Raising children is not an easy task. It is essential to take care of children especially in their upbringing years. It is essential to provide support to children so they will grow as stable, calm, and emotionally intelligent adults. It is harder if parents are experiencing stress over expenses and payments. If parents are divorced, the drama or fighting between co-parents over the issue of child support is not good for the health and well-being of the child. This may lead to negative earlier impressions on the child. Therefore, to avoid this it is essential to have something that manages the expenses and payments of the child support without quarrel and fighting.
“SupportPay assists single, divorced, separated or remarried parents in managing their child support payments and shared expenses.”
SupportPay makes this entire process simple and streamlined. Sheri Atwood is currently the Founder and CEO of SupportPay, the only co-parenting app that enables parents to manage child support and share expenses directly with each other without any quarrel or fighting between them. SupportPay is first-ever automated child support payment platform for parents living apart. SupportPay seeks to eliminate child support conflict and enable collaboration with an easy to use online and mobile application, providing both parents transparency while saving time & money. Through SupportPay parents can now spend less time managing child support and expenses and more time focused on raising happy, healthy children.
Revolutionizing Family Financial Management
Prior to SupportPay, Sheri was a Silicon Valley executive and divorced single mom juggling a career and raising a child. During that time, she found that it was difficult to manage the intricacies of child support and was certain there was a solution out there to help. She searched high and low for a solution and was shocked to find out there was nothing available. At the same time, her daughter had to have emergency brain surgery which really forced her to look at how she was spending her time. She realized then that if she was going to spend so much time away from her daughter, she wanted to be working on something that made an impact in the world. Therefore, the idea behind SupportPay was born: an app to make it easy for separated and divorced families to exchange money, without the drama or the fighting. SupportPay seeks to revolutionize family financial management by creating simple yet effective software to help modern families.
Ensuring Financial Security for Children
The SupportPay app eliminates the need to discuss expenses and payments directly with one’s ex regarding child support and shared expenses. SupportPay manages the entire process, stores a certified record for compliance, court, and tax purposes and facilitates all of the communication between parents! SupportPay app is like an automated financial mediator. With the SupportPay parents can spend more time being a parent and less time managing their support payments, expenses, receipts, and documents. Paying parents can see where their money is going, and parents can receive the exact track of child support, expenses, and payments that can be accessed from the web or mobile device. This helps in giving children the financial security they deserve.
Unique Perspective
As the CEO and also a parent who faces the problems of managing child support and sharing expenses with her daughter ’s father, Sheri has a unique perspective of understanding the customer as well as the way to deliver a solution that is beneficial.
In running her company, Sheri encourages all of her employees to try to find solutions to problems on their own before coming to her. A lot of times questions can be answered with a Google search, so she considers it is always imperative to do some of one’s own research first. This helps employees become more resourceful and allows them to seek new ways to achieve goals.
Inspiring Journey
One thing that really changed Sheri’s life was being fired from her own company in 2017. After coding the app herself and working tirelessly to build her company from the ground up for years, she was terminated as CEO. The even more disappointing thing is that once she left, the company started a quick decline – losing most of its customers, having a non-working product, and firing countless employees. And to boot, just three months after her departure she found out the company was being liquidated. Sheri knew she couldn’t standby and let this happen so when her offers to return and help went unanswered, she began her journey of buying back the assets herself. In 2018, she took out a personal loan and used all of her remaining savings to purchase the SupportPay assets. Since then, she has focused all her energy on rebuilding the product, winning back customers, and growing the business. Though it’s been a long, hard journey to where she is today, Sheri hopes her story inspires even one person not to give up, even when they feel all hope is lost.
Utilizing Advances in Technology
Sheri believes in being about something rather than just talking about it. Constant changes in the market force organizations to be nimble therefore Sheri states that technology is incredibly important in driving her organization’s business. SupportPay’s solution is a technology solution and everything it does uses the technology to make the organization more productive and efficient. As the technological era continues to change and evolve, Sheri is always seeking better ways to achieve organizational goals. She believes that it is important to continue to adapt one’s mindset to keep up with the changes and never stop thinking of new ways to do things. Sheri is constantly talking to customers and getting their feedback to enable SupportPay to quickly adjust priorities and make sure it is delivering the best product with the most value to its customers.
Encouraging Women Leaders
First and foremost, Sheri tells emerging leaders to ensure their idea or company is solving a real-world problem. Beyond that, her best pieces of advice are to be prepared for a long, hard ride and have tough skin. She states that one may hear NOs, and one may run into problems still one should continue to be resilient and hungry to succeed. In regard to female leaders, Sheri advises them to never be afraid to speak up. Women bring a unique perspective to the table, especially in industries like tech, and she says that they shouldn’t shy away from voicing that perspective.
