Episode 179: Winning & Losing Together: A Team Approach Where Everyone Feels Empowered To Do Their Best Work With Baxter Lanius (Alternative Payments)
What is the best team approach to achieve your goals and secure success? Baxter Lanius, Founder and CEO of Alternative Payments, breaks down how leaders can make everyone feel empowered to do their best work, even if it means facing failures together. He joins Amy Vetter to share the importance of aligning a person’s strengths with their respective work roles, inspired by his experiences in playing lacrosse. Baxter also explains how they leverage AI to improve payment processes and client experiences, significantly speeding up payment times.
This episode is sponsored by Alternative Payments. Alternative Payments is a financial technology platform trusted by 1,000+ service businesses nationwide and the clients they support. They help service providers embed and monetize payments within their existing workflows, creating a new recurring revenue stream while simplifying billing and eliminating operational lift.
To learn more: https://go.alternativepayments.io/see-it-in-action-2?utm_source=b3method&utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletter
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Winning & Losing Together: A Team Approach Where Everyone Feels Empowered To Do Their Best Work With Baxter Lanius (Alternative Payments)
Welcome to this episode where I interview Baxter Lanius, who is the Founder and CEO of Alternative Payments, a B2B payments infrastructure company helping managed service providers modernize and automate their payment workflows. Baxter is a serial entrepreneur specializing in Fintech and MSP payments. He cofounded Alternative Payments to simplify the accounts receivable process for service providers. Prior to founding the company, he served as principal at Apollo Global Management, where he developed deep expertise in scaling high-growth businesses.
He brings a combination of institutional finance experience and hands-on operator insight to build the future of MSP payments. During my interview with Baxter, we talked about his personal story and his business journey. He talked about growing up in Manhattan, where he developed an early sense of independence and problem-solving skills that he carried into his college years and to his first business venture, a lacrosse camp. He later transitioned into finance and eventually founded Alternative Payments to address the archaic invoicing and payment processes common among businesses.
This episode is sponsored by Alternative Payments. Alternative Payments is a financial technology platform trusted by 1,000-plus service businesses nationwide and the clients they support. They help service providers embed and monetize payments within their existing workflows, creating a new recurring revenue stream while simplifying billing and eliminating operational lift. To learn more, check out the link to see how Alternative Payments can help you. I hope that you find this interview inspiring as well as take some of the leadership lessons that Baxter shares with us into your own life and business.
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I'm here with Baxter Lanius from Alternative Payments. Baxter, before we get started, do you want to give a little brief intro on yourself and then we'll get into your story?
Yeah, I would love to, Amy. I really appreciate you having us on. Quick background, I'm the Founder and CEO of Alternative Payments. We're a financial operating system for recurring services-based businesses. Think IT services, field services, commercial services, and ultimately, really the core problem that we're solving is businesses today get paid in a quite archaic manner. They may be receiving checks, they may be manually invoicing, they may be having a challenging time to collect, and our core software product automates that workflow. I’m super excited to be here and excited to run it through.
Looking Back To Baxter’s Childhood And Education
Looking forward to hearing more about that. We'll get started with your story. I just wanted to start off with where you grew up, what your parents did for a living, just a little background on yourself there.
I grew up in Manhattan, in New York City, which a lot of people are like, “WTF. How the heck did you grow up in a big city, in the Big Apple?” It was an interesting childhood. My parents were divorced when I was about five years old, and I grew up with my mom, but my dad was very relevant and in my life. A lot of my friends' parents all were in the finance industry. My dad ran a very small real estate business, my mom worked for a big Fortune 500 company, and business was always a little part of my life as were sports.
I grew up really focused on an assortment of sports, but then I gained a passion for lacrosse. I played lacrosse in high school, I played lacrosse in college, and probably in college and university, I, started to have a passion for just running a business. When I was a freshman in college I started my first company, which was a lacrosse camps business, keeping with my passion in sports. It was an amazing opportunity to teach children and teach kids how to play lacrosse a sport that gave me so much.
