, that these need to be taxed correctly and they need to support global teams, 'cause a lot of teams are global now. Compt is a reimbursement platform, so there's absolutely no vendors on it. Companies select categories for employees to use, things like wellness, student loan repayment, family, and then employees can spend on any vendor they want, wherever they're located, and then they submit a receipt and they get reimbursed and it's taxed correctly and all the nice things. And because of the approach that we've taken, for the past four years, employee utilization on Compt has been over 90%. So that's across 50 states and 60 countries, just insanely high utilization, because employees get access to that personalization. That's the key to unlocking employee utilization when it comes to this compensation.
Joel: That's a tight pitch, Amy. That's a tight pitch. Thank you.
Chad: Yeah, but where can they find out more? That's the question.
Joel: Yeah. CEOs always forget that. You can find out more about us at...
Amy Spurling: Www.compt.io.
Joel: There you go.
Amy Spurling: Or emailing me at amy@compt.io.
Joel: Lauren, her marketing person, is like, "No! She forgot." Okay.
Chad: Luckily we kicked her off. Luckily we kicked her off.
Joel: Yeah, we did kick Lauren off. She's...
Amy Spurling: We did.
Joel: She's in the fetal position in the corner.
[chuckle]
Chad: Sorry, Lauren. Not really. Not really.
[laughter]
Joel: So your pitch said only 5% of employees use perk plans. Why is that?
Amy Spurling: So every person wants something different, is what you find out. We actually went and took a sample... I mean, we obviously have amazing utilization and have for a long time. We took a sample of 8700 people about a year ago and watched 'em for a year and said, "All right, how many different vendors do they use?" Because that's what you'd have to bring into your organization to be able to support all these people and have high utilization. Guess how many different unique vendors 8700 people used in one year?
Chad: Five.
Joel: Five. Yeah.
Amy Spurling: 27,000.
Chad: Holy fuck!
Amy Spurling: You cannot build a marketplace that will support your employees internally if you want high utilization. It's not possible. On average, every person wants three different things. So if your goal is utilization and to make sure that people are engaging with this, you have to take a different approach. If your goal is to, hey, throw something out there and hope a few people use it, cool, you like spending money on things that don't work. That's not my... The CFO in me gets a little bit sweaty on that.
[laughter]
Joel: I always ask about the name. I get the name. That's the good news. Dot io isn't that crazy? However, Compt.com is for sale. It's available. Have you tried to buy it? Why don't you go buy it? Why won't you secure the dot com as your name?
Amy Spurling: It's theoretically for sale. So we approached that for the last like five years. No response. Doesn't matter who you go to. I have no idea who owns this, and so at this point, I just don't care because Compt.io is common enough. But yeah, so it's not for a lack of outreach, but whoever owns it, I think just has it in a portfolio somewhere.
Joel: And chances are they're not listening to this show, so you're not in luck on that front. So you're a finance person. Why the hell get into workforce software?
Amy Spurling: I managed finance and HR in all those prior organizations. So I wasn't planning on starting a company, I liked being that number two spot in all those prior startups, but I needed something to fill these compensation gaps so that you could attract people, so that you could retain them. And I waited for somebody to build the thing that I needed. I pitched it to engineers. I'm like, "Just build me the thing." I tried Jerry-rigging it with expense software, which was a disaster, and finally was like, "Look, if I'm gonna build another company, I need this to exist. So if I'm the only user ever, I don't care. I need this thing to exist," and so started the company five years ago.
Chad: Okay. So you are not the typical CFO. At least the CFOs I know 'cause they're generally penny pinching.
Joel: Careful.
Amy Spurling: I'm a pretty cheap person. Don't get me wrong. We sit on some cash here. But it's looking at efficiency. I don't wanna waste money. I don't wanna spend more than I have to spend, but I wanna spend smart. I wanna spend smart on my team and I wanna do things in a as fair and equitable way as possible. But I don't wanna waste money. I don't like wasting money.
Chad: As a CFO should not.
Amy Spurling: I also like compliance a whole lot. I want my taxes to be done correctly and I don't want that coming off my exit price when they're like, "Wow, you have a mess. Let's just add a lot of [chuckle] things to your documentation."
Chad: Let's talk about that, because that's interesting because you say that Compt is the only IRS-compliant perks software on the market. Really?
Amy Spurling: When you're combining taxable and taxed.
Chad: I mean, this is a huge market. Nobody else is IRS-compliant?
Amy Spurling: Only if they're doing completely pre-taxed or untaxed. So if you're thinking about HSAs or commuter benefits, companies like WageWorks are of course tax-compliant, but they only do untaxed things. You cannot combine taxable and untaxed things anywhere else in the market other than our platform and have it be automated and tax-compliant. Doesn't exist.
