Hello, I'm Josh, the CEO and co-founder of Gusto. Welcome to Gusto Showcase. This showcase is a look at how Gusto keeps getting better for small businesses. Over the past several months, we've introduced nearly 75 improvements across Gusto, shaped by real customer feedback. Because great businesses aren't built on one big win. They're built on thousands of small ones. The everyday moments where work gets easier, decisions get clearer, and running your business feels more manageable. Today I'm going to be visiting small businesses and sharing with them what we're doing to make their life easier and better. Emily, Heather, I'm so grateful to be here.
Yeah, thanks for visiting. We started this business as a way to provide free pastry training to people with barriers to employment and then we help our students get jobs as bakers and pastry chefs after they leave us.
So, at the beginning, it was just the two of you.
Then you started adding more people. At any given time, it's going to be either like a team of five or six of us all the way up to 15 depending on the time of the year. It eventually got to the point where I started using just like a Google sheet to track everyone's hours and that got way too complex over time.
On the contractor front, we had gotten feedback and we knew it was kind of a project that we wanted to get to where we actually bring more of that same W2 functionality to contractors so they can decide different places to do the payouts. They can do reoccurring payments.
It's kind of one screen to go now do payroll for both the employees and contractors. And so that's based on feedback from customers like you.
Small businesses don't need more complexity. They need fewer steps between what needs to get done and having it done. A lot of what we have been building is about removing friction, turning things that used to take extra emails, forms, or follow up into something that gets done automatically for you by Gusto. For teams like Emily's and Heather's, that shows up in one payroll experience for employees and contractors, reoccurring contractor payments, and fewer hoops to jump through every pay cycle. The goal is simple, less process and more progress. So you mentioned earlier that you found out about Gusto through your mom. So what does your mom do?
So my mom's a CPA and she actually works with lots of small businesses helping them set up their payroll and she was the one that told us about Gusto.
That's amazing. Could you introduce me?
The small things really do add up. One less step here, one less interruption there and over time that becomes real time savings for a small business. Joanne, it's good to see you.
Tell me more about how you first came across our product.
So I came across Zen Payroll back in 2014. At that time I probably had 40 clients I was doing payroll for and along came Gusto and I seriously changed my life. I now take vacations in January.
My mother-in-law is a CPA and I remember when we were just getting started in 2011 shadowing her running payroll for businesses and seeing how much she was doing by hand manually. Part of the genesis was, hey, this seems like a whole bunch of stuff that could be made simpler, easier, and if we do it accurately, reliably, then we could actually become a partner to not just the business owner, but the accountants and bookkeepers of the world. So, one thing we've done is in the accountant dashboard, we added more to the dashboard to help them be more equipped and smarter to know which of their clients might be a good fit for 401k, which of their clients might be now at the threshold to be a good fit for health insurance or tax credits, right? Which clients might be eligible for an R&D tax credit or 401k tax credit, right?
Yeah. We did it through Gusto because then you get a credit with your payroll taxes and so Gusto will take care of that.
One thing I love about this story is that it shows all the ways Gusto helps small businesses including working with their accountants. That's why we've built clearer guidance right into the flow of work. For accountants, that means clearer visibility into compliance requirements and savings opportunities for their clients. So, you're not just getting the work done, you're making better decisions with more confidence.
But, you know, my clients come to me for that information and to be able to do all that in one place is great.
We don't view Gusto as a tool. We aspire to be a partner to small businesses.