I ran that business for about 6 or 7 years and then transitioned into more of a business operations role and started working with business owners and operating businesses, and then went to an investing role. I started Alternative Payments in 2021 based off of a core problem that we saw in the market around this archaic invoicing, billing, and payment workflow. I have 1 brother, 3 half siblings, and then I married, little boy, and then a dog.
Let's go back to you growing up in New York City. How did that work as far as going to school and playing with friends? I don't think I’ve ever met anyone that grew up in New York City, in Manhattan.
Yeah, so your playing field is basically your apartment. Neighbors complain all the time because I'm throwing balls against the wall. That was like what I basically did as a kid. I went to a school probably fifteen blocks away from my apartment, 2500 square foot apartment. I walked there with my mom or dad.
There were two buildings which were obviously attached to many other buildings as buildings are in Manhattan. One was more of an academic building. One was an athletic building. Obviously different types of rooms and different types of structures and then we also we drove out to fields called Randall's Island to play sports.
It's one of those great experiences once you start becoming social and socializing with other schools because the world's your oyster. Many of your friends live 3 blocks away, 4 blocks away. You go and grab a pizza, you go to play laser tag or you go to get a burger. Everything's very convenient. You have Central Park, which is a massive park and resource for many kids growing up in Manhattan.
Those walks to school, if you think about walking to school with your parents, are there any conversations that stood out or any experiences from those? I don't think everyone gets that opportunity to walk with their parents each day.
I think about it as there are all these parallels in terms of the way in which people are brought up and it doesn't matter if you're in Kansas or Omaha or San Francisco or New York City or Los Angeles or Austin, Texas or Dallas. That type of relationship can take place on the street walking. It could take place in a car. I have a lot of friends who grew up out of New York and the way they pass time with their parents oftentimes was like, “Let's go take a drive.”
That's not what happens in Manhattan. You take a walk. That's an opportunity to obviously bond with your parents and build relationships with them. I think the big difference is just the amount of space and so you need to figure out I think as a family and now I'm figuring this out for my own family, how do you operate without as much space as other people do. How does that impact what you offer to your family?
If they don't have a backyard, if you can't just let your dog out the door and go to the restroom, what does that lifestyle look like and is that the lifestyle that you want to provide for your family or is that not the lifestyle that you want to provide for your family? Many people make the decision to leave Manhattan and go into the suburbs, of which there are many, and commute into back into New York for a whole host of different reasons.
I think it's also a little bit of the education scene. Public-private school in Manhattan versus public-private school in many of the suburbs is quite drastic and has many different differences. There are in there are a lot of single-sex private schools in Manhattan, which is also quite unique relative to a lot of different places.
It really got interesting and wild when we were in eighth grade because the social scene just accelerates so significantly and it's not like you need your parents to drive you to somebody's house. You take the elevator down to the lobby of your apartment building and then you can go out and do whatever the heck you want to do and nobody knows really where you are.
There's a sense of independence that you're getting way earlier than probably a lot of kids.
Independence and just solving problems at the end of the day is the way I think about it, which is there's certain level of controls that your parents have when they're in charge of driving you around. You really can't stray too far outside the course. In New York, you grow up at a different rate because again you don't have those same confines.
There are also obviously negatives in terms of sports. I left. I went to boarding school, which was a decision that I made because of sports. I had access to fields and could play lacrosse or I played tennis whenever I wanted to play the sports. As opposed to in New York, again, you have significant confines to what that looks like.
Where was the boarding school?
In New Jersey. I was about hour and a half hour West of Manhattan.
How old were you when you went there?
Fourteen.
You lived there then at fourteen?
Yeah.
You really did have a very independent life.
You got to solve problems. Get them all out there. Throw get the kids out of the house and figure it out.
Is that when lacrosse started? How did you get exposed to lacrosse?
My very good friend's father played lacrosse in college and so he taught a number of us lacrosse and then that started when I was probably ten and then pursued lacrosse more aggressively once I got to boarding school. We had a really great team in boarding school and then obviously kept that up through university and through college.
What was it about lacrosse that you enjoyed so much?
