Hello Workstream investors and advisors,
We continue to double down on investing in Payroll and HR as our main focus for the company in Q1 '25. Here's some highlights:
- Payroll all in one ARR increased from $128,000 ARR to $1.8M ARR in past 12 months from end of Q1 '24 to Q1 '25
- We had a strong Q1 '25 for Payroll AIO ARR where we grew 3X in Q1 '25 compared to Q1 '24 for Payroll AIO ARR, as we added $400K!
- We closed larger payroll deals despite smaller employee counts of customers closed.
- The average Payroll AIO deal size has increased 19% YoY, from $6.8k to $8.1k.
- We also launched new products including benefits admin platform and AC compliance
- Affordable Care Act (ACA) compliance is a requirement for many restaurants and today they are doing it manually
- Adding benefits admin platform also allows our customers to process their benefits for their customers and an integrated platform is a strong differentiator for us
- 2025 is the year that we are leaning in to become a Payroll-first company → from enablement, training, selling, product knowledge, we are leaning in fully to become a payroll-first company and make Payroll and HR the core of our offering.
- We continue to invest in AI too, as we have built new voice AI agents for screening, interviewing and onboarding for our customers and actively piloting and rolling them out to our customers.
Q1 2025 Investor Update - https://youtu.be/y1eBjCWCMeQ
Here are more detailed updates for Q1
- A year after launching Payroll and becoming a true AIO HR solution for the hourly workforce, we have been seeing encouraging YoY payroll growth demonstrated by increasing revenue, more opportunities to sell, and larger payroll deals
- This year, we've managed to 3X our total revenue despite having only half the number of Inside Sales reps at this time last year, representing a 4.5x increase in productivity per rep
- We've also managed to increase Payroll pipeline, despite less top-of-funnel spend and fewer SDRs
- On top of becoming more efficient acquiring new payroll customers, our average Payroll AIO deal size has increased 19% YoY, from $6.8k to $8.1k, despite a lower average employee count in these deals
- This suggests further upside potential in our Payroll product pricing and we expect this trend to continue as we bring our Benefits Administration offerings to market
- We had our best RKO yet in February and solidified key goals to continue to grow confidently in 2025. Some key takeaways include:
- Focusing and doubling down on what worked for our first 100 payroll AIO customers in order to continue growing to 1,000+ AIO customers
- By continuing to solve deep pain points in payroll and HR for hourly workers, creating a connected ecosystem flywheel (across accounting partners, benefits brokers, franchisors, field sales, etc.), and investing more in our implementation, support, and enablement, we will be able to exceed this goal
- Our EPD team continue to build incredibly fast and showcased new products including mobile chat, benefits / ACA compliance, accountant portal, HRIS v2, AI and more
- HR compliance is a key issue for many of our customers, from ACA compliance to reducing risk around meal breaks, Overtime, onboarding and more
- Our biggest customer is Bajco (largest Papa John's franchisee with 250 locations)
- Ran first Bajco payroll and upgraded Bajco to HRIS v2
- This past quarter, we achieved two huge milestones in running payroll and upgrading our largest AIO customer, Bajco, to HRIS v2
- Bajco's successful implementation validates the fact that our payroll and AIO platform can successfully serve the largest enterprise customers
- Upgrading Bajco to HRIS v2 means that payroll admins no longer need to manually re-enter new hire data and authorized managers can now view and update their team's HR and payroll info without relying on admins
- This project was a huge cross-functional effort, requiring days of preparation and 24 hours of execution from Streamers across the company
- As we identified during RKO, HR compliance remains a key issue for many of our customers which is why we launched Benefits Administration and ACA Compliance
- In a customer panel at RKO with Christian Bankhead (Crumbl franchisee), he shared how he puts aside $15,000 every year to pay for fines because he knows he cannot comply. Both Christian and Macros (Bojangles franchisee & payroll customer) signed up for our ACA compliance product on the spot!
- While still in the early innings, Benefits Administration and ACA Compliance have had strong early success, resulting in an 8-20% increase in ACV
Workstream Team
Promotions and Internal Movements!
Sales
- Andrew Walters - Sr. SDR
- Nick Walters - Sr. New Business AE II
- Hunter Britsch - Sr. New Business AE II
- Chris Connelly - New Business AE Team Lead
- Jacob Davis - Growth AE Team Lead
- Patrick Ledesma - Channel AE
- Justine Tan - Sr. BDR
Marketing
- Emily Hancock - Partner Marketing and Demand Generation
- Jee Ken Ong - Field Demand Gen Intern
- Li Chen - Product Designer
Engineering
- Irene Sou - Sr. SWE
- Xinyan Zhang - Sr. QA Engineer
Customer Success
- CJ Anderson - Sr. Solutions Engineer
Revops
- Angel Gonzales - Sr. Order Management Specialist
Customer Support
- Jill Banaag - Customer Support Specialist
New Streamers! (#OneTeamOneStream)
Utah
- Matthew Conover - Channel Account Executive II
- Makenna Clark - Sales Development Representative
- Dallin Brown - Professional Services and Solutions Engineering Senior Manager
- Tatia Meghdadi - Senior Events Marketing Manager
- Mike Griffith - Senior Manager, Order Management
San Francisco
- Vance Nguyen - Sr. Recruiter Manager
- Jaime Ng - Software Engineer Intern
- Max Yeo - Field Sales Intern
- Jee Ken Ong - Field Sales Intern
- Mark Presto - Head of CSM
Shanghai/Chengdu
- Owen Zhijian Shi - Design Manager
- Kahn Liu - Sr. QA Engineer
- Max Wang - Chief Technology Officer CN
- Feiran Yang - Sr. Software Engineer
- Eli Wang - Staff Software Engineer
- Dian Lei - Sr. Software Engineer
Phillipines
- Kiara Talan - Customer Support Associate
- Sarah Misajon - Customer Support Associate
- Viel Artuz - Business Development Representative Manager
- Shin Alba-Lopez - Customer Support Associate
- Rica Gapas - Solutions Engineer
- Renz Maghuyop - Customer Support Associate
Canada
- Leang Paul Kho - Software Engineer Intern, Fullstack
- Naz Sokmez - Consultant Business Development Account Executive
Singapore
- Zakiyah Masud - Marketing Automation Specialist
- Rousie Mok - Marketing Associate Intern
Investor Support
How you can help (investors & advisors)
-
We are actively recruiting across many roles across all teams. Here's our career page - https://careers.workstream.us/
More specifically, here's a few top priority roles that we will love to get your help on
- Product Marketing
- Field Sales AE
- Corporate Partnerships Account Executive
- People Operations Manager
- Senior Customer Implementation Manager
- Strategic partnerships with restaurant tech and point of sales companies
We are exploring strategic partnerships with POS, technology and food supplier companies, so if you have introductions to any companies from point of sales companies that you may know well!
- Introductions to accounting firms and benefit brokers
We are building out our channel partnerships with CPA/accounting firms and benefit brokers. Case in point, for many payroll companies, channel partners are often >50% of their revenue and we are seeing early traction in this.
It will be very much appreciated if you can help to make an introduction directly to me at desmond@workstream.is
Also, for those who watched the video - did you realize that it was an AI-generated video of me speaking? Let me know if you realize or did not catch it!
Thank you all of you for your constant support!
Cheers,
Desmond