By the end of 1978, we had 11 partners and six franchisees, we were operating in 22 cities, and we had about 6,000 clients. We had left Electronic Accounting Systems and were doing our own processing on our own computers.
In New York, the average total state and local tax burden is $5,260 for every man, woman and child. That's by far the highest in the country.
My original business plan? To work hard, get 300 clients in the Rochester area, and live happily ever after.
Politicians like to talk about incentives - for businesses to relocate, for example, or to get folks to buy local.
I've been paying a lot of money in state income taxes, and I've been happy to do it, but when this last thing happened, this 50 percent increase in the tax rate, it was just too much.
New York state and federal election laws allow us to make unlimited expenditures on behalf of or in opposition to candidates so long as we do not coordinate those expenditures.
I came up with the idea for what later became Paychex in 1970 when I was working for Electronic Accounting Systems, a company that sold payroll processing to companies with 50 to 1,000 employees.
Anyone who has been as successful as I have should want to share those resources. Why not give some of it to charity?
Electronic Accounting Systems processed my little payrolls like one big payroll. I did the selling, and the people I hired did most of the operations.
I'm not possessed about owning the Buffalo Bills, just as I wasn't possessed about owning the Buffalo Sabres.
We picked a great marketplace. We were a pioneer in payroll processing for very small companies. And we had the perseverance and good fortune enough to stick it out.
What made me this way was watching my father go through bad employment experiences. When I was 17, and he was 65, I saw him go through the experiences working for a boss that was rude and obnoxious. I swore if I was ever had the capacity to run a company that I would do it in a different way.
There are tremendous barriers to building housing. If we could break them down, the need for rent controls would go away.
It struck me that most businesses have less than 100 employees, but most payroll services were going after bigger companies.