I think there were a number of different things. One is it was a relatively new sport and it still is a new sport. There are not nearly as many Division 1 teams and then not many collegiate programs that than other sports. It’s kind of up-and-coming. I love the team aspect of it in terms of working with each other to drive success and to drive an outcome. That was one component of all team sports that I really enjoyed but definitely preferred team sports more than individual sports. I guess I was good at it. That helped. I'm not exactly sure.
Team Approach: Lacrosse requires players to work with each other to drive success.
How Baxter Got Into Business
When you were going through boarding school, is that when you started noticing you had an interest for business or where did that time come?
I think in boarding school and definitely at university and college. I always wanted to start a business. I was always very interested in companies that were being founded. There's a news company called TechCrunch. I read TechCrunch a lot in terms of understanding what companies were getting funded and why were they getting funded and slowly really built an interest for this whole dynamic of building something.
The challenge that I always faced I think through high school and college and career-wise is like when is the right time to build something. When is the right time to go out on your own. Do you have the skillset that's required to be successful and I think that was the key piece of the puzzle that I was trying to solve. I think a lot of this accelerated in college because I started this lacrosse camps program and saw this opportunity where lacrosse was an up-and-coming sport, there was getting much more traction in the market but there was no camp in New York City.
I obviously had a lot of friends who played lacrosse and so I had a network of coaches and there was obviously a lot of demand from the kids from Manhattan and outside of Manhattan who wanted to play. We were able to put those together and build a camp for the next seven years around that supply-demand imbalance.
When you said about the challenge of when to start a business or not, did you have a decision matrix at that point? Why did you decide that that was the right time to start?
I'll tell you really funny story. I was a freshman in college at 18, 19 and I called one of my good friends up from high school and I said, “There's not a lacrosse camp in New York City. Do you know what are you doing this summer? Do you want to start a lacrosse camp?” He said, “This is interesting. There's no lacrosse camp, let's start a lacrosse camp.”
We said, “All right, we're going to go start a lacrosse camp.” We created a flyer. We went into Microsoft Word, we created a flyer, tried to make it as pretty as we could, tried to design the logo. We downloaded like Adobe Photoshop at the time to create this flyer. We didn't have prior design capabilities. AI didn't exist to automate all of this.
We sent it to both my former elementary school as well as his former elementary school. We started to try to figure out other teachers and coaches within these elementary schools that we knew and we continued to just send them out and said, “We're hosting this lacrosse program, here's how much it costs, here's when it is, here's what it entails,” and crickets.
We didn't hear anything. Two weeks go by, crickets. I call my friend, I'm like, “Are we really starting this? How do you acquire customers? How do you go to market? How does this even work?” One day, I got a call on my cell phone from an unknown caller and I picked up I said, “This is Baxter.” A woman picked up the phone and said, “This is so-and-so's mother. We'd love to inquire about NYC Lacrosse Camps. Could you tell us about the offering?”
I was like, “Who? Wait, what did you say?” That kickstarted it and that individual's mom was instrumental in driving demand from the group of friends that her son was friends with. From there, we launched and we had a first year as a camp of about 75 boys and then a few years later, we launched a girls' program and we were off to the races. It just takes that one lucky call or one lucky thing to fall in your direction.
It's always interesting with starting a business I think, too, of whether it's what you intended to start based on what the interest is for the idea that you have because someone else might perceive it differently. When I started an accounting business a long time ago, I thought I was going to just sell bookkeeping services.
The first caller I got didn't want bookkeeping. They wanted me to come and train them on how to use the software and that was not what I had expected. I was curious and went and didn't realize there was a demand for that. Is there anything that changed in how you started delivering this? I guess you got it through a mom versus the coaches in the school like you had originally thought.
Things didn't really change in terms of the program. We tried to add services where it got a little bit more complicated. We had this whole idea of starting an eCommerce store. That was obviously a huge waste of time and obviously a time suck. No one wants to buy our branded socks on a website. We’re not going to make a lot of money from that strategy. We tried to open up a new location, which was challenging as well. Learned a lot from that. We went through an M&A transaction and were going through an M&A transaction and then that didn't work out so well from a cultural perspective. There were a lot of different iterations.