Chad: Holy shit. That's awesome. So you said 27,000 vendors.
Amy Spurling: Just for that group of 8700 people. We've got a lot more people on the platform.
Chad: How many providers do you currently integrate with?
Amy Spurling: So on the vendor side?
Chad: Yeah.
Amy Spurling: Zero.
Chad: So you don't have to... How do you actually get the data so that you can manage all these perks?
Amy Spurling: So we don't have to suggest vendors. There's no path to suggest vendors in that scenario. If every person wants three different things, who am I signing up? That's not possible. I'm gonna have to sign up your dry cleaner and your dog walker and figure out who's got what nanny. That's not a scalable solution. So for us, it's much more around making sure that you've got the category set, and those are all based on IRS things, so things like wellness or family or cell phone or whatever. And then employees go and spend as they normally would, so they don't have to change their buying behavior, buy the thing that they want, upload it, tag it to that category, and then they get reimbursed through their payroll system and it's taxed there.
Chad: Gotcha. Okay. So if they have a program, then the individual has to actually go through the process of... Again, it's taxes, so receipts, all that other fun stuff?
Amy Spurling: Exactly. So receipts are a requirement until the IRS says, "Stop it," which would be great.
Chad: Yeah, until we actually come into the 21st century. Are you fucking kidding me?
Amy Spurling: Amazing, right? [chuckle]
Chad: Jesus Christ. Anyway, 90% utilization? I mean, one...
Amy Spurling: 91 for four straight years.
Chad: 91. So okay, that's ridiculous, 'cause I thought right out of the gate that this is gonna be incredibly low, even at 20%, but 91%. So is there an app? What's the secret sauce when it comes to being able to engage these individuals to actually use their perks?
Amy Spurling: So it's amazing that when you give people the free will of choice and treat them like adults that they just use the thing. It's part of their compensation. So we've got a 98% account activation rate, meaning 98% of people who get access to their account from their company, activate it. Payroll is the only thing that's higher, which of course, everyone activates their payroll account.
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Amy Spurling: So from there, the way we count utilization is that somebody uses some of their stipend. So it can't be you just logged in. We don't count... That's not useful for anybody. You have to use some of your stipend. So 91% of people on our platform have used their stipends for something within the year that they had them. The key to that is just making sure that you provide an easy-to-use platform. Employees can spend less than a minute on our platform.
Chad: Is there an app?
Amy Spurling: It's a web-based app, so it's a web app. It's mobile-optimized. It works on your phone. It can work through Slack. We're fully integrated with Slack, so you don't even have to log into our platform if you don't want. And so making it as easy as possible for employees, and it works. Onboarding is really simple. Usually takes about 30 minutes for our company, under a hundred people. We've got all the payroll integrations that companies need. I've been through enough HR software implementations, that's where all my gray hair comes from, that my directive to the team when we built this was, "Make it so easy that it's literally like turn the thing on." Because HR doesn't get access to engineers. HR doesn't have time for a long implementation. Employees have zero tolerance for anything difficult on their side.
Joel: Is it fair to call you like a reimbursement engine?
Amy Spurling: It is a reimbursement platform, so yeah, that is fair. But it's specifically around employee perks. So rewards and the recognition is part of it, so peer-to-peer recognition and then employee stipends is part of it as well. But it's very different from, say, an Expensify or a Concur, which is also a reimbursement platform. Those are meant for business expenses. They're not taxed, they're not tied to an individual. There aren't time periods where we can say, "Hey, you've got a quarter to use your wellness stipend."
Joel: Got it. What does a typical client look? And I know that Drizly is a client and there's a good chance Chad and I are single-handedly funding their Compt account, [laughter] but what does a... [chuckle]
Amy Spurling: I appreciate that.
Joel: What does a client typically look like?
Amy Spurling: So we get asked that a lot. It's anybody who is trying to attract and retain talent. So we've got about 17 different industries on the platform. It's in every state in the us. We're supporting employees in 60 different countries. It's not size-specific. Our largest customer right now is about 15,000 people, actually, in the Indianapolis area. And then the smallest is five or six people. So it really runs the gamut of, "How do I differentiate this piece of compensation in the most effective way possible for my team?"
Joel: Got it. The most important question I'm gonna ask you is this...
Chad: Oh, oh.
Joel: There are tons of companies that do this. Bonusly just got a ton of money. I'm sure that you're well aware of that. I mean, Snappy, Fond, Achievers, Blueboard. OC Tanner is been given shit away at trophies, at conference. I mean, they run the gamut of engagement and perks and benefits. I'm sure your salespeople get this question every day, "How are you different from the masses of companies that offer this?"
