Johnathan Holland, Founder & CEO, SmartPay Checkout - How a fresh look at taking payments online is sweeping the FinTech space

It Takes A C-Tribe Village

Preface:The thought leaders, gamechangers, and innovators that we look up too are often impacted by the same thing: they’ve been exposed to people, environments, and interactions that have helped shape and define who they are today.

It takes a C-Tribe Village Podcast aims to identify, dissect, and celebrate the unsung heroes, things, and experiences that have impacted the greatest minds of our generation and how these individuals are paying it forward for those to come.

Guest: Johnathan Holland, Founder & CEO, SmartPay Checkout
Interviewer: Sahr Saffa, Founder at C-Tribe Society and VP of Canadian Operations at AutonomIQ

Show Notes
“As an entrepreneur it takes every opportunity, and every advantage you can get to be successful. Obviously, the probabilities and the statistics are against you when you’re building a company. The most impactful people for me were the people that helped in the very early days of the business. The thing about these people is I actually don’t really know them.

In the early days, I would literally sit in front of a computer and Google “how to build a company in Canada?” What I realized is that everyone around me wasn’t going to help me achieve the level of success I was looking for which was a multi-billion dollar company—which is no small feat. In the early days, if there’s no one giving you advice that you can honestly look at and say “I wish I could trade places with this person,” find examples of people online, read their books, listen to their podcast and do whatever it takes to surround yourself with the information and knowledge that directly correlates with where you want to be.”

Bio: Johnathan Holland is a serial FinTech entrepreneur in the payments space with a proven track record of success. Johnathan went through the Next 36 accelerator in 2016 where he was taught by business leaders with 10 figure exits. His current business, SmartPay, has just graduated from the #1 globally-recognized incubator, the DMZ. SmartPay continues to grow month over month, where it’s exceeding over six figures of revenue every single month. Yes, you heard that right: every month. However, this wasn’t achieved overnight. It’s taken Johnathan 2.5 years to see any revenue from any of his business ventures and an additional year and a half just to turn its first profit.

The SmartPay solution is simple, but so effective: they allow eCommerce businesses to integrate debit payments on their website. They’ve approached the problem a different way than some of the incumbents in the space like PayPal and VISA

Outside of building a fast-growing technology rocket ship, Johnathan comes from humble beginnings and considers himself a late bloomer. Despite this, he advocates for Canadian entrepreneurship and believes that the country has what it takes to grow the next wave of multi-billion dollar companies.