SupportPay: Delivering Cutting-Edge Automated Child Support and Alimony Payment Platform

SupportPay is the first-ever automated child support and alimony payment platform that enables parents to manage child support, alimony, and shared expenses directly with each other. The platform helps children to get the financial support they deserve, from both of their parents, while enabling parents to focus on what matters most: raising happy, healthy children.

Founder and CEO, Sheri Atwood built SupportPay from scratch when she was going through this process herself with her ex and needed a solution to help her track and manage child support along with her daughter's expenses. The overall process of this is complex, time-consuming, and stressful. The SupportPay app aims to remove the complexities, allowing users to manage support, share expenses, and make payments, all with a certified record automatically created for each one. Everything is stored in one place via the web platform or mobile app, so parents can easily access payments, upload receipts, and make payments – parents have a complete history of all child support payments made or received, and because SupportPay does all of the notifications and reminders, parents can worry less about uncomfortable financial conversations.

An Inspiring Leader

Sheri Atwood is currently the Founder and CEO of SupportPay. Before 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 – you get a bill for everything in life, but you don't get a bill for child support.

Sheri 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 forced her to look at how she was spending her time. Sheri 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. So the idea behind SupportPay was born: an app to make it easy for separated and divorced families to exchange money, without the drama of fighting.

Learning from Real-Life Lessons & Experiences

One thing that shaped Sheri's journey as a successful female leader 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, Sheri was terminated from the CEO position. The more disappointing thing was 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 add, just three months after her departure, she found out the company was being liquidated.

Sheri knew she couldn't stand by and let this happen so when she offered to return and help went unanswered, she began her journey of buying back the assets herself. In 2018, Sheri took out a personal loan and used all of her remaining savings to purchase the SupportPay assets. Since then she 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 can inspire even one person not to give up, even when one feels all hope is lost.

Combating the Challenges and Barriers

According to Sheri, during the initial phase of building the company, the challenge was a lack of capital to help get SupportPay off the ground. Not to mention that, to this day, females still receive less than 3% of venture capital. Sheri worked hard from the jump to overcome this and over the course of five years, she was able to raise over $7M in funding. Earlier, she also had to overcome the lack of awareness that a solution to this problem exists. Many parents don't realize there is a solution to the problem and so they don't think to look for one. The company overcame this by always seeking to educate parents and family law professionals about SupportPay.

Important Qualities Every Leader should Possess

Sheri believes entrepreneurs make mistakes and hear lots of no's – so resiliency, determination, and grit are some of the most important traits of a successful leader. She also says passion is a huge part of this as well, you have to have passion for what you're doing to help fuel you through your journey.

Strategic Innovation to Boost Target Audiences

As the CEO and a parent who faces the problems of managing child support and sharing expenses with her daughter's father, Sheri has a unique perspective of truly understanding the customer as well as the way to deliver a beneficial solution.

Disruptive Technologies Impacting Today's Innovation

As the technological era continues to change and evolve, Sheri believes she is always seeking better ways to achieve the company's goals. "You have to continue to adapt your mindset to keep up with the changes and never stop thinking of new ways to do things", says Sheri.

Path to the Future

Sheri says that in the future, the goal is to be successful and expand the company to not only help parents support their children but to take the same platform and help siblings support their parents. She and her team want SupportPay to become the modern family finance platform.

Essential Advice to Rising Female Leaders

Sheri advises them to:

"First and foremost, I'd tell emerging leaders to ensure their idea or company is solving a real-world problem. Ask yourself the critical question "are people willing to pay for the solution I'm offering?" If not, the idea is likely not a viable venture. Beyond that, my best pieces of advice are to be prepared for a long, hard ride and have tough skin. There will be challenges, successes, unexpected hiccups and so much more that you'll have to deal with along the way. You may hear no's and you may run into problems so continue to be resilient and hungry to succeed to help push you through.

In regards to female leaders, I'd also advise them to never be afraid to speak up. Women bring a unique perspective to the table, especially in industries like tech, and they shouldn't shy away from voicing that perspective."