1:07 - From Canada to Denmark
7:32 - Convincing your parents about entrepreneurship
16:20 - The 3 ways to do payroll in Switzerland
21:57 - Convincing Swiss SMEs
30:32 - Preparing to acquire a company
Bassil Eid is a co-founder of Earny, a startup providing simple automated payroll in 10 mins or less for startups & SMEs. Bassil’s family moved from Lebanon to Canada when he was young, and it was in Canada that he studied Business Administration and Economics and began working as a project manager in the freight industry. He then moved to Denmark after his masters to work at eMagCreator, a startup selling online magazines — this was his first entrepreneurial experience. When it came time for him and his wife to settle down, and his wife got a job at UBS, they chose to settle in Switzerland.
In Switzerland, Bassil noticed that despite there being some momentum in the cap table space, for instance, no one was tackling payroll yet. By talking to accountants he discovered that Swiss SME payroll got done in one of 3 ways:
People do it themselves using one of the available softwares. This requires some previous payroll experience, and even then, you’re bound to make your fair share of errors. People hire an accountant at a rate of 30-60 francs per employee per month, on average. This still means you have to gather all the documentation yourself to email to the accountant. People hire internally, if they can afford it, which they often can’t. And often the person they hire ends up having to speak to an accountant anyway.
With Earny, anyone can run payroll with no experience needed, since most of the process is automated. It is also still possible to work with an accountant. In fact, earny has 3 interfaces: one for companies, one for employees, and one for accountants. Charging 10 francs per employee per month, Earny comes at about a third of the price of regular accountants.
"A lot of successful entrepreneurs are immigrants. They have a strong drive to surpass the status quo."
"In the startup world you don’t wanna assume anything too fast. But you also want to be agile enough to fill the demand once it comes in."
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