The Leadership Challenges of Scaling Fast While Staying Mission-Driven with Matt Pierce

In this interview, Matt Pierce, co-founder and CEO of Immediate, shares the story behind the company and its mission to give employees early access to wages they've already earned through a simple, flat-fee alternative to payday and title loans. He discusses Immediate's growth since 2019 to nearly 700 employees nationwide, and how the company is staying mission-driven while scaling in a competitive earned wage access market. Matt also talks about how they're building alignment through shared ownership and stock education, shifting toward strategic partnerships and larger clients, and learning from a past hiring mistake in sales. He closes by reflecting on his own leadership growth, especially around delegation, coaching, and developing stronger leaders across the organization. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 3:10 Immediate's Earned Wage Access 4:38 Fighting Payday Loans 6:40 Growth With Purpose 11:31 Building True Ownership 15:48 Scaling Through Setbacks 20:30 Learning to Let Go Key Takeaways Fast growth only works when the mission is actively reinforced through stories, not just stated in strategy documents. At Immediate, customer impact stories (avoiding late fees, accessing earned wages) keep teams aligned and motivated. Ownership is strengthened by structure giving employees equity changes how they think, decide, and act. Rapid sales expansion without clear ICP or territories created inefficiency and overlap, requiring a strategic reset. The company shifted toward strategic partnerships to scale more efficiently and improve enterprise reach. Founder leadership must evolve from "doing the work" to "coaching the team" to avoid becoming a bottleneck. Trusting the team and stepping back is essential for sustainable scale. This episode is a must-listen for CEOs and executives looking to lead innovation with purpose, scale responsibly with AI, and build cultures where people feel empowered to think boldly and grow. About the Guest Matt Pierce is the co-founder of Immediate, an earned wage access company helping employees access wages they've already earned, offering a responsible alternative to payday lending. Under his leadership, Immediate has scaled rapidly while focusing on mission-driven growth and financial wellness for workers across the U. S. How to Connect with Matt Pierce: LinkedIn: Matt Pierce https://www.linkedin.com/in/piercmb/ Company Website: https://www.joinimmediate.com/ – to learn more about his work and platform Get In Touch with Matt: https://www.joinimmediate.com/contact-us Resources & Next Steps Ready to take your leadership energy to the next level? Explore free training and resources at https://training.coreelevation.com/ to help you identify energy leaks, strengthen your leadership presence, and elevate your team's performance. 🌐 Explore More: https://training.coreelevation.com/ 🎧 Listen to the Full Episode: Growth Think Tank Podcast https://growththinktank.com/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We can really challenge people to take true ownership. Say, hey, look, you know, you as a shareholder in this business, you know that there's a really good outcome that's going to happen if you go out and perform your job at the highest capability, day in and day out. And so, so, so what we see is in, in action, they are taking ownership of what they're doing. When you kind of mix that ownership and mission, right? And we're continually aligning on the mission.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  To me, it really results in a lot of success. And it's one of the reasons that I believe we've had such, such high growth the past few years.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Welcome to Grow Think Tank. This is the one and only place where you will get insight from the founders and the CEOs of the fastest growing privately held companies. I am the host. My name is Gene Hammett. I help leaders and their teams navigate the defining moments of their growth. Are you ready to grow? Today, we're going to talk about the challenges, specifically leadership challenges, of a fast growth company and staying mission driven. If you think about this, if your company is growing really fast, you probably have challenges that are always hitting you. But sometimes you lose momentum with the mission. And so, the guest we have today is the co-founder of Immediate.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  They are in the earned, let me get this right, earned wage access. They're helping create an alternative to payday loans for employers that need that. These employees are paying exorbitant fees and it's an incredible business idea. And they can get access to money that they've already earned at the touch of a button through technology. And the fees are extremely low. And so, it really is a great mission that they're on. That being said, Matt Pierce and I talk about those leadership challenges to create fast growth, but stay mission driven. One of the things we talk about is tell better success stories.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  We talk about, you know, how important it is for you to not just jump in, but to build a team around you. All these things are packed inside this episode. So hopefully enjoy it. My name is Gene Hemmott. I'm a founder, CEO, coach, been doing this for about 16 years. The podcast is something we love doing, but what we really love is to serve founders and their teams that are growing. So if you're founder dependent, if you're feeling the weight of decisions, feeling the pressure of working harder, then you definitely want to show up to our next workshops, absolutely free. Just go to training.coreelevation.com and you can find out more about what it is, but I will tell you if you show up, you'll get the play by play

• 2:41Speaker 01

  that we take our clients through to go from founder dependent to founder led and even a team driven company where that company is more valuable at the end of that process. We'll walk you through the process, give you some insight, give you some mistakes that are common so that you can avoid them. If you feel like you want to do that, just go ahead and sign up at training.coreelevation.com. Now here's the interview with Matt. Hey Matt, how are you?

