We recently connected with Nikki Estes and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Nikki thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

In 2008, our brand’s inception was sparked by a pivotal moment in the evolution of online transactions. At that time, software vendors distributed updates via CDs, and online payments were predominantly synonymous with credit cards. Fueled by the vision of revolutionizing transaction processing, we coined iCheckGateway.com.

The “i” in our brand represented the transformative shift as we pioneered a payment gateway allowing transactions to traverse the internet, breaking free from traditional methods seamlessly. Our cutting-edge technology facilitated credit card transactions and introduced a groundbreaking approach where businesses processed checks within the same virtual terminal. This tech stack marked a revolutionary stride, empowering businesses to engage in secure, anytime transactions without needing physical CDs or floppy disks for updates.

As we continued to evolve and adapt to the changing landscape, we recognized the need for a more concise identity while retaining our essence. Thus, while officially operating as iCheckGateway.com, we embraced a simplified moniker—iCG Pay—last year. This streamlined name reflects our commitment to innovation and efficiency, ensuring our valued audience readily identifies and associates with our brand.

Our journey has been one of constant innovation, adapting to the dynamic needs of businesses in an ever-evolving digital landscape. Today, as iCG Pay, we stand as a testament to the enduring spirit of innovation, offering simple, secure, and reliable cutting-edge payment solutions that transcend limitations with numerous plug-in capabilities.

Nikki, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Born to serve with encouraging enthusiasm, God gave me a strong husband to join forces with, Jason Estes, to create businesses that solved challenges our peers experienced. While he’s the tech guy, I enjoy building relationships, bringing him feedback on what he built and other potential ideas people share as I promote solutions he has created. I’ve always been confident he can design a reliable framework for any project he sets his mind to develop, and I will stir up interest in marketing to those within our reach to serve them in their struggles.

While we started website development for small businesses, calling through a phonebook to advertise services, I took a fancy to online marketing when we started a farm. I wrote content to educate potential stock buyers about the variety of animals and agriculture we sold and share what farm life looked like while raising a family. It gave me joy to help people avoid struggles we learned about with our mentors or had experienced firsthand. We built good relationships with our buyers that turned them into repeat customers.

We repeated a similar model: building a nonprofit baseball league, sharing education about the sport, and building trust with our families that bought into our mission, returning to our league over the others, season after season. Jason made tutorials to showcase how to coach your kid at home between practices. I created social media campaigns for our followers to promote brand awareness and, over time, develop thought leadership in our community. Like with the farm adventure, I gained more marketing skills to promote our services and solve challenges within our target audience.

Fifteen years ago, Jason pioneered a path in fintech with a virtual platform that empowered businesses to accept not only credit cards online but also offer their customers to pay by electronic check, ACH. He designed custom payment portals we hosted securely on offsite servers that tokenized and encrypted digital payments to protect sensitive customer data. Yet, the business owner could access the necessary payment information. In their admin virtual terminal access, they knew a customer made a transaction, and they had access to void it, ask to set up a recurring payment, and view other payment history logs. This technology proved to be popular, and over time, he developed more solutions like paying by text, over IVR, and through iFrame integrations to stay ahead of the competition arriving in the marketplace.

As competition increased, Jason decided it was time to start a marketing campaign, having confidence in me to join him in this business to build educational content and social marketing campaigns. In the first eleven years, he laid the framework for my marketing success by building innovative solutions that solved B2B and B2C clients across numerous industries, solving their need to accept digital payments to keep up with their competitors. Solving a time-sensitive pain point for such a large audience of businesses across the US, I had the easy job of just talking about potential solutions to publishers and different marketing outlets. I have enjoyed the opportunity to bring in a team to work alongside me to create content and design collateral to help partners and clients understand the value of these products and make our entrepreneurial growth story relatable, as we intend to encourage businesses in our audience to seek personal growth, too.

While we persevere through different business adventures together, growing in our skills as we learn to make businesses profitable, I am most proud that we continue solving the needs of those within our reach. Jason empowers others with his technical know-how and ability to create a strategy to solve challenges we see others face, whether in the business sector or for nonprofit entities. I appreciate that we can work together as a team, leading by serving those around us with the experiences we have had and the education we have gained. With enthusiasm, I look forward to serving our partners and clients for years to come as his entrepreneurial helpmeet, pioneering with technology and marketing with encouragement and education to those within our reach.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

When building your network, whether making a request to connect or saying “YES!” to someone who wants to join your network, I found getting to know them or at least a little about them helps sustain an audience on social media. The carefully crafted public content and personal engagement impacts those relationships and will attract more based on your goals and public personality.

