Jeff Brodsly and Danny Margolis wanted the same corner of Moorpark. Each had a plan for it. Neither initially realized that the other was bidding. Brodsly bought the property in June 2021; when the two friends discovered their accidental contest, they decided to become partners. A bidding war is an expensive way to arrange a meeting, but theirs produced an unusually agreeable agenda: bring ice cream and cinnamon rolls back to High Street.
Brodsly remembered the neighborhood shops of his childhood, including The Creamery and Sweet Cinns. The proposed business would borrow something from each. By summer 2025, High Sweet Creamery was opening its doors. Here was a payments entrepreneur investing in a pleasure considerably older than electronic commerce: somewhere pleasant to go after dinner.
That corner offers a useful introduction to Brodsly. He has built companies that help money move across the country, yet keeps finding reasons to put it back into his hometown. His career runs through Chosen Payments, the founding Aurora alliance and, now, 100GROUP. Follow the connections long enough and you arrive on High Street again.
A salesman before the nameplate
Brodsly grew up in Southern California in a working, middle-class family. He began in entry-level payments sales in 2008, followed by partnership and the creation of Chosen Payments in 2011. He attended San Diego State University. The career began with calls, customers and learning the machinery beneath the transaction.
After years of selling merchant accounts, he opened his own independent sales organization. He wanted agents to understand what happened to the accounts they brought in, including why an application was accepted or rejected. For someone whose livelihood depended on those decisions, a little visibility was a practical courtesy.
The ambition was explicit: “I want the agent to be the master of his own destiny.” It is an expansive sentence for the rather unromantic subject of merchant boarding. It also identifies a recurring concern in his work: the person doing the selling, buying or operating should have some say in the relationship.
Chosen Payments went on to appear on the Inc. 5000 in consecutive years, at No. 800 in 2017 and No. 2,493 in 2018. Those are historical rankings, snapshots of a business at particular moments. Together they mark the distance between making sales calls and running a company with a national customer base.
Learning the passenger's business
Chauffeured transportation became one of his classrooms. By June 2017, Chosen Payments served more than 1,100 livery clients. Brodsly and his colleagues turned up at association meetings, sponsored events and learned the software operators used. A limousine company had accounting and reporting requirements that deserved more attention than a generic sales pitch.
Some of that knowledge came through the people he recruited. Jim Luff had been a Chosen Payments customer while working as an operator before asking to join the company. Derek Maxwell also brought transportation experience. Brodsly was building a team that could recognize an operator's problem without requiring a long explanation of the operator's day.
He estimated in 2017 that word of mouth supplied about 60 percent of the business, after an earlier period dominated by chasing sales. That helps explain why he spent so much energy on associations and relationships: a recommendation travels into rooms a cold caller has yet to enter.
A larger table at Aurora
In April 2018, Brodsly joined Sabin Burrell, Brian Goudie and Adam Spencer in a new parent company, Aurora Solutions. Chosen Payments and BlueSquare would retain their brands and leadership, while the alliance brought resources together. Goudie became CEO of the parent; Brodsly remained the Chosen Payments chief under the announced arrangement.
The distinction matters to his story. He was a founding alliance partner with an operating business to contribute. Aurora's structure offered shared technology and financial relationships while preserving the specialized work of its constituent companies. Goldman Sachs and Prudential Capital Partners were among its financial partners.
For an entrepreneur who had built through specific industries, the arrangement carried a familiar logic: get closer to a customer's business while gaining the resources to serve it. The names around the table had changed. The question of how to combine scale with an attentive relationship remained.
One fewer vendor to chase
September 2021 brought the public launch of 100GROUP, Brodsly's next business-services venture. A separate announcement that month introduced the rebranding of Chosen Payments Atlanta, naming Brodsly and Richard Scalesse as founders and owners. Scalesse's role was chief revenue officer; Brodsly's was founder and CEO.
The proposition widened the relationship beyond processing a card. Business owners also needed management software, phones and insurance. Each extra supplier could mean another bill, another account and another person to reach when something went wrong. Brodsly wanted a concierge model that gave owners one relationship through which to obtain several essential services.
