Chad Richison and the trouble with payday

Chad Richison used to take a hundred-foot phone cord to sales calls. He carried shorter ones too, along with AOL and Prodigy setup disks. It was 1998, and he was selling payroll software that ran on the internet. Some prospective customers needed an introduction to the internet before they could have an introduction to Paycom. Somewhere between the office computer and the fax machine’s phone line, the future of work required a cable down the hallway.

It is a useful opening image for a founder whose business concerns something people tend to notice only when it fails. Payroll has little room for suspense. The money should arrive in the right amount, on the right day. Richison saw enough of the machinery behind that expectation to decide he could build a different system. Getting there took a return to Oklahoma, some expensive faith in plastic, and years of asking who actually needed to touch the data.

A farm kid with a German minor

Richison grew up on a farm in Tuttle, Oklahoma. In high school, he started a hay-hauling business. The work gave him an early acquaintance with earning money through a service other people needed. His later Giving Pledge letter returned to that upbringing: work hard, keep commitments, choose good people. The list is short enough to fit on a business card. Following it is a considerably longer assignment.

In 1989, he enrolled at what was then Central State University, now the University of Central Oklahoma. He became the first person in his family to earn a college degree. He has described a disappointing ACT result, followed by making the university honor roll. His eventual qualification, completed in 1993, was in mass communications and journalism, with a minor in German. The future payroll executive arrived through the liberal arts.

He also wrestled for Central. College did not turn him into a professional athlete, but it supplied relationships that lasted. “The relationships I made at UCO have lasted forever,” he said years later. His education matters to the story partly because he kept returning to it, with money as well as recollection. The campus would become one of the places where his success acquired a physical address.

A loan, some plastic and a recurring problem

After college came payroll sales, including work at ADP and then a regional provider in Colorado. This was an education in the existing business, delivered by customers rather than professors. He could see how companies handled information and where the process might improve. In 1998, after working in Denver, he returned to Oklahoma and founded Paycom. He was 27.

The financing included a small-business loan and credit cards. For someone launching a payroll business, the immediate question of meeting his own payroll had an uncomfortable neatness. A recurring customer payment is an attractive business model once enough customers recur. Before that, bills are rather better at recurring than revenue.

By 2007, when private-equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe bought a majority interest, Paycom had reached $13 million in annual revenue. A decade after the founding, Richison was discussing a public offering. The company eventually listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014 as PAYC. A business built around other people’s payday now had shareholders waiting for its numbers.

The internet decision gave the business its starting distinction. Paycom became an early provider of payroll processed entirely online. Over time, its software spread into recruiting, time tracking, learning and other employee administration. Richison’s career stayed attached to a practical subject even as the vocabulary changed around it. Payroll became cloud software; cloud software acquired a much larger set of jobs.

Give the paycheck a rehearsal

Paycom introduced Beti in 2021. Its central move was to let employees review and approve their payroll before processing. That changes when a discrepancy becomes visible. An employee can check the calculation while there is still time to address a problem, rather than discovering it after the money has arrived.

Consider the ordinary ingredients: hours worked, time off, expenses, a change in pay. Each can affect the final amount. The employee has information about those ingredients that a payroll department needs. Beti’s design brings that employee into the process earlier, while giving payroll administrators visibility into completion and outstanding issues. The aim is fewer corrections after the event. It is a product promise whose importance is easiest to understand from the receiving end of a paycheck.

Richison’s interest in consumer habits produces an unexpectedly domestic detail. In a 2021 conversation, he recalled buying a shirt online for the first time, then buying six of the same shirt. Even a software founder can arrive late to a familiar consumer ritual. Once the purchase worked, he saw less reason to repeat the old shopping trip.

The analogy has limits, of course. Approving pay is a more consequential responsibility than choosing another shirt. Still, the underlying question is recognizable: why should an employee’s everyday software feel so different from the technology used outside work? Richison has made that question part of his argument for greater employee participation.

When the efficiency arrives at home

In 2025, Paycom launched IWant, an AI tool through which users can type or speak requests about their employee information. The company presents it as a way to reach information without navigating through the software. Where the early sales demonstration required getting a computer online, the newer promise concerns getting the menus out of the user’s way.

The automation argument also reached Paycom’s own offices. In October 2025, the company filed an Oklahoma notice covering 544 job cuts. It linked the restructuring to efficiencies from advanced automation and AI technologies affecting back-office positions. Paycom said the affected roles were not client-facing and that it continued hiring in areas including sales, software, implementation and service.

Those losses belong in the same account as the product launches. Removing administrative work can make a customer’s day easier and remove an employee’s job. A founder who has spent years advocating efficiency must also answer for what happens when his company achieves it. The benefit and the consequence can occupy the same building.

“I want to make a sustainable difference.”

Chad Richison, discussing his giving in 2020

The commercial scale is now far removed from the credit-card years. Paycom reported $2.052 billion in 2025 revenue and $453.4 million in net income. Its annual revenue retention rate was 91%. These figures describe a substantial operating business, with the obligations that follow from employing people, retaining customers and keeping investors informed. They do not settle every question about how the work should change.

The wrestler and the football stadium

Richison’s name now appears on UCO’s football stadium, although wrestling was his own college sport. A $10 million gift announced in 2021 brought his university investment to $25 million. Earlier gifts had helped fund the Sports Performance Center, baseball improvements and an addition to Hamilton Field House. The results included places to study, practice and prepare, as well as places to watch a game.

“I am passionate about higher education and collegiate athletics,” he said when the stadium gift was announced. He had entered UCO’s Athletics Hall of Fame in 2014 through its special-recognition category. The distinction is useful: the university was recognizing a former athlete’s contribution beyond his competing years.

His wrestling interest extends beyond Central. He helped launch the Paycom-sponsored National Duals Invitational in Tulsa, announced in 2025 with a purse exceeding $1 million. The event offered participating college programs money in a sport whose finances attract less attention than football or basketball. In January 2026, Oklahoma City University announced a separate $50,000 gift from his family foundation, with support intended for scholarships, travel, coaching and facilities.

A longer definition of the return

The giving has another origin story, this time at a poker table. Richison first heard about the Giving Pledge at a game organized by Warren Buffett. The idea stayed with him. In 2020, he signed the commitment to give away a majority of his wealth. He described wanting to support organizations that could sustain their work, and to see the effects of his giving during his lifetime.

That interest keeps returning to Oklahoma institutions. In May 2026, OETA announced a $500,000 program-underwriting grant from the Richison Family Foundation. The support would help sustain children’s educational programming, the Oklahoma News Report and statewide emergency alerts. For a journalism graduate, funding a service that includes state news makes a pleasing connection, even without attaching a grand theory to it.

He remains involved in the business he started. Shane Hadlock became Paycom’s president in February 2026, while Richison continued as CEO and chairman. For the quarter ended June 30, 2026, Paycom reported $531.2 million in revenue, up 9.8% from a year earlier. The founder’s current work is still judged partly in quarterly increments.

His other commitments use longer clocks: a student’s college years, a program’s next season, an institution’s ability to keep serving its audience. Together they make a fuller picture than either a stock ticker or a stadium sign. Richison began by trying to improve a familiar business process. He is still making decisions about which work software should do, and where the proceeds of that work should go. The phone cord, at least, has retired.