Sheri Atwood, the Founder and CEO of SupportPay is an ideal example of “women fight back”. Fired from her own company which she built from scratch, Sheri decided not to give up and stand with courage before the situation. It was the darkest and hardest time of her life. Being fired from the company where you have worked with dedication and commitment is not easy to digest. Sheri’s absence quickly led to the downfall of SupportPay. In just the span of 3 months, the company lost most of its customers and employees.
Soon she found that SupportPay was being liquidated. Sheri didn’t want that to happen as their loyal customers—the single parents who relied on the firm would no longer have a solution for their critical financial problems. Therefore, the wise womenpreneur, Sheri started looking for ways to buy the SupportPay assets. Further, she took out a personal loan and gathered all her lifetime savings to buy her company back. Finally, the day arrived when Sheri bought SupportPay and since then she is refining the product and winning back the customers efficiently. Today, Sheri is proudly leading SupportPay with 4x more paid customers and 5x active users while focusing on her mission to support millions of parents and children dealing with financial conflicts, thereby helping them to live life easier and happier.
SupportPay, Solving Financial Issues of Separated Families
Sheri and her team at SupportPay believe in the technology that makes modern family lives easier. SupportPay was founded on a simple and powerful idea that families made up of single parents, divorced, multi-general households or blended families face problems regarding financial expenses as they are no longer in one account. Sheri and her team solve the problems of such modern families with high-quality financial applications.
SupportPay® is the first-ever automated child support payment platform, specifically designed to transform the complex, time-consuming & stressful financial processes for modern families. This platform provides an easy, neutral, and transparent way for parents and helps them to manage their child support and share expenses, resolve payment disputes, and share and track all documents and receipts related to their shared payments. The efforts of Sheri rebuilding the platform are immense and that’s why this platform seeks to help the nearly 300 million parents worldwide who are exchanging more than $900 billion in child support & child expenses each year. With assistance from SupportPay, modern families can now reduce wasted time on managing and arguing about child support, expenses, alimony, etc. and focus on raising happy and healthy children.
An Independent Entrepreneur and a Single Mother, Setting an Ideal Example
An Independent Entrepreneur and a Single Mother, Setting an Ideal Example Presently, at SupportPay, the highly accomplished and energetic Sheri is handling everything from development to ensuring the delivery of essential solutions that match with parents’ needs, while also leading a team of dedicated employees, fundraising to enable the company to grow faster and promoting the company in order to increase the install base. While managing multiple tasks, Sheri is also raising her daughter as a single mother. Explaining the essence of independent life, Sheri asserts, “One critical lesson my mom taught me, and that I try to teach my daughter, is to never be financially dependent on another person. The moment you are financially dependent, you are there because you HAVE to be, not because you WANT to be.” Therefore, she always inspires her daughter to be an independent person and wants her to know that even being fired from her own company and lost everything; she never stopped fighting and again bought it back and made it more successful than ever before.
Sheri’s will power and strength to conquer the challenges have made her a successful entrepreneur today. With the focus on revenue generation and reduce dependency on outside capital, the highly experienced CEO of SupportPay is leading the organization to new success peaks. In addition, Sheri and team are working on developing new capabilities on the SupportPay® platform that will enable modern families to seamlessly manage finances across households. They have built a feature which facilitates parents to directly pay 3rd parties so that they won’t need to go through each other for paying shared expenses. In the coming days, the team of SupportPay is planning to build a similar solution that will let siblings take care of their aging parents.
“Nothing good in life comes easy, it’s hard work that pays off,” says Sheri
Considering her previous experiences, Sheri cautiously chooses the investors for her organization. It’s a bit of a challenge as financial resources are essential to drive the growth of a company But she confidently says, “I know we can achieve.” And, adds, “I would rather wait and get the best investors who believe in our mission and focus and grow at a slower pace than be dependent on outside capital to ensure we succeed.”
Looking back at her journey, the trials and tribulations she’s been through, Sheri accepts that she has made mistakes, regretted many decisions and has fallen behind numerous times. But, she rose like a fire in a forest and burnt all the obstacles to the ground. Speaking more about her inspirational journey, Sheri says, “My daughter had to witness what I have been through and I hope this has taught her that, despite everything I have endured, no one can take away my resilience, persistence, grit, and desire to succeed.” She believes that nothing good in life comes easy and the only way to achieve goals is through hard work and determination as Winston Churchill said it best, “Success is not Final. Failure is not Fatal. It is the Courage to Continue that Counts”.