I think for me personally, what was most fascinating is just having to go through some of these experiences at a young age and navigate them and not really knowing what to do. We came up with an idea because lacrosse summer programs are right around when the final four is, which is a big collegiate lacrosse tournament. We started emailing the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, a bunch of media in the New York area. We got our camp written up in the Wall Street Journal, which was very cool.
It was very much of an ad hoc. There was no real strategy. It was really just like throwing stuff at the wall and seeing if it stuck and seeing if there was demand and seeing how to grow. Now, what was very successful is we had this referral network because we knew some of the parents, we knew some of the teachers and coaches in the space and we tried to incentivize them to showcase our programs. I'm sure it's similar with your business. That's always a great method if you can figure out how to accelerate it and how to build something larger because of it.
Why did it end up ending?
I wanted more structure and more of a platform within business operations and finance. Had we been able to grow it for a larger portion of the summer, it could have easily been a full-time job. At the end of the day, after 6 years, we had 4 weeks of boys' camps, 4 weeks of girls' camps, and then 4 weeks in a second location in August. Both the boys and girls camps overlap, so cumulatively, eight weeks. When I was in college, it was the best job in the entire world because I made more money than anybody else.
I had a ton of fun doing it and I was employing my friends, which was always an interesting dynamic. Once you graduate, you need to get kicked in the butt a little bit and hopefully learn from someone else as opposed to making it up on the spot and emailing a bunch of newspapers to quote you in an article that doesn't exist.
How Baxter Started His Own Company
What was your degree?
I majored in Finance. I went to an undergraduate business school called Lehigh University, which actually had a very strong accounting program. A lot of my peers majored in Accounting and went off to get their CPA and then work for the Big Four, but I decided to major in Finance and then go into business and finance.
Did you take a job that was within a company before you started your own company again?
Yeah, so then I worked at 3 different companies for the next 9 years, either operating businesses or investing in businesses throughout that time period. Both small businesses, $10 million and very large businesses, so multi-billion-dollar companies.
What was it about what you're doing now, what started it? What was the idea behind it or where'd you get it from?
What we kept seeing is that all of these companies that I’ve ever worked with, including going back to my lacrosse camps business, just couldn't get paid. We couldn't figure out how to automate the workflow. Going back to my lacrosse camps business, people used to drop off checks at my apartment building. That's how they'd pay for a week session and we would check the mail every single day and we'd see, “Did this person check,” and then we had a checklist and we went down their names and we checked them off the list.
Once we accumulated enough checks, we would then go to the bank and we had a banker and we'd go to the banker and say, “These are all checks,” and they'd scan them and confirm that they were real checks. Luckily, no checks bounced. That was always very positive when we knew that we had money in the bank.
Funny thinking about that now. You'd have to take people to small claims because they wouldn't replace the check.
Totally, or the kid goes to camp and then a week later, the check bounced. I distinctly remember when I was a kid, my mom and I going to go get groceries and she used to just write a check at the counter for groceries. That was 2010, 2011. My lacrosse camps business was quite a small business, less than $100,000 of revenue. I started working with $2 million revenue businesses, $5 million revenue businesses, and they had the same issue. They were accepting checks and they didn't have a workflow and they'd send out a PDF and they'd say, “Amy, thank you so much for being a loyal customer. Please see an invoice for $1,500.”
You would then just wait. You'd just wait and you'd pray that Amy paid you or that she'd send you an envelope one day and you'd wake up and check the mailbox and there's your check. Even with some of the biggest companies that we did business with, $20 million of revenue, $100 million of revenue, $1 billion of revenue, like a lot of their customers paid via check or paid via wire, which is untrackable. We saw this big challenge and obviously, as you're a business owner and the number of invoices that you send out every month increases, this challenge and this pain point becomes much more acute.
