Daniel Bessmert Revolutionizing Business Payment Systems And The Financial Service Industry

It can be tough to know where to start when it comes to online payments for business owners. Surely, there must be a more effective way to manage and grow your income – but what do you do if you don’t have any idea where to start or are tired of old traditional methods?

Meet Daniel Bessmert, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Great Week. There are many advantages to using Great Week, including high convenience, reduced costs, efficiency, faster & effective transactions, security, and privacy. These benefits will improve your business’s operations and make it more efficient.

Daniel is on a mission to simplify the payment process for small business owners so that they can concentrate more on thriving than managing financial administration. With his company, an entrepreneur can easily open a bank account (also sync previous owned account) and send invoices to customers for easy transactions between the service provider and the customers.

Startups are in high demand right now and are achieving exponential growth because of the power to accept payments instantly. By using Great Week, businesses can offer quick and easy transactions, increase their customer base and bring in more revenue. Additionally, with Great Week all in one app, companies can increase engagement with customers and keep them coming back for more.

Great Week has solved the problems related to traditional payment systems such as the inability to quickly and easily settle disputes, risks that payments may not be received, inability to charge for services or products, difficulties to process large payments, insecurity, and fraud.

Hello Daniel, we’re thrilled to have you in our media. Can you please share a little about yourself and your work with our audience?

Daniel Bessmert: In the early part of my career, I worked at large companies like Citibank, Visa, and PayPal. But 7 years ago I left the comfort of getting a nice paycheck and jumped into my entrepreneurial journey. Since then I’ve built and sold 2 ventures and am currently involved in a handful of Fintech Scaleups, mainly as an Investor and Board Member. My passion and main focus right now, however, is my newest venture www.greatweek.com a Bank, Payments, and Accounting Platform, for Small Business Owners in the US. 

What made you take the leap into entrepreneurship? 

Daniel Bessmert: I’ve always been curious about innovation. Even during my corporate career, I found myself in roles that involved leading innovation teams, new product launches, or new market entries. When you work in a larger organization, even in senior roles, you find yourself spending lots of time and energy on things that don’t bring any real value (P&L’s, PowerPoints, unproductive meetings, etc). I often felt like “the wheels were spinning but the rubber didn’t hit the ground”. Hence I jumped into the unknown, with less than $25K in the bank to build my own venture, and had to hustle my way through to profitability and then later exit. Since then I never looked back, building companies and working closely with other entrepreneurs is where I thrive and what I plan to do, moving forward. 

What were the biggest initial hurdles to building your own companies and how did you overcome them? 

Daniel Bessmert: As we all know, most startups fail. Over 50% within the first year and over 65% fail within the first 10 years. Hence the odds are against you from the start and by far the main reason businesses fail is that they ran out of money. While money is not the key factor to success, it’s still important to know that it often takes more funds to build and market a product, than initially forecasted. In addition, once a product is out of Beta/MVP it often needs to pivot into something that actually has a product-market fit. Most entrepreneurs just don’t plan appropriately from a financial perspective. So instead of building P&L’s and larger business plans, I learned that it’s better to first validate your idea with your target audience, go out and build a basic MVP and try to build revenue as early as possible. Most business ideas can be executed with less than $25K but you have to have at least double that in the bank, before stepping into a new venture. Otherwise, you’ll end up being one of those 50% that never made it past the first year. 

How do you personally define success? What does it mean to you? 

Daniel Bessmert: Success to me is when you excel at what you do and when you leave a mark behind you. If you are an architect then success is building houses that leave a legacy, if you are a Restaurant owner, make sure you are rated in the top categories on Tripadvisor, if you are a Fintech Entrepreneur, like me, break grounds and build something new and exciting that people want to try out and read about. 

How do you differentiate yourself from others in your field?

Daniel Bessmert: I assume you are asking about my business, right? Our main USP is that we bundle Banking, Payments, and Accounting together. This allows our clients to manage their entire business with one single app/relationship. 

What was the biggest business mistake you made and what did you do to learn from it? 

Daniel Bessmert: I agreed to sell one of my companies just before Covid Pandemic and had an earnout clause as part of the agreement, where it stated that I would receive 0 if revenues fell more than 25%. That business had all of its revenues from POS and Payments in the hospitality segment and as you can imagine that segment collapsed. And so did my investments in that business. My learning from that is basically to always try to push yourself away from longer locking periods and ensure that you safeguard yourselves from “Force Majeure”, which apparently the Covid Pandemic couldn’t be labeled as. 

What are 3 tips you can share with our readers as it relates to your industry? 

1. Focus on building a profitable business instead of running around fundraising. Bootstrapped over VC basically. 
2. Work with your conservative plan and just trash the optimistic plan. 
3. If you have an idea that you can’t stop thinking about, just go out and do it. Once you go at it, remember that “Done is better than perfect” and just hustle, grind and get shit done. 

What advice would you give to someone asking for help about becoming an entrepreneur?

Daniel Bessmert: I think it’s more fun building businesses together with people you like. Doing things by yourself can be done, but only after you have found success being an entrepreneur. Sort of the same as in training, it’s always easier to achieve results with a training buddy or in a group. So if you are just getting started, try to find a Co-Founder, which can be an equal equity split or a majority-minority equity split. 

What would you say was the single most influential factor in your business’ success? 

Daniel Bessmert: Grit. Never give up, and stay positive. 

It was great interviewing Daniel. If you want to know more about his business or want to build value together, connect with him via LinkedIn. If you wish to get in touch about using www.greatweek.com ping an email to daniel@greatweek.com or go ahead and sign up for a free trial account on their website www.greatweek.com