Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Paul Byrne. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Paul, thanks for joining us today. Has Covid resulted in any major changes to your business model?
The effect of the Wuhan SARS COV2 pandemic hit us early on. Until mid-March 2020 we all worked together in an office space and felt it gave us an advantage. Within a few days, our company had gone remote, completely remote. We left our office and moved everything that wasn’t already in the cloud to the cloud. Our employees liked the change so much that we decided to make it a permanent change. It introduced new challenges to us but also created new opportunities.
The challenges included onboarding new employees. We found we had to plan for that more carefully and deliberately. We had to be more purposeful in communicating with and checking in with employees. For example, I and our team leaders conduct far more 1 on 1 interviews to make sure we’re checking in with everyone. We have more company-wide online meetings. Internships, which are key to our recruiting process, became more difficult to execute.
The new opportunities included opening up our recruiting efforts worldwide. We have employees in 3 US states and 4 countries. Because we had to become effective at working remotely, we have been able to tap into labor markets that we had previously been shut out of.
However, the global rush to go online, especially in the realm of ecommerce, has put massive pressure on the cost of talent. We have had to raise prices and implement cost saving measures very aggressively.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’ve been working in ecommerce software development for a decade now. I started my career in Europe working in consumer electronics after which I moved back to the US and joined PepsiCo’s Pizza Hut division (now part of Yum Restaurants), later transferring to Frito-Lay, where I was responsible for marketing in the direct division. After that I worked in an advertising agency and a direct-selling company (on the corporate marketing side) for about a decade before deciding to go on my own. I joined up with a friend who had a small data-entry company and we started helping our clients leverage their data in email marketing which led me to build an ecommerce website and get involved with eBay corporate during the Magento acquisition.
For the next few years, Razoyo focused on customizing the Magento platform for online merchants but eventually expanded to support BigCommerce, OroCommerce, WooCommerce and building out complex ERP and other integrations.
Today, our offering includes custom SaaS application development, a custom SaaS platform called AutomaticFFL(tm) and, of course, continued support for ecommerce.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
While our ability to do the heavy lifting from a software engineering perspective is certainly a contributing factor, our clients rave about two things: transparency and accountability. We have designed our systems and focused our teams on empowering our clients with daily budget updates, full-detail invoicing (who worked on what and when), Project Managers and Business Analysts who help clients prioritize their work and full control over what is done by the Razoyo team and what is done by the client.
When things go wrong we have a clear and open discussion with the client and make sure that our billing reflects our responsibility.
Those are the things people know us for.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
Be yourself. Be honest. Treat employees like volunteers.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.razoyo.com
• Instagram: razoyodev
• Facebook: razoyodev
• Linkedin: Razoyo
• Twitter: @Razoyo
• Other: Reddit: u/Razoyo Gettr: @Razoyo

Image Credits
Heidt of Media