We decided to build software around it. We plug into accounting software to streamline the pull of those invoices. We plug into practice management systems. To streamline the pull of those invoices, we automate the distribution of those invoices. If you don't pay within a certain time frame, we send you another email. We've then built a client portal so that your end clients can log in and they can really self-serve. They can say, “I want to pay via ACH,” or, “I want to pay via credit card,” or, “I'm actually not in charge of making this payment. Let me add Amy to the account so that Amy can make the payment.”
You can see your whole payment history, so you can really clearly audit, you can see w9s. It's a full-sum self-service capability. All of those payments are directly reconciled into the practice management software and the invoicing software, the accounting ERP software. That's the core premise. Obviously, there's a lot more functions and features around it. We were really trying to build for that automation piece of the puzzle to help businesses not only get paid on time but also save money on processing fees and track the payments very closely.
Do both sides use it or the person billing can use it but the client doesn't have to be on it.?
That's one of the things that we learned really early on. A lot of systems only solve one side of the equation. It takes two to tango. You need a system that is flexible and fungible for your clients if they want to control that experience or for you if you want to control that experience. There's a quite a bit of function or flexibility in the workflow and that's really why I think we've had so much success. We didn't just put everybody in a box and said, “You fit into QuickBooks or an Intuit customer and this is how it's meant to be and this is how other people have done it.”
Team Approach: A lot of systems only solve one side of the equation. You need a system that is flexible and fungible for your clients if they want to control that experience.
We spent years and continue to interview customers and continue to build relationships with our customers and really understand what is it that you want? How can we help drive adoption to online payments for your business. How can we eliminate this whole dynamic of going to the mailbox, seeing if the checks have arrived, going to the bank and depositing the check, because obviously that's a very high-friction process.
How AI Affects Baxter’s Accounting Platform
How is AI affecting your platform?
I think there are two real big components that I think are really exciting. One is, as a business owner, how do you use AI internally to streamline your workflows? We have an engineering team, a product team, a design team, we have customer success, we have sales, we have operations. Within each one of those lines of business, we're trying to figure out what is the most efficient way to use AI to drive efficiency, to drive a return on investment, to improve each one of those lines of business.
The second big piece is then how do you productize this so that your clients can benefit from AI and leverage, obviously, the technology of AI to really what our North star is, which is get paid faster. Our capability or our success metric is our ability to help our clients get paid faster. The couple of different ways we're doing that is one is AI-based automated emails. We know when your clients are engaging with these emails that we're sending out, we know when they're opening them, we know when they're clicking them.
That can run autonomously for future emails based off of how those clients engage. That's really one of the key ways and we've actually seen that improve payment times quite tremendously. You know that Amy wakes up and she turns on opens her email at 8:00 AM and that's when she clicks on all these emails and that's when we distribute the invoice. You meet them where they are, which then drives adoption.
The second piece is really around understanding financials better. There are a lot of companies in the accounting market that have business intelligence tooling but because we are the payments platform and because we understand day sales outstanding, we can also assess risk and assess intelligence of your clients so that you can get ahead of those potentially slow payers. That allows you to take what historically has been a reactive payment component of receiving the check, posting it to your bank, and now you can proactively identify potential risk, slow players.
If Joe Smith is now paying five days after he paid last month, you know that there may be a different issue and we can give you line of sight on the risk side, which again allows you to proactively get paid. Those are two different examples, but AI is going to transform a lot of these products and we couldn’t be more excited about how do you use the technology to offer your clients a better solution.
Leadership Lessons From Lacrosse
Is there anything you learned from whether being independent growing up, lacrosse, your first business that you've brought into your leadership now of this business?
I think the biggest thing for us is really the empowerment of individuals and in team members. It’s this mindset of winning and losing together and hopefully upleveling the entire team as you do it. I saw that on the sports field, I saw that when I started my lacrosse camp at a young age. I saw that in my business career, but I didn't really have as much capability of forming that culture.
