Taylor Lauber is the Chief Executive Officer of Shift4 Payments (NYSE:FOUR) and a member of the company’s board of directors.
Taylor Lauber, CEO, Shift4 Payments (NYSE: FOUR)
He has been with Shift4 since 2018 and his prior roles include President and Chief Strategy Officer.
He has been a corporate officer since the company’s IPO in June 2020, but his roots extend far beyond this as one of the company’s first interns 25 years ago.
Before joining Shift4, Mr. Lauber worked at Blackstone in a variety of strategy roles, most recently as the COO and lead portfolio manager for Blackstone Total Alternatives Solutions funds.
Before joining Blackstone in 2010, Taylor worked as a Private Banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr. Lauber received an Economics and Finance degree from Bentley College.
In this exclusive interview in the Wall Street Transcript, Taylor Lauber explains his primary case study for Shift4 Payments (NYSE:FOUR).
“To provide an example of our business, we like to have people visualize a visit to Yankee Stadium.
You’re buying your ticket to the game online.
You’re using a digital ticket to enter.
It might come with a free voucher that you need to also present digitally.
You may spend money in a dozen different ways in an ecosystem like that, and they’re all very unique commerce experiences, whether you’re buying a hat, or ordering a round of drinks in a suite versus a table service restaurant inside of just one venue.
We try to specialize in that level of complexity.
We try to pick areas of commerce that are a lot more complicated than we think they necessarily have to be, and then pursue those very vigorously.”
Shift4 Payments has been growing its business through acquisitions of adjacent competitors.
“Revel is a great example.
It was restaurant software.
We know that very well.
We invest a ton of time in it.
We own our own software.
We’ve acquired others.
And yet, to make that software work well, they were working with like three different payments companies, a bunch of different hardware companies, and different security layers.
If we own that business, we can deliver all those pieces and a Revel customer should be a heck of a lot happier because they get one hand to shake — or one throat to choke when it’s not working well — and it’s not this grand series of finger pointing.
And as you can imagine, the connectivity of all of that information under one roof helps solve problems much more quickly.
We have found that acquiring pieces of the value chain can really differentiate us.
From a growth perspective, it’s great, because you can actually instantly inherit a lot of customers that are sending their payment volume to dozens of other places and don’t love that experience.
And it’s an easy conversation: “We’ll consolidate everything for you.
We can help you save money.
You can get updates much more easily because we own the whole value chain.
And when it doesn’t work, you know who to call and that entity is 100% responsible and is empowered and has the tools to manage the entire ecosystem.”
Taylor Lauber explains the acquisition strategy for Shift4 Payments (NYSE:FOUR):
“So needless to say, acquisitions have been a healthy area for us to build out capabilities where we don’t have them, in a good way, and Givex, I think, is an example of that.
We also inherited a bunch of customers.
Obviously, Givex is its own 30-year-old business, with a bunch of customers, and then cross-sell those customers and make their lives easier.”
The expansion into adjacent verticals explains the company’s recent growth trajectory.
“In terms of how it brings us to categories, it’s that philosophy.
We don’t start with the idea that restaurants are the right vertical to go after and therefore, let’s go.
We actually start with where are the problems in commerce and where do we think our skill set could be applied?
So, lo and behold, restaurants pop up in hotels, and we start to become educated on how to solve more problems. And again, we weren’t in any hotels eight years ago. We’re now in 40% of the hotels in the country with that kind of philosophy.
And sometimes you need to acquire a technology capability to service hotels on top of what you already do for that hotel and other times it’s that you need to build something, or maybe just partner with 10 different companies in order to solve their problems.
As you start to think through that, it becomes very easy to spot the next thing to solve. We started touring a stadium as customers in Las Vegas. They wanted us to buy a suite because we had a business there. They said, “Come visit the stadium.” And we’re walking through and we said, this is just like a hotel: There’s an online sale. Then the guest shows up. Then they navigate this experience and buy food and buy merchandise. And hopefully they all stay overnight.
I think as you double-click on the verticals we serve with that mindset, you’ll see that they all actually have a lot more in common than you’d think.”
“…We have a founder who is Chairman, who owns the largest single share of stock in the company and votes and controls the company.
Oh, and by the way, he’s done it for 26 years before me, and we’ve been friends since we were 16 years old.
All this to say that there’s not a lot of ambiguity around the mission.
From that standpoint, I hope as little changes as possible.
I will say we are different as a company.
We started last year with 3,000 employees.
We’re going to end this year with 6,000.
And I mentioned that 75-plus country growth that we’re experiencing.
You can’t be the same company.
Maybe we balance the idea that we’ve been on a successful march for 26 years and deviating from that would be, quite frankly, dangerous, with the idea that every two to three years of those 26, we had to change the way we were operating to help manage scale.
So, how do I think about this through the lens of what the business is today?
Really, really predictable, what I call battle rhythms.
I don’t want anyone in the company to guess what a Monday morning is going to look like versus a Thursday afternoon versus a Friday evening.
Helping the 6,001st employee to join the company as quickly as possible, and understand what we’re focused on, and when and how to, quite frankly, just navigate the complexity of a growing organization.
Our priorities are always clear, and I think we try to keep as few of them as possible, but inevitably, you can’t say you want to be in over 75 countries and not deal with nuance there.”
Get the complete interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, and develop further insight into Shift4Payments (NYSE: FOUR).
