Crocodilian

Paychex Warns About Small Businesses

Good article. Paychex and ADP are both well run shops, and this is disturbing. Most troubling is:

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"[For] the overwhelming majority of our clients... I would have guessed that there would be a larger decline of employees in existing clients than there is. It’s down, but it’s down ever so slightly... It has been a surprise to me.

Quite frankly, it would be hard for me to imagine with what we’ve been through over the past six months that it’s going to get a lot worse and cause a much greater business failure scenario for our clients. But again who knows?
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What strikes me about the conf call language is the tentativeness of it-- for a business that's really a rock solid numbers and execution play, its unusual to hear "who knows?", "surprise", "hard to imagine", and "guessed" jammed into two paragraphs.

Everywhere I look, I get the feeling that businessmen have arrived in an unfamiliar land, and are at best disoriented.