The general principles of servant leadership are timeless, but the movement was re-energized when a man named Robert K. Greenleaf published an essay in 1970 called “The Servant As Leader.” In this essay, Greenleaf proposed a radical concept: “The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first…That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions.” Greenleaf followed this essay with a second one, “The Institution as Servant,” which proposed that organizations could also act as servant-leaders and change the world. In this essay, Greenleaf said: “…Caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built.”
Here at Pay it Forward Processing, we have built our company on the rock of servant leadership. The principles of focusing on the well-being of our employees, the success of our customers, and the betterment of our community are what drive everything about our company. In an industry that has a deeply-embedded and well-deserved reputation for being slimy and duplicitous, we are dedicated to offering our customers and our employees a different option. We are proud to provide servant leadership by: • Giving away net profits to carefully vetted charities (our executive team makes no salary) • Providing customers with month-to-month agreements with no termination fees • Never charging customers minimum usage fees • Never demanding monthly quotas from our sales team • Actively supporting our customers’ businesses and events to increase their success We express servant leadership by honoring our customers and our employees, and we give the excess we don’t need to organizations that do. In the last six months, we’ve been able to give over $30,000 to local charities, and we plan to give away much more in 2015. I encourage you to read more about servant leadership so that you can make a difference as an individual and through your own business. I also hope you’ll consider working with us as we try to change the merchant processing world and support each and every one of our customers as best we can.