Amy Spurling: 91% utilization.
[laughter]
Chad: I love it.
Joel: How would your competitors answer that?
Amy Spurling: They would be really happy about 20% utilization.
Joel: Really?
Amy Spurling: Mm-hmm. If you're a marketplace, you might get 30 or 40%. If you're an individual perk, you're sitting in that 5 to 7% range. Like we don't see competitors in sales processes almost ever.
Joel: I'm guessing this is anecdotal. They're not publishing papers about utilization numbers. I mean, is this...
Amy Spurling: Some of them do publish because they do because...
Joel: You got these offices tapped?
Amy Spurling: No, because... I mean, I've bought this stuff for a long time, so I know lots of HR people, I know lots of CFOs. We all know what our utilization is, and it's pretty similar kind of across. And so if you're trying to reach folks, utilization is good.
Joel: Utilization. Got it. So we were talking in the green room about how Gen X we were, but millennials, as we know, and Gen Zs are a big part of the equation building businesses and they love experiences, according to many articles that I've read. I didn't hear experiences as part of the perks that you guys offer. Can I go to Fiji and expense it on your platform?
Amy Spurling: Could, if the company sets up either a personal travel or an entertainment or an experience category. We have all of those categories. I mean, there's 22 different categories a company could select and craft different stipends and things like that, so they absolutely could. It's just the whole point is not to try and do some... Like HR has been tasked with make everyone happy. One, that's not possible. And two, trying to do that with, "Okay, we're gonna offer experiences." Well, tell a mom with three young kids at home that she can go skydiving. Sweet. No time for that. Like, "This is not a good perk for me."
[laughter]
Amy Spurling: So it's meeting people where they are and allowing them to make the decisions for their own lives. Wellness is different for every single person. They're in different parts of their journey. We're all adults. HR shouldn't be dictating what wellness is. It's allowing for people to be treated like adults with their own compensation in a way that is still aligned with company culture.
Chad: So I'm gonna go back to Joel's question, dig a little bit deeper. Who are you targeting go to market wise? You can do obviously top to bottom, that's awesome, but who are you targeting right now?
Amy Spurling: So what's interesting is that almost all of our leads come in inbound. Companies come looking for us. So we have a really strong inbound engine, and that's the source of a lot of our leads because companies are actively looking for solutions for this last piece of the compensation. So they're actively looking for stipends, they're actively looking for employee perks. And we've got a very strong kind of SEO and content game, and so when they look, they find us. We're on, I think, the first page of Google for like 500 key terms. So that's where we don't have to target a particular industry because the problems are the same across industries. It's making sure that you're there and available for HR when they're ready to be in that process.
Chad: Gotcha. Okay. So let's talk about the business model. Is this a seats-based per employee-based platform? Cost? How does this actually work out for an employer?
Amy Spurling: It's a SaaS model, so there's a subscription fee for the platform. My CFO brand does not like per seat because I can never budget for that. "Okay. I add 10 people. How much now do I have to do across 15 different platforms?" So it's tiered, based on the number of employees when you start, but add as many as you want. We don't care. We're not coming looking for more money during the contract. We'll talk to you on renewal and figure out where you need to be then. So it's kind of guaranteed term of the contract.
Chad: Okay. So this is an ARR kind of scenario then since you're not really fluxing?
Amy Spurling: Exactly.
Chad: What does ARR look like these days?
Amy Spurling: Oh, it looks great. It also looks private. [laughter] Thank you. Agree with that.
Chad: You've always gotta ask the CFO of that question. That's for sure. That's for sure.
Amy Spurling: Yeah, not new here.
[laughter]
Chad: Okay. So let's talk about partners. And I mean, it doesn't sound really you need to get into integrations with ADP SAP Workday...
Amy Spurling: Oh, we do.
Chad: Okay, so talk about that. Do you have integrations? How does that actually work?
Amy Spurling: So, payroll integrations are very interesting for us because that's how you automate a lot of this. It's all gonna be processed through payroll. Some payroll systems play nicer than others. We've got a great partnership with ADP we're fully integrated with them. We work with others like Bamboo and Colitis, Colitus [laughter] all the payroll players basically. And so that side of the house we spend a lot of time with. Other partners that we work a lot with are benefit brokers, so that's another place that we spend a lot of time. That's not a technical integration, that's just partners.
