State Payroll Tax Compliance Background
Maxmius Greenwald - CEO @ Warmly (Germany)
Abyss Jan Estrera - Biz Ops @ Warmly (Philippines)
US States with remote employees: 6
Tell us about Warmly
Abyss:
Warmly helps SMB revenue teams understand the companies and people researching their products on their website, so they can engage with them.
Once a website visitor is identified, Warmly can automate email outreach and LinkedIn requests with that visitor to help build the relationship.
We also have a capability called “warm calling”, which is pretty insane.
Everyone does cold calling, where connection rates are around, I don't know, less than 2% right now, because no one likes getting cold calls.
But with Warmly, when a sales rep gets notified that a high intent visitor is on their website, they can pop open a video chat window right in the visitor’s browser.
The visitor can see that it’s a real person that’s there and ready to answer questions if needed.
Some of our customers have hundreds of thousands of website visitors per month, so helping them figure out which ones are most valuable - and to engage them in a number of different ways - can be really powerful for their growth.
What words would you use to describe managing state payroll tax compliance manually?
Abyss:
I’d say intimidated and afraid.
Whenever I used to get an email about compliance, one I’d get Intimidated, and two I’d be afraid that I may miss something we need to do.
There’s so many little details; it’s not just the payroll tax registrations stuff.
One example I can remember right after Sam went on maternity leave (editor’s note: Sam Perkins is Warmly’s amazing Operations Lead) was a notice from one state’s Department of Labor.
I was like “I don't even understand these things, because I'm not from the US.”
Even if you ARE from the US, I'm pretty sure most people are not even familiar or confident to actually do these things.
This state stuff really bothers me because I don't want to miss anything for Warmly, and I feel like if I do, it could cost us tons of money which could be really devastating for a growing startup.
What’s been the impact of using AbstractOps to eliminate those feelings?
Abyss:
AbstractOps, in a way, gives me confidence. Now with AbstractOps I feel like I’m covered.
I don't need to do as much research and basically I have the confidence to say, “yeah, we're, we're compliant in all the things we do” with you guys in mind, rather than us just doing it manually.
It's so time consuming if we were to do this on our own.
I would confidently say for every email we see here, and if I have to do it manually, it would take at least three hours for each one. At least.
Because then I have to contact the state and… it's just so time consuming.
And then I also have to think about, like, am I doing the right thing?
Max:
If someone on my team isn’t an expert on this, they’re either going to spend a ton of time learning a thing that’s not their core function, or do it wrong, which is a huge financial risk.
I’d much rather the biz ops team focus on the things they need to be doing to drive the business forward - accounts receivable, making sure invoices are being paid, doing audits.
All of these things have a much bigger positive impact on Warmly, than trying to make sense of state compliance.
Max, CEO @ Warmly, is an expert founder living in Germany with employees across the US.What’s it like managing US state compliance from overseas?
Max:
Say you want to hire five employees in five different states - that’s VERY tricky from a state compliance perspective.
As a CEO, you probably don’t have the time to do this yourself, so you try to hire someone, and someone outside the US might not be extremely well versed.
So then you have to try to find a unicorn… someone in the US … who's really good … who’s willing to do all of these little things to stay compliant … which is challenging for most international startups.
It’s much easier to find someone who can simply oversee what’s happening in AbstractOps, make sure notices are getting taken care of, registrations are getting done, and there’s nothing getting missed.
Now that I know Abyss is onboarded in AO, and Sam when she’s back, it’s like I don’t even have to think about this.
Additional notes from the AbstractOps team
Many international startups say hiring in the US can be pretty daunting. It really helps to have someone experienced to ask questions.
(Note - as Abyss mentioned, even US-based founders and HR leaders have expressed many of the same fears.)
We try not to “humble brag” about our team’s expertise, mainly because it’s cringe, but also because it’s really difficult to prove until you experience it yourself, like Abyss has:
It gives us great joy helping folks like this overcome common myths that result in undue stress, wasted time, and penalties.