My goals include enticing conversations, seeking opportunities to learn about the humans in my network and provide solutions to struggles they personally or professionally may experience in that season I’m reaching out. Throughout the month, I choose a few pieces of content to change up what my network may appreciate, at least one for my legacy followers and one meant for my recent followers. I write public messages that align with different segments to either encourage them where I relate, empower them with the content from others in my network, or educate them on a topic, like health or finances, that affects us all. In the direct messages, I use some AI to choose a handful a day from different industries to send personal messages that I found stir up conversations.

Some people connected, and I know that they are not my customer avatar, but I made the connection with them for some reason, maybe to learn from them, they write well, or possibly LinkedIn suggested we connect. What do you talk about that is not just sales? Everybody has a birthday and most work somewhere. I send cheesy messages to brighten their day in celebration of it and ask them to tell me about their goals for the next year. It usually opens conversation to build a relationship that attracts their trust and comfort with me, showcasing I am not just another person but rather a human capable of bouncing ideas off of, advising when they see the opportunity to share their wisdom, and learning from or enjoying a cheerleader for their accomplishments.

What if you want to sell to them? I keep up with their job titles, if we have messages that lead me to believe they’d share interest, and engage in their profile to see what’s going on in their virtual life. Not only does this build a sales opportunity, but this opens the door to further build a social media presence because I connect with their colleagues on their public posts through engagement and their feed sends alerts to their network we communicated.

Building relationships require communicating. The more you engage to make a connection, share education, encouragement, and executed accomplishments, the more others will take interest in your journey. Over time, your social media presence will grow, and you’ll carry the responsibility to lead them by continuing to serve them with further of the same activities.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

About 30 years ago, I trained for junior high track competition, hurdling victoriously over the last waist-high stand with arms raised high with excitement that led to a life of firey nerve pain. I tripped at that moment, falling with such force that we saw I broke my writing arm, elbow, and collarbone upon falling. One would think the next few months would show my resiliency to keep moving forward: getting cast and making a bus in the morning for an overnight school field trip to the Smithsonian museums in Washington DC, learning how to write left-handed, and duct taping my casted arm to my body to continue training and racing on the track. The story becomes more powerful when a less obvious fracture occurs that doctors didn’t discover until 25 years later.

Never considering stepping away from physical competition or pushing forward when I experienced pain and tingling through my years after that fall, I experienced the joys of high school and college intramural sports, building businesses with my husband, delivering and educating four healthy and active boys, traveling to many states driving, taking long flights to destinations like the Bahamas and Europe with my family, and joining our community in friendly competitive events that involved baseball, soccer, bowling, golf, and more. Even with the stinging pain running through me, at times, feeling like I was sitting on glass; nothing stopped me until I got “stuck” resting in bed.

My husband was in meetings that day, and the kids happened to be at a friend’s house when I realized I could not roll over or inch my way to sit up again. At any moment, I thought my circumstances would change as I waited for my husband to call me back or come home. Even while 1000 miles away and usually working in his entrepreneurial adventures, I called my dad. While my husband did beat him to our home before my dad’s flight arrived, my dad stayed with me a while as I sought answers, eventually learning my vertebrate had entirely slipped out of place over time. This event happened because it floated “just right” into my spinal cord.

After gaining an insightful set of diagnoses, life changed tremendously. The next three years involved X-ray lead spinal injections, spinal surgery through cesarean scars to fuse vertebrates with a titanium device to replace the floated vertebrate, vascular and gastric doctor visits to monitor other conditions, many months of bedrest, and ongoing physical therapy. I had to become dependent on a wheelchair and other people to get where I needed to go and accomplish the goals I would make. My mindset stayed firm with my faith in God and my supportive network of family and friends.

To encourage myself, I coined the phrase, “nevertheless persevere with joy,” during this season of life. Through my struggle to learn to walk again and start doing my daily tasks with modifications, I found others who suffered different physical and emotional battles that would seem otherwise life-stopping. I discovered how resilient I was and how focusing on what I could do, rather than the activities I could not do any longer to avoid further damage or unnecessary pain, would make the difference in my pursuit of joy in my new normal. The opportunities I gained because of my injury allowed me to encourage many others because while it seems easy to give up, we gain good experiences in moving forward.

Since this season of my life, I have continued to learn more about myself, when I can push and when I should rest, having up and down kind of days like others. I see myself successfully resilient with my husband, children, and supportive network, encouraging me to live by my coined phrase. A day may prove challenging for whatever reason, but nevertheless, persevere with joy. There is a reason I wake up each morning to serve those around me, and I intend to do so.

Contact Info:

• Website: icgpay.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nevertheless_persevere_w_joy?igsh=MWV4Z3l0MGF1d205bQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikki.cronin.estes?mibextid=LQQJ4d
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikki-estes-icg?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@icgpay?si=1bZlAJIqTggL4sju
• Other: Estesclan.com