Chad: Benefit brokers. So is employee perk management, is that something you guys came up with or is this literally been like a segment that nobody's paid that much attention to over the years? [laughter]
Amy Spurling: No, it's pretty new. So when we started, we had to educate people on what stipends were. The term lifestyle spending accounts is now all over the place. The first woman on our team was a marketer. She invented that term. She did a very good job with SEO. She came out of HubSpot, so she understood, inbound very, very good. And now that term is everywhere. And we're sitting here going, "Man, we invented that five years ago. [laughter] like we should have just trademarked that." [laughter] But it's something that is relatively new. A lot of companies have gone the marketplace route. So, hey, here's 25 vendors your employees could use. Those have been around a lot longer. You mentioned Fond. They were just acquired, by the way, by Reward Gateway. And so there's a lot of kind of acquisitions in the space but those still get, if you're lucky, 20 to 30% utilization. So companies have been looking for, okay, what's next? How do I do better than that?
Chad: Right. So let's talk about funding. Last April you received 13 million. What have you been doing with that money? What have you been putting it to? What's the focus on spend and your CFO brain?
Amy Spurling: Yes. So the focus was one, build out a leadership team. Everybody on the team. We're a relatively small team. We're a pretty capital efficient team, no surprise. But everybody reporting to me is obviously a very bad plan as you start scaling. So, built out a really talented leadership team over the past year and then started spending a lot more money on testing out different pieces of the market for marketing spend, as well as different approaches on the sales side. Selling to HR is very different from selling to any other group of people.
Joel: Amen.
Amy Spurling: They're a pretty amazing group of people that fight fires all day long. Their priorities are never something that they get to control, and a lot of times they don't get to control their budgets. So you have to take a very different approach when you're selling to them and when you're marketing to them. And so that takes a lot of experimentation. I don't think anybody has cracked the book on that, and kind of cracked the code on that to figure out how that's works beautifully well.
Chad: Well, that being said, HR does struggle with being able to kind of like show the ROI of who they are. You're a CFO, you should be able to help them do that. If you're coming to me and I need to pitch this to my C-suite, how can perks, how can your platform actually help my business? Actually, talk about the bottom line and impact in the bottom line.
Amy Spurling: Sure. So the questions I ask them are, one, "Do you have trouble attracting talent that you need in your business?" If no, then okay, great. "Do you have trouble retaining talent?" If no, then fantastic. You don't need us. End of story. Now that's no one. Everybody is struggling with one of those two things and likely both. So if those two things you need help on, then the question is, "Are you paying competitive salaries and are you offering health insurance?" If you're doing both of those as well, then you have to do something else. And when you get to the have to do something else, the question is, "Okay, then what, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna pull in an app that 5% of your team is gonna use? Or are you gonna do something that gets you high utilization?" Because you know you have to do something in this space, or you're not gonna be competitive within your own team and talent. So it's really measuring against what else would you do with that portion of the compensation and how are you gonna use it most efficiently? That's the pitch to CFOs all day long.
Joel: So in lot of that comment every business in our space is sort of prone to pain when the economy goes to hell. This feels like to me one of the first things that companies would look to cut. Am I wrong? Am I right? And if I'm right, is the current environment a threat to the business?
Amy Spurling: You're right about employee perks. You're wrong about this version of it. So you're right about... So I was a CFO in 2008. I cut the heck out of everything. And so that was in the back of my brain when we started building this platform. The thing is, is that unemployment is still very, very low. In tech, it's 1.5%. There is virtually no unemployment in tech. We've been talking about all these layoffs, all of these things, less than 200,000 people in tech have lost their jobs out of hundreds of millions in this country. So you still have to figure out how you hire and retain. So if you're gonna cut something, it's gotta be something that's inefficient. So you have to find something that is the most efficient and cheapest way to be able to solve for that problem. And that's where something like this is a game changer in an economy like this, because you cannot just throw a whole bunch of stuff out there, spend a ton of money and hope that, it covers the board and you're fine. You have to be very intentional about your spend and make sure that it is very efficient.
Joel: It sounds like remote work has been good for your business to... On the competitive side, does a remote workforce hurt some of your competitors? If you want to name names, feel free. But do some of the business models around perks suffer in a remote work environment?
Amy Spurling: They do, and it's a lot of it... So it's remote and it's global. So we started seeing, we wouldn't global much earlier than I intended to. All my prior companies have been global. And because of that I've got plenty of battle scars. And so we planned on staying US-centric, but we realized that companies as small as 25, 50 people started having employees in other countries. And so to be able to support your entire team, you have to think about something. Basically the way that we built it, a credit card does not cross borders well. A marketplace does not cross borders at all. Taxation is an absolute nightmare when you start crossing borders. So you have to do something, basically the approach that we took and doing the tax compliance piece in order to be able to support an entire team. So that's one of the key places that, we really differentiate is the remote, but it's the distribution. If your team is all over the place, you can't have a book of vendors, that is based on in downtown Boston, because if no one lives there, that's useless.