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Doing good. How are you?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  I am great. We're gonna have a great podcast today. Before we dive in, tell us a little bit about your company, Immediate.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  So Immediate is an earned wage access company. We essentially were built to provide the American workforce with a responsible alternative to predatory title and payday lending services. And we do that through by delivering a benefit to businesses so their employees can access their pay as they've earned it versus having to wait till, till next Friday. And I've been doing this since 2019, launched our first customer in 2019 and we have, we're approaching 700 employers across all 50 states and having a really good time doing it.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  That is an incredible business idea. Do you have much competition?

• 3:52Speaker 00

  We, we do. And it's, it's been, it's funny, when, when we first started, I remember doing the Google searches and I had no clue how to search for it, right? It was like, you know, how do I get paid every day? And, and so I couldn't find anybody when I was kind of ideating on it. And as we came, we came to find out there were a couple of companies that are a few years ahead of us that have done a really good job. They've landed some large enterprise clients and, and then as time has gone on, this has been branded earned wage access or EWA. And there's, I'd say there's probably 20 to 25 companies that are out there doing it today. And so the, the market's getting a little more saturated, but it's still only about 30% penetrated from an employer perspective. So there's still plenty of,

• 4:37Speaker 00

  plenty of space to grow.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Fantastic. I mean, and this, I don't want to assume what the mission is, but can you go ahead and define the mission that you guys are on?

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's funny, I'll, I'll share this here. I may ask you to edit it later if my attorney gets upset with me. It's funny, when I first started, I got, I got on a stage, I was in Atlanta, and I got on a stage and, you know, when you get in front of these big crowds, you want to say something to pull people in. It's, it's like the, I always think of like the opening scene in a James Bond movie. It's always like this great action that gets people leaning in, right? And so I think about that when I get on a stage. And so I get up there and I say, I'm Matt, I'm the founder of, founder and CEO of Immediate. And we started this company to put payday lenders out of business. And, and people go, oh, you know, and they perk up and they listen, right? And then I walk off the stage and my attorney pulls me over and he goes, don't ever say that on a stage again. And I said, why not?

• 5:27Speaker 00

  He goes, I'll kneecap you on the way to the car, you know, and so, um, so I've, I've adjusted that now. I wouldn't say we're putting them out of business. I would say that we're trying to just give people this responsible alternative, you know, payday loans are average 391% APR. Title loans are 300% APR. And so when you look at that, there is a place for services like that, right? Somebody finds themselves in a pinch, in a bind, and they, they can't access money in their way. And that's the only thing to do, well, it's going to help them out. But as technologists, I believe that we're put here to try to give people a better way. And so we can do this by going in and aligning with their employer, giving them the ability to access their own money. Because they've already earned it, right? We validate that they've earned it and then we charge them a flat rate, $3.50, just like an ATM fee to access their money early.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Wow. I love this. I mean, this is so smart, Matt. And I love what I do because I get to, to, to not only, you know, hear what the business is, but let's, let's dive a little bit deeper into this. You know, you've made the INC. list in 2025, 342. That is very incredible. I almost said respectful, but it's, it's beyond respectful. And, and that's, that's revenue growth of over 1100%.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And the big question I have behind this is how do you navigate growth like that and still keep alignment with the mission?

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Right. It is, um, you know, when we think about how we grow and every meeting that we're in internally, we talk about the impact that we're, we're able to have. When we do company all hands, we usually start or finish with our head of customer success sharing some support stories. And some of our support stories have just turned into praise tickets. You know, people that want to send a note in to say, you helped me do X, Y, and Z. You know, my, my water bill was due on a Wednesday and it was a, you know, 15% late fee if I waited until payday on Friday. And so I went in and pulled out my money early and, and we actually got to keep the water on in our house. So when you share things