I think we're really proud of promoting probably eight people in a year to the next phase of their careers and the next area that they want to be in. The other piece of the puzzle for us is really aligning what people want to do with what they're good at. We try to empower people to push us into the position that they want to be in and how they want to spend their time as opposed to where we think that they should spend their time. Trying to meet in the middle to to put people in the right position to be successful is another key component of our business and where we've had success.
It’s so important because you can have the same job title across the line, but there's people people, there's technical people. Same job title but important to know what drives them from an energy perspective so you get the most out of them.
Oftentimes, I think within Corporate America, you follow a trajectory of a specific career but you don't necessarily have the ability to pivot. I saw this for my own career. Even when I was running a lacrosse camps business, after a few years I woke up and I was like, “What am I doing?” I want to go work for somebody else and learn from somebody else. Luckily, it was a small business so it's not like I had to sell it and go through this whole song and dance. Luckily, there wasn't a lot of money in it or else that would also be challenging to tie somebody down.
You need to have the ability to I think pivot and do something else that maybe you're passionate about and so many of the times, you start a career when you're 21, 22 and 10 years later you're 31 and you're still in the same seat and you wake up and you're like, “I don't want to be in sales,” or, “I don't want to be in customer success,” or, “I don't want to be an accountant.” There's got to be another option.
I love that because I do think that whole empowerment or looking within is so important which really shows in how you grew up of really being an individual independent so early in the lifestyle that you had. You had to look a lot within to know where you wanted to go, how you were going to stay safe, and then even to decide to go to boarding school for team sports. Those are all ways of learning that yourself and a lot of people I don't think necessarily come by that naturally because they have been guided or told what to do. Really being able to develop that skill of looking within of what really does drive you, not everybody takes time to do that.
Totally, and I think a lot of people, right, you show up to university or college on day one and now, all of a sudden, you’re alone and you're like, “I need to figure this out.” People often say that the first years are a struggle because a lot of people are trying to figure out how to show up to class on time because now they have that independence and their mind is blown. They're like, “My mom and dad are not here to tell me to go to class. This is revolutionary.
Rapid-Fire Questions About Family And Friends
I like to end with some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category, either family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
Family and friends.
Things or actions I don't have that I want to have with my family and friends.
I would say I don't see my family and friends as much. I work too much. I consider my team now my family and friends so I now have 75 family members and friends that are close to me.
Are you in New York still?
Yeah.
Things or actions I do have that I want to keep with my family and friends.
We just have a newborn at home, so that's been amazing and it's been incredible to watch him grow and super excited to be a father and be part of that journey.
Yeah, that's exciting. Things or actions I don't have that I don't want to have.
I don't even know. Skip.
Last one. Things or actions that I do have that I don't want as far as my family and friends.
Yeah, this is a good one for me. I think just materialistic aspects of this. I am not a big present person. I don't it's not that I'm the Grinch but I don't need all this materialistic world that we live in with family and friends and gifts for every single holiday. That's something that I could pass up on.
It also goes back to what you said earlier of how to live minimalist when you're living in Manhattan versus when you've got a lot more space.
Totally. I always wake up with my wife and I'm like, “We don't even have enough storage for all this.” It's wild. A lot of people live with a storage facility and that's also just another whole dynamic. Minimalist life is the way to go.
Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words
Thank you so much for sharing your story. Is there anything that you didn't get to say or you want to just drive something home as we close out this interview?
No, I just think it's fascinating in the accounting landscape. The adoption of AI is obviously going to change the industry tremendously and it's changing a lot of industries. I would definitely encourage people to think about how it's going to change your business and in what ways it's going to change your business.
More importantly, how can you offer solutions to your clients. How can you use tooling as a benefit and as an opportunity to sell more, sell different services and really, that's where I think we've been quite excited about on the accounts receivable side. We run into a lot of accountants every day who say, “I don't want to touch accounts receivable because it's so messy.”
It's not a solution that we offer. If we can automate it for you, if we can help you with this technological automation and adaptation, it could be something unique to put in your quiver and put in your portfolio to build a stronger practice and build a stronger business. This has been this has been really great, Amy. I really appreciate your time.
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate having you on and look forward to seeing what you develop over the next year.