There is a touch of theatre in applying the language of a hotel concierge to business administration. The everyday request, however, is modest enough: answer the phone and understand the problem. A reservation desk and a merchant support desk both discover quickly how customers feel about being kept waiting.
Four everyday needs. A shared point of contact.
The software portfolio makes that idea concrete. Kennel Connection serves pet-care businesses; Hello-Groom addresses professional groomers; PawLoyalty supports boarding, daycare, grooming and training operations. These are businesses where an appointment, a message and a payment belong to the same working day. Putting them together can spare an owner some administrative shuffling.
ReCo takes the approach into local government. Founded by Gary Norton in 1997, the business joined 100GROUP in 2022. Norton remained president. Its work includes municipal revenue collection, with ReCo Anywhere adding a cloud platform alongside the legacy cashiering system. The customer might be a public department rather than a shop, but still needs transactions and records to agree.
Brodsly's presence on the 2024 County Treasurers Association of Ohio conference program shows how specific those conversations become. His panel concerned modernizing tax payments, with Apple Pay, QR codes and interactive voice response among the subjects. This is where a broad business pitch meets the details of somebody else's job.
The people who stay
One of the longer relationships is with Sarah McKee. Their work together dates to 2009; she became central to his team and later led 100GROUP's Michigan operation as managing partner. That office moved into Grand Haven's Harborfront Building in 2020, expanded in 2021 and moved again in 2022. Growth had an address, and then needed a larger one.
In reflecting on his early hiring, Brodsly has described the difficulty of recruiting with limited money and the value of people willing to handle several jobs. He also acknowledged that some choices did not work out. His lessons included budgeting earlier, planning more deliberately and exercising care when working with friends and family. Experience apparently retains its position as an expensive teacher.
By July 2026, 100GROUP was looking back on a four-day Nashville retreat that brought employees together from its brands and offices. Brodsly personally paid for travel, lodging and the program. McKee and Kacy Waxman organized it. Meetings shared the itinerary with meals and time around the city, giving colleagues accustomed to screens a chance to sit together.
“Culture's important to me. It's in my heart.”
Jeff Brodsly, addressing the company retreat
He linked that time together to productivity and credited the organizers. The human detail sits comfortably beside the ambition. A company assembled through several brands has to give its people opportunities to become acquainted; an organization chart is poor company over dinner.
A hometown with a claim on him
Brodsly's local commitments include a 2021 appointment to Moorpark's planning commission, approved unanimously by the city council. Later commission minutes recognized him as a former commissioner. His civic work belongs alongside his commercial investments, rather than disappearing beneath the longer list of companies.
In 2020, he funded tutoring for 19 first-graders and helped organize Thanksgiving groceries for 19 families, totaling 120 people. That year also supplied an entrepreneurial comedy at Lemmo's Pizzeria: the reopening drew enough customers to exhaust the dough, leaving the investor carrying pizzas and pouring beer. He had helped redesign the restaurant. Opening night added table service to his responsibilities.
The Moorpark Chamber named him its 2025 Good Neighbor of the Year. His contribution to High Street continued with High Sweet Creamery, which entered its first full summer season in 2026. The cinnamon rolls of his childhood had acquired a present-tense counterpart. Nostalgia, in this instance, came with opening hours.
Brodsly has other ways to occupy himself. He captained his high-school hockey team for four years and took up motocross as a teenager, eventually choosing college over pursuing professional riding. His interests include saltwater fish tanks, wine collecting, travel and golf. The last grew from attending charity events into actually playing them, a sensible precaution against spending every tournament as a spectator.
His business agenda now includes industry software, integrated payments and the attentive service he has advocated since Chosen Payments. In 2025, 100GROUP earned Fiserv/CardConnect Circle of Excellence recognition. Yet the most revealing measure of where Brodsly wants his work to lead may still be that corner in Moorpark: somewhere people can walk in, recognize a neighbor and find a reason to stay.