Joel: So I assume you're compliant in multiple countries, from a tax perspective, obviously the IRS is a big one for our audience, but can accompany in Stuttgart benefit from your platform as well, from a taxed perspective?
Amy Spurling: They have to have a US legal entity. So my compliance requires US contracts. [chuckle] but you can have employees anywhere in the world. And so the way it works is that it's gonna be taxed in those countries because we're not... I'm not gonna say that we are tax locked down in 200 and some countries because quite frankly, I'd have to charge a heck of a lot more for this platform to do that. So we keep them on the conservative side, but we work with their teams. And if there's particular things that, like in Germany, don't tax this and Argentina don't tax that, we have the ability to do that.
Joel: Let's chat on this one. AI surrounds all of us every day, particularly in our space. And we talk a lot about vendors and workforce software that are gonna be impacted by chatGPT, OpenAI, everything that's coming down the pike. This is one where I have a hard time thinking that AI impacts, you think about this stuff every day, how is AI gonna impact, if at all, the perks business?
Amy Spurling: I think there is a place at some point, I mean, we're amassing, like we know what people are spending on, we know vendors that people are spending on. In theory you could say, people who bought this thing also like these other things, kind of like an Amazon marketplace that is less discovery and more suggestion. You could use AI for something like that down the road. It's not something that we have prioritized because we're getting the utilization we need in the meantime. But there is a place that you could do that, but it's not the first focus of what we're doing. There's a lot of other things we can do to support companies, employees in the meantime.
Joel: Got it. All right, Amy, that is the bell. And that means you get to face the Firing Squad. Are you ready?
Amy Spurling: I'm ready.
Joel: Chad. Get her.
Chad: Alright, Amy. The workforce and talent landscape has changed dramatically. It isn't what it was three years ago, you know that. It has rapidly evolved and employees are finally sticking up for themselves, quitting and asking for more. Companies are having a real hard time in getting in-office, hybrid, remote work. Those things, just those incredibly important things really hashed out. They don't have the bandwidth in many cases to think about things like perks. I personally believe perks are a must-have, but coming into this discussion, I wasn't sure that many penny pinching CFOs and weakass CHROs would be able to weave together a business narrative around why this makes sense. Until now, perks can help employee engagements retention and bottom line, I would only trust a CFO to understand how to connect those dots. 91% of the time, it's a win for me a hundred percent of the time, it's a big applause for Compt.
Amy Spurling: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Joel: Congratulations. But it's not over, Amy. You still have to face the big Cheese. Is that a little bit too egotistical? Anyway.
[chuckle]
Chad: You called yourself the big cheese. Really? [laughter]
Joel: I did. That's the first time ever on the show and probably the last. [chuckle] I love this space because it takes me back in time to the OC Tanner booze at Sherm with plaques and trophies and the gold plated clock. It's evolved...
Chad: So bad.
Joel: So much from those...
Chad: It was so bad...
Joel: Those days, but I was gonna kick out of how that used to be. How we rewarded and engaged employees. So the global employee engagement software market is expected to reach approximately 346 million by the end of 2025. That means opportunity. I know there's a lot of competition, a lot of players in the space, a lot of well-funded players, but there's a lot of money in that pie and it's a big one. So I love the space. I think retention, I think engaging global employees is gonna be huge and will be huge in the future. The money's there. I love the IRS angle, I love the tax angle. I think companies hate dealing with that shit. The fact that you can support that I think is great. I do think you'll have to raise more money at some point. I think you know that as well, even as fiscally conservative as you apparently are. But for me, this is a fun space to watch. I wish you had said, AI was gonna be a big part of it and you were gonna like dive into that. But anyway, at least we're a long way from gold plated watches or gold watches and plaques for people to put on their wall for me as well. DJ Horn ends. Round of applause.
Amy Spurling: Awesome.
Chad: Double. Big applause.
Amy Spurling: Double. I appreciate that.
Chad: Hello?
Joel: That's right. Congratulations Amy, how do you feel?
Amy Spurling: Thank you very much. Fantastic. I'm gonna tell my mom. [laughter]
Joel: Excellent. And one more time for our listeners, where can we learn more about Compt.
Amy Spurling: You can learn about us on our website at Compt.io or feel free to reach out to me, amy@Compt.io.
Joel: Chad, another one is in the books. I'm still waiting for my compensation. Until then, we out.
Chad: We out.
Outro: This has been The Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.C-H-A-D-C-H-E-E-S-E.com.