What shaped your marketing instinct? You've worked across different businesses and markets; what have those experiences taught you about finding the growth story that actually matters?
It started early. As a kid, I used to make up commercials to convince my parents to let me do things like have a sleepover with a friend, or get a pizza night. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was learning the fundamentals: know your audience, understand what they care about, and give them a compelling reason to say yes.
Later, my work in B2C advertising and word-of-mouth marketing gave me a deep understanding of what drives people to form meaningful connections with brands, and how those connections turn into purchase decisions. That lesson holds whether you're in B2B or B2C. Either way, you're reaching people. And those people have aspirations, challenges, and needs that we can help solve.
That's where the growth story that actually matters lives. It's not the first interesting fact you uncover. It's what you find when you keep digging until you unlock a true insight. An insight that differentiates your brand, forms a connection and drives real behavior change.
HR has gotten complicated. From payroll and benefits to compliance, increasing costs, talent, and changing employee expectations, where are employers feeling the most pressure today?
The pressure points are now everywhere all at once. Payroll and benefits compliance were always complex, but now there's talent on top of it. Skills gaps. Retention. Changing expectations around flexibility and benefits. What I hear most often from customers is that managing all of this is pulling HR leaders in way too many directions.
Small business owners feel this strain most acutely. They want to offer competitive benefits and run a compliant operation, but the administrative and fiduciary burden that comes with it can feel overwhelming.
What do employers really want from their HR partners right now? And where does Paychex have the strongest opportunity to deliver on those expectations?
Employers want partners they can trust to not only lighten their load but to reduce their risk. They’re looking for someone who understands the full complexity of running a business and can help with the things that pull time away from what they do best. They want outcomes, not features.
When Paycor joined Paychex, I didn’t have a true grasp on everything the company does. Paychex pays one out of every 11 American private sector workers. We're one of the largest 401(k) recordkeepers in the country. We have employment law expertise, benefits administration, retirement solutions, advisory solutions, and, of course, payroll.
The opportunity is clarifying who we are as a brand. Brand is what your customers say about you when you're not in the room, the role you play in their day-to-day life and the impact you have on their bottom line. I want Paychex to be known as the partner who understands the full complexity of running a business and delivers against it. Everyone is leaning into automation right now, but we can uniquely deliver both innovation and true human expertise, real advisory support alongside the technology, not instead of it.
AI is everywhere in the HR conversation. Where do you see real opportunity for it, and where do you think the industry is getting distracted by the hype?
The opportunity is where AI solves for real customer problems. Streamlining payroll processing, flagging compliance risks, helping benefits administrators work smarter. That's legitimate, valuable use of AI.
The distraction is when AI becomes the story instead of the outcome. A lot of companies are racing to innovate for innovation's sake. The race should be against customer problems, not against each other.
What separates us isn't just the data we have, though we maintain an extraordinary amount of it – we've been solving customer problems for more than 50 years. It's the human expertise behind that data. Our AI is informed by those interactions – 26 trillion at last count – and that's the difference between driving automation and driving outcomes.
Business owners aren't impressed by how smart the AI sounds. They're concerned with accountability – they want to see the checks and balances, the humans in the loop, and the safeguards that ensure automation produces the right result. Trust is hard to earn and even harder to keep, especially around something as sensitive as payroll and HR. You maintain it by showing your work and proving that technology has to earn its place rather than replacing people.
What should Paychex be known for beyond being a payroll and HR provider? How do you want to evolve that story in the market?
Our brand currently reflects our half-century history more than it reflects where the company is today. I want to respect the sage wisdom we’ve gathered over those 50 years while pairing it with the fresh innovation and expertise we're actively bringing to the table.
We want to tell the story of breadth, depth, and outcomes. There are so many parts of our portfolio that are still underestimated. Retirement, specifically. Most people don't realize we're one of the largest 401(k) recordkeepers in the country. We've built pooled plans so a small business owner can offer retirement benefits without taking on the administrative and fiduciary weight that usually comes with them. That's a genuine competitive advantage that almost never comes up.
But more than for any single product, I want Paychex to be known as the company that took a 50-year-old brand and modernized it. Not by chasing shiny new trends, but by staying genuinely focused on what makes HR and payroll simpler, smarter, and more strategic for the customers we serve.
The workforce itself is changing fast. As AI reshapes jobs, skills, and employee expectations, what new questions should HR marketers be asking?
They should be asking what the role of HR is becoming. As AI handles more of the transactional work, what unique value does the human bring? What's the new job of the HR leader? I think we're reimagining HR as a strategic function focused on talent strategy, employee experience, and organizational capability. It’s now less about keeping the lights on operationally and more about driving business outcomes through people.
That shifts everything. Instead of "How do we automate this task," the question becomes "How do we free up our team to focus on what creates real competitive advantage?" Instead of "What does AI make possible," the question becomes, "Where does human judgment matter most?"
Employee expectations are changing, too. Flexibility, personalized benefits, and development opportunities all matter more to today's workforce than they used to. HR marketers need to help companies understand that managing those shifts is where their actual growth story sits.
Forget the marketing metrics for a moment. What would make you genuinely proud of what you've built at Paychex?
Two things. First, that we fundamentally changed how people think about what Paychex is – that we closed the gap between everything we actually do and what the market associates with our name. In a year, when someone thinks of Paychex, I want them thinking of us as the one partner they can’t run their business without because we helped turn their company goals into results.
I want to evoke a customer experience that inspires passionate brand advocates that can't help but tell everyone about us. That they can't imagine doing their job without us. That's the real measure. Not the campaigns we ran or the features we launched, but the relationships we built and the actual impact we had on how people run their businesses.