• 7:29Speaker 00

  like that, it kind of continues to remind everybody inside the organization, hey, the bigger and bigger we get, the more and more impact we're able to have. And so making sure that we start and, and end our, our meetings with conversations about the way that we're able to, to truly impact the financial wellbeing of the American workforce. It's something that I believe has really helped us all kind of row in the same direction and make sure that this mission is, is top of mind and everything that we do.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  You know, it's almost like you're behind the scenes because there's many times as an executive coach, I'm actually talking to founders about morale or performance or attitude with their employees. And I know they're doing good work, but I'm like, have you ever thought about how you could improve the way you tell success stories? And what you just said, Matt, starting meetings, ending meetings, and I bet they're showing up in other places of how you guys are making an impact. It's not just about you guys' growth and getting a new deal on the board. It's about the families that are really impacted by the work you do.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Right. You're exactly right. It's, you know, it's funny because when I, when I go back to the early days, We would often talk about, would say, "Well, you know, we just signed an 85-employee company, and that's 85 more lives that we're going to get to impact." And as we started getting a little bit bigger, we're a for-profit business, right? We've got to make sure that we're generating enough revenue to support the organization and keep growing. And so, as evidenced by that 1,100-plus percent growth over the last three years, we kind of naturally made this shift to start talking about, we still talk about the lives we impact, don't get me wrong. But we started talking about how we can really move the needle.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  And so, we started shifting to focus on mid-market and enterprise, which for us is like north of 1,000 employees. And so, when, the best example of this is coming into last year, coming into 25, our average employer size was about 470 employees. Last year, in our net new business from our growth, our average new employer size was 2,900 employees. And so, the idea was, we went to our team and said, "Hey, we may not be closing as many deals. The quantity's going to go down in 2025, but the quality's going to go up. The impact that we can have by focusing on these bigger companies." And of course, as you would imagine, it's also understanding our ICP, right?

• 9:53Speaker 00

  If we know where our ideal client is, we're not going to go out and go, "Oh, we just signed a 6,000-employee university," because we might only get 7% or 8% penetration there, right? Only 7% or 8% of people may actually use it at a university versus, "Let's go sign a 6,000-employee quick-service restaurant where we're going to get 40%." And so, when you start to like build this internally, you build this really solid alignment where people say, "All right, you know, we don't get to hear the bell get rung every time somebody closes a deal." Where it's, you know, we're doing it, one quarter, we closed 54 deals in a quarter. Well, we didn't close 54 deals all of last year, you know? So, it was, the bell wasn't ringing as much, but gosh, when we rung it, it was a lot louder.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Amazing story again about the impact you're making and the mission that you're on. You know, the core of this is talking about the, you know, the leadership challenges in fast growth, but keeping that mission driven.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  I'm going to put some context around this. You don't know my work as much as I do, much as, much as I do, but as much as, because you probably haven't listened to, you know, as many episodes I've created.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I've interviewed so many founders like yourself and one of the things that came up was we want our employees to not just take responsibility for their work, not just take responsibility for the goals, but to take a sense of ownership. And I started dissecting what is ownership and one of the six factors is mission. The mission has to be clear enough and strong enough emotionally for the people to go, it matters when I come to work and do what I do. It matters when I do it right.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Do you think about the level of ownership that your employees take as they get their, their work done?

• 11:38Speaker 00

  We, we do and it's one of the things that I feel like our, our team has done a really good job of and, and our board has enabled us to do, um, to provide literal ownership, right? If you work at immediate, you are a shareholder. Um, and I, and I believe, and this is, you know, I know there's a lot of differing opinions on this as entrepreneurs, but I believe that if you want somebody to act like an owner, you should make them an owner. And so, um, you know, it's, it's varying levels. We were, we were very specific about the way we built out our, uh, our plans. Um, and so based off of the amount of time you've been with us and the, the level of employment, you know, manager, director, VP level, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, we've kind of built out this, this stack rank.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  And so everybody gets to, to, to be an owner and they all have stock options. I've, I think first and foremost, when you do that, um, it makes an impact. Now, the argument can be made, well, sometimes, you know, people that are fresh out of college, they may not even know what that means. Well, just because I don't know what it mean, doesn't, doesn't mean that they shouldn't have it, right? And so our job is to help coach them on what, what actually that means. And then once they start to understand it, so about once a year, we'll, we'll do sessions where we'll break down, you know, we'll talk about stock options. And we'll talk about what some of these things mean. And then what we do is we go back and so now when we get in these meetings, we can really challenge people to take true ownership. Say, hey, look, you know, you as a shareholder in this business, um, we, you know that there's a, there's a really good outcome that's going to happen.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  If you go out and perform your job at the highest capability, day in and day out. And so, um, so, so what we see is in, in action, they are taking ownership of what they're doing. Um, when you kind of mix that ownership and mission, right? And we're continually aligning on the mission. Um, it, to me, it really results in a lot of success. And it's one of the reasons that I believe we've had such, um, such high growth the past few years.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  I, I know it works and, and when I looked at it, I, I excluded the whole equity or the whole but profit sharing, because those are big two financial tools. And I looked at it from the perspective of how do you get that identity to shift? When they're inside of it, so I, I want to unpack the six, um, uh, elements of ownership, but mission is, is the first one that, that really just stood out for me. Because there's a lot of companies out there that are just want to make money. And people talk about money all the time. They talk about bottom line and I get it. But the companies I see, they're really successful or sharing those success stories, like you mentioned earlier, that have people in them.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  And those people, people show up differently for knowing that that's the reason why we're doing it, not just to fund your next Porsche or.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. Well, and, and I've, I'm fortunate enough that the first company I worked at, I was there for a decade and it was very mission oriented. And we had, uh, I was employee 55 and we grew the company to 850 employees before we sold. And, um, once we were acquired by private equity, they merged us with two of our competitors and we were 1,800 employees. And, you know, from 55 to like one of 1,800 over the course of a decade. And at that point we were doing, you know, hundreds and hundreds of millions a year in revenue. And what I saw was I saw the mission went away, right? The mission became, all right, how are we going to start trimming the fat?

