Starting & Running a Business Is Very Demanding

Founder Every story begins with a dreamer and a dream. Our story began when our founder, Mike Kappel, a pudgy 8-year-old who was raised by a patriotic World War II veteran, told his second-grade teacher that he was going to be an entrepreneur when he grew up. But where? How?

For the next 21 years, Kappel dreamt about entrepreneurship daily. It was in his DNA. He tried starting various businesses while working his way from student to a corporate engineering job. Finally one day, he stopped dreaming, quit the corporate world and made his entrepreneurial leap.

Growth Our fledgling startup eventually grew and spawned four additional companies - making five companies in total. Our first four startups were successful, with two of them actually growing into strong medium-sized businesses that generated a lot of cash.

But our fifth startup [Patriot Software] was substantially more difficult and costly than the prior four startups combined. We bootstrapped and self-funded Patriot with millions of dollars, but it wasn’t enough. We needed to raise tens-of-millions of additional dollars to build accounting and payroll that would be great for the country.

Big Risk As we built, we became convinced we should do an IPO in 2016, but Kappel stopped us in the 11th hour. He said that we could service our customers better if we stayed private. Instead, in order to raise cash, he chose to sell-off our other companies that we grew and operated for ~30 years. This was a very difficult decision, akin to putting 4 of your children up for adoption in order to save your 5th child.

Doing Good Avoiding an IPO was the right decision. We could see that tens-of-thousands of customers really liked the software that Patriot created. Testimonials poured in telling how we helped and even saved some of our customers’ businesses. We were on to something big, and we didn’t want to stop. Our products were truly helping our American customers. Our founder’s WWII-veteran father would have been proud of our patriotic perseverance.

The Fight Our need for cash intensified. We met with hundreds of private equity firms. But they didn’t care about our customers—American businesses—they only cared about profits (i.e., EBITDA). Bankers were especially vicious. Everyone was circling us like buzzards on a desert road, and we were within an inch of our lives. So, we got creative.

Cash We ignored traditional cash-raising methods and conducted private capital raises with hundreds of accredited high-net-worth investors. One by one. For years. This was exhausting, but it worked. We raised the capital we needed, and we maintained majority control ownership of the Company.

Success Looking back, we sailed past 60,000 customers and we just kept growing and growing. We became profitable and debt free. Today, we are beholden to no one, which allows us to be customer obsessed and to engineer the best products in the market.

Our decades-long journey was filled with successes, tribulations, and failures. Like many American success stories, the odds were stacked against us, and we really shouldn’t have survived. But by the grace of God, we not only fulfilled our founder’s dreams, but we also successfully built the fastest, simplest, and most affordable accounting and payroll platform for millions of American businesses and their accountants. We are America’s Accounting and Payroll™.

You're The Reason Regardless whether you’re in a small, medium, or large business, we know all-too-well the struggles you endure. We know how hard you work every single day. And we also know with just a few fast, simple, and affordable tools, plus a little help from a team that’s been there too, you can write your own great American success story.

We’ve got your back. Now go make it happen! — Team Patriot