Chad Richison

The son of a milkman and a dental assistant, Richison 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. Armed with a Chevy Viking and a flatbed he welded to the back—and with his high school friends as employees—he built a small business that could haul up to 1,200 bales a day. 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. After that, Richison left to join a smaller payroll outfit in Denver. 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. Unlike some financial institutions, which store data on Amazon Web Services, Richison decided early on to avoid outsourcing customer data to a third party. While most of its more than 23,500 customers are businesses with 100 to 2,500 employees, Paycom started actively targeting much bigger firms with up to 5,000 employees in 2018—a move that put it into more direct competition with industry stalwart ADP.