There’s another homegrown company setting its sights on greatness.

PayIt is a software development company with the mission of making it easier, faster and more efficient for people to do business with the government. Its origins came from Plunkett and his co-founder John Thompson’s desire to solve the issue of long customer lines at government departments, while also modernizing government fee collection processes.

“Less than 15 percent of fees are collected digitally, when 95 percent could be,” Plunkett said.

Founded in 2013, PayIt has sold itself to dozens of governmental entities across the country, such as the states of Kansas, Florida, North Carolina as well as local municipalities such as the Wyandotte County Unified Government, the city of Memphis and Jackson County.

Thanks to aggressive capital raising efforts, it has seen its employee count double in the last year to nearly 100 and expects that to double again in the next year.

What are some of the keys to success for the nine-year-old company? For starters, Plunkett said, the founders are both Kansas City-area natives and have never had the desire to move the company elsewhere, despite many outsiders offering the perspective that the only path to success would be headquarters located in Austin, Texas or Silicon Valley.

“We want to build the next great Kansas City company,” Plunkett said.

The company has also stayed true to its mission and business plan, he said.

“Our premise is product-based,” Plunkett said. “We give away the software. We get paid by the transaction. That matches our impact (to the governmental entity) to revenue. There isn’t cost to the government. More digital transactions are better for government, so our product and mission are always in alignment with theirs.”

A product focus means that even as the CFO, Plunkett is always a salesperson, too.

“If you don’t have your executives selling, it’s very hard to succeed,” he said.

As the company continues growing, Plunkett points to several important decisions that have impacted it positively.

“One, we have gone after big deals – sometimes not taking smaller ones, because we wanted to do big things,” he said.

Company leaders have been selective in forming partnerships so that those relationships would be built to last. They made sure that the company was set up around the product. Yes, administrative processes are important, but only in relationship to the product and its abilities.

Plunkett said another key to the company’s success thus far has been its culture, balancing taking the product and business seriously, but not themselves. He and Thompson are also as transparent as they can be with employees.

“When we finally moved out of the coffeeshop and into an office, we got a used conference table, put it in the middle of the room and that’s where John and I work,” he said. “Everyone hears us making pitches and raising money.”  

Will they be able to maintain that as the company grows? That’s the goal – generally achievable, Plunkett said, by continuing to make good hires and remaining focused on the mission.

“When we hire, we look for the PayIt DNA,” he said. “People who are entrepreneurial, who want to learn from us, but who want to contribute, too. “

“We don’t want to ever feel like we’ve made it, because we haven’t.”