• 15:07Speaker 00

  And how are we going to put things in place where we can maximize profit and flip this thing in two years? And I, I made it, I think 11 months and I was like, this isn't for me, right? And so ever since then, I've always. At least in my career, I'm like, I want to seek out a mission, something that's going to get me fired up about waking up in the morning and going and doing good in this world. And also hold on to, there's a great quote by Ben Franklin, and he says, it's okay to do well while doing good. And so we kind of take that to heart, right? We're, we're doing this in a way where we have, you know, solid profit margins, but we can still do it in a way that's, that's much more responsible than what the, the alternative is in our world.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Well, let's go on the theme of the leadership challenges that you're facing in fast growth. What else are the things that you have faced and overcome? We're not going to, we're not going to talk about your current challenges, Matt, but what have you overcome in this journey?

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Well, so it's, it's interesting. We, to the biggest learning for us, we kind of got caught up, and you, you ask a great question to kind of kick it off, just around like what our market looks like and, and how many, you know, competitors we have. And what we started seeing was competitors that came in and raised a lot of money and they're, you know, West Coast or New York City based, and they raise a lot of money and they start staffing up and they go and they hire 60, 70, some of them as many as 150 sales reps. And we're headquartered in Birmingham. We've got an office over in Atlanta. So we've got a team that's split about 50/50 between the two. And money doesn't flow here the same way that it flows on the coast and in New York City. And so we kind of got caught up

• 16:50Speaker 00

  in this a few years ago where we were like, all right, let's go raise some money. And then we know that we got a better product. We know that we've got better service. We know that we do things the right way and we can go head to head with these guys and beat them. We just need to, to build out a huge sales team and let's go do it. And, and we went and did that. We, I think we staffed up at one point, we, we had almost 15 sellers on the team. And, and what we found over time was that probably similar to, to, and this is why we're talking about this, is you grow really fast, revenue wise, you've got to make sure that you're supporting that, right? That you've got the right CS team and the right, the right account managers and everybody That's going to support that growth and foundationally, right, that you can support it from a process perspective.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Well, we accelerated too fast on trying to staff up a sales team and brought on all these salespeople with no clearly defined territories, with without a really clearly defined ICP. We started, you know, they they started like stepping on each other's toes, calling on the same clients, bumping into each other. And then, of course, you know, one or two go, I'm I'm done with this. I'm I'm gone and they leave. And then you're you're kind of trying to feel figure out what what it where to go from there. And then you fast forward out, you know, two quarters and you've got people that you brought on to try to sell big deals and people that are experienced salespeople that were all very directly really solid salespeople. I thought they were all great. They just didn't have experience in our space.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  And they got six months into it and they were frustrated and and they said, well, I got to put some points on the board. So they started closing small deals. And next thing you know, we look up and we go, all right, well, we closed a bunch of deals. But we're we're upside down. We're spending too much money on growth and we're not generating enough revenue on the back end. And so we went through this whole process where we staffed up a growth org and then we had to go in and and wind it back down and say, all right, let's let's go take two and let's try this again. What did we learn from that? Well, we learned that if you're going to do this, we've got to have all the all the foundational elements in place for for for scaling a a growth team. But also what we found is that if we're really trying to go out and sell into larger organizations, where you're going to have the most success is to go in with a trusted advisor, right?