Wonderful, definitely. Thank you, everybody.
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Welcome to our Mindful Moments for this episode with Baxter Lanius. We started this conversation talking about the fact that he grew up in Manhattan, which is something that's a little unusual, especially for children to grow up in the middle of the city. It was extremely interesting to learn what his childhood was like versus living in a suburb. He also talked about the fact that both of his parents were in business and how he navigated the city as a child to be able to do the things that he wanted to do.
One of the most important things that I think we talked about were two things in his childhood. One, the independence that he had early on in order to be able to see friends and navigate the city. The second, finding ways to play team sports, which really carried through to be such an important piece of what Baxter carries as a leader and as well as an entrepreneur.
One of the things he said was very interesting to me when I step back thinking about it because I always knew in my head I was going to be an entrepreneur. I didn't start that way as well. I worked in my mom's businesses, but I went to college, I went to CPA firms, I worked in corporations, and it was always in the back of my mind of what would be the thing that would be exciting to me to have a business in.
It’s one of those things that has to come to you and that you are excited enough to take the risk to go all in. His first business was lacrosse. It's funny, it reminded me that when I was doing my Master's, I applied for this scholarship in order to get a business funded and it was called fitnessnow.tv. It was way before its time, we're talking more than 25 years ago, before there were places where you could stream fitness videos and so forth and that's what I was talking about at the time.
I knew that that would be something that would excite me of being able to think about how I could run a business like that and scale it. Now, I came to the conclusion as I started working through all the different areas of it that the technology wasn't right and wasn't going to be able to do it. Same thing for him, as the reality of college ending that it really wasn't a full-time job at that point without a lot more investment. He went back in business as well.
I think it's important to understand that not every business that you do or job has to be for forever. It's what you learn from those experiences that actually grow you as a leader. This is really an important thing that we look back on as it's not a failure, it's not a waste of time. It's what do we learn from it that is going to give us experience into the next role that we do or the next business that we do.
We really talked about how that business and growing up in New York really has empowered him as a leader to empower his people, but also have this team approach that's so important to him of making sure that everybody's in the right slots, that they're excited about the roles that they have and it is aligned with their values. Also, that the work that they do excites them and they can look within and be empowered to do the next best thing. All of these things are really important when we look back into our history and how it is actually affecting us now.
Really fascinating about how all these tools are moving so fast into delivering new ways to surface information. When he talked about AI with Alternative Payments of really delivering insights, where you can be an advisor to your clients and have the tool actually helping a small business or mid-sized business to better understand their cashflow and collections and what they could be doing differently and timing of when you're sending invoices and so forth. Those types of insights are what helps create the advisor relationship.
Even if they are in the client's software, most of the time, they don't really understand how to impact that. That human side paired with the AI is such an important thing and to really think about where you want to be in that continuum in your workflow to make sure that you are staying ahead of the curve, that you keep researching what's in the applications you're using or looking to use so that you can enhance the work that you do with your clients.
I want to thank Alternative Payments for sponsoring this episode. If you haven't heard of them before, Alternative Payments is a financial technology platform and is trusted by 1,000-plus service businesses nationwide and the clients they support. They help service providers embed and monetize payments within their existing workflows and create new recurring revenue streams while simplifying billing and eliminating the operational lift.
There is a link that you can go to find out more. Just remember that this is our time to step back, look at what skillsets we have, what skill sets that maybe we haven't even identified that are our unique gifts that we have to bring into the work that we do now. Be inspired by that and look around and see where you can innovate and be able to help others.
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About Baxter Lanius
Baxter Lanius is the Founder and CEO of Alternative Payments, a B2B payments infrastructure company helping managed service providers modernize and automate their payment workflows. A serial entrepreneur specializing in fintech and MSP payments, Baxter co-founded Alternative Payments to simplify the accounts receivable process for service providers. Prior to founding the company, he served as a Principal at Apollo Global Management, where he developed deep expertise in scaling high-growth businesses. He brings a combination of institutional finance experience and hands-on operator insight to building the future of MSP payments.