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Someone who's been working with those organizations before and who they say, oh, well, if they're going to bring if they're going to bring in immediate, we're going to give them a listen versus trying to cold call into a 10,000 employee company alongside the other 20 competitors that we have, right? And so as we started to build our growth organization back up, we really built it around distribution through strategic partnerships. And I'll tell you, it's it has been one of the most impactful things that that we've done for our our business. And and it's allowed us to operate in a relatively lean fashion with a really clear line of sight to profitability that allows us to.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Scale in a really rapid way, but by doing it through partnerships and then making sure that we've got the CS and support and account management and partner management, all that good stuff on the backend. So I'll tell you, it was a really difficult time organizationally and as a leader, kind of trying to navigate through that. But on the backend of it, it was just a really, really good thing for the company and we're in a much better place today because of it.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Well, I want to say this is a classical story of adaptation, right? As companies grow, you have to adapt. Your ICP changes, the way you go to market changes, sometimes what you sell changes, sometimes the people change. It's adaptation is such a critical element to any level of growth. And those that are trying to do it the same way they've always done it tend to stagnate.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Matt, we're coming to the end of our conversation today, which I hate to end it too early, but I want to get a little bit personal with you. If you can be vulnerable with me, I'd love to take you there.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  What is some leadership challenge that you face personally? That you've had to maybe change the way you think about leadership or a mistake you've made that looking back at it, you're like, okay, I'm glad I learned that lesson so that I can build on that. Is there something that comes to mind?

• 20:56Speaker 00

  I mean, look, I think a lot of founders would probably fall into this, into this same category. So this isn't going to be, you know, earth shattering. I think as founders, you know, we are take the bull by the horns kind of people. And so what I've found and learned, and I think I've done a much better job. I think if you pulled my leadership team in here and went one by one asking them, I think that they'd tell you over the last, you know, 12, 24 months, I've done a much better job of this. In a lot of cases, I just try to jump in and get things done. And as opposed to coaching, leading the team, helping guide them through getting things done.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  And while that may produce short-term results, it doesn't necessarily put the organization in the best position for the long run. And so I do feel like over the Past few years, I've gotten better at delegating. I've gotten better at trusting the team to go make things happen. It may not be in the same timelines that I would like, right? You know, I see things and I know you're a founder. You probably did things like this too. Or something had come in at six o'clock and you're at dinner with your family and you put your kids down to bed and you just go, hey, I'm gonna go hammer this out in the next three or four hours and you're up till 2 a.m. and it's done by the next morning. And so I have to kind of change my expectations in a lot of cases.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  But it's also something that I can, I can make sure that our team knows what the priorities are and how they can go get those things done and do what's best for immediate as a whole. And ultimately by doing that, it's, it's making sure that this organization is gonna continue to flourish. You know, I'm, I'm taking the back half of this week off to go to the beach with my family. I had to skip spring break because I had a bunch of things going on and which I didn't like doing, but I told them I'd make it up to them. And so we're going to the beach for a long weekend and I told my team I'm gonna be offline on Thursday and Friday and I'll be back on Monday morning. And, and it's one of those things that probably three years ago, I would have never felt comfortable doing that.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  And today, there is not a doubt in my mind that this team is gonna continue to excel and soar in those couple of days while I'm gone. And so I, I know that that's again, probably not something that's unique to me, but it is something that I've learned of just really trusting the team that we've put in place and, and to be able to go out and execute things and be there to lend a supporting hand, but not try to take things over and do it all on my own.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  You might be surprised, too many founders are jumping in still. Even with 10 million dollar companies and 20 and 100 million dollar companies, they jump in, jump in. They, they, there's some value in being that firefighter sometimes. And the reality is, it is short term. The long-term thing is to coach them up and lead more powerfully. That's, that's why I love what I'm doing is helping my clients lead and

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  I appreciate you sharing your perspective of that, Matt, and for being here on the podcast and sharing the impact that you're making with the media and I wish you all the success in the world and thanks for sharing your wisdom.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on, Gene.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Wow, what a great interview here with Matt. Again, I just love doing what we're doing, talking about growing as a leader. What he ended there was, you know, jumping in is the short-term solution. And I won't disagree with that, but it's not the long-term solution. The long-term solution is being a better leader, coaching your people, developing them, and delegating, empower them, holding them accountable, and being a leader, not a doer. And so if you're curious about how to do that, all you have to do is go to their next workshop. It is at training.coreelevation.com. You can sign up for free. And we're here to help you be a better leader. We're here to help you create a company that is not founder-dependent, but team-driven. If you want to do that, just go ahead and sign up at

• 24:48Speaker 01

  training.coreelevation.com. My name is Gene Hammond. I've already said that many times today, but when you think about leadership and you think about growth, think about growth and team. As always, with the courage, we'll see you next time.