Meet New PayrollOrg President Jim Bolek, CPP

A strong work ethic and an unwavering love of family are core traits built into the heart of President Jim Bolek, CPP, and he gives his father all the credit.

Jim, the father of seven children himself, spends a lot of his free time ushering his younger four to various sporting events and school activities.

“I have been running kids around my whole life,” he said, recalling how he did the same with his older three children, now in their 20s.

“I leave work and become Dad’s Taxi Service, and I love it,” he said. “I have always stepped in to coach and help out. I just wanted to always make sure I was a part of their lives.”

Of course, Mom’s Taxi Service is also operating, thanks to Jim’s wife, Sara, who also stays busy ferrying the kids from one event to another.

“I don’t see my wife much when the kids all have something going on at the same time,” Jim said. “Sometimes, I’ll just pass her in the hallway, and we just give each other a high five.”

Although they stay busy, Jim said those activities also build strong bonds within the family and help to foster that strong work ethic and teamwork that he learned working weekends with his father and his brothers.

Lessons From Dad

A native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Jim recalls the examples his father set for him as a young boy, and how those examples fueled a successful payroll career.

“Growing up, the biggest mentor in my life was my dad,” Jim said. “He was always such a hard worker. He worked 60 hours a week until he was 70 years of age.”

His father was a grocery store manager, and Jim remembers the Sunday mornings of his youth when his dad took him and his brothers to work at the store to help with tasks such as straightening out the shelves, bagging groceries, or sweeping the entryway.

Some might consider that punishment, but Jim and his brothers learned the value of good, honest work.

“He instilled that strong work ethic in us,” Jim said. That work ethic drove Jim to a successful career in business and in the payroll industry.

A ’90s Style Payroll Journey

Time changes everything, and that includes how payroll was processed when Jim started in the early 1990s.

“It was certainly different back then. Before I got into payroll, the only exposure I’d had to the business was when I got paid,” Jim said. “It was very interesting, and there was obviously a learning curve.”

As most payroll professionals know, the industry itself has a way of drawing one into the fold, whether its happenstance or destiny, and the journey always involves an interesting story.

For Jim, that first payroll job was a respite for a busy college student who longed for free time on the weekends after spending every day in a college classroom.

“I was in college working nights and weekends at a grocery store,” he said. “An opportunity came up with a payroll company where the job didn’t involve working weekends, so I took it. That’s how my payroll career started.”

In 1992, Jim was hired at Dominion Systems by John Highhill, who owned the company at the time and whom he credits with mentoring him early in his payroll career.

“I was pretty young, but he imparted a lot of his knowledge and gave me a lot of opportunities,” he said. “John helped me along the way and gave me a lot of great knowledge that I still use today.”

Back then, most payroll processes were being completed on computers to be printed on green or blue bar paper and saved on reel-to-reel tapes that were stored in banker boxes.

“We had computers, but we didn’t have the internet back then, so clients would call us with their hours, and we’d key them in, or they’d send us a fax,” he recalled.

Jim worked nights packaging payroll, sending everything out to clients. But the work quickly evolved, as Jim’s supervisor revealed more aspects of the payroll industry to him.

“I really started to enjoy payroll,” he said. “I got an exposure to all these different pieces of the payroll business. That’s when I started to take on more and more responsibilities.”

A Fork in the Road

Over the next two years, Jim worked his way up in the company and was promoted to tax manager, all while still attending full-time at Aquinas College.

“I knew I wanted to go into business, and I had a good feel for accounting and numbers, so this job was a good fit for me,” he said.

Jim helped in various sections of the business, such as calculating taxes, taking payrolls to customers, and providing customer service. He stayed on after earning his bachelor’s degree, but he wondered if there was something greater on the horizon than being the tax manager and thought maybe a sales career was his destiny.

In 1996, he left Dominion Systems to follow his dream of being a salesman.

“I sold accounting services for an accounting firm. I also sold snowmobile and motorcycle parts,” he said. “I was pretty successful and won salesman of the month four months in a row. I was good at it, but it wasn’t bringing in the income I needed and, by then, I had a growing family.”

In 1998, Jim returned to Dominion Systems with innovative ideas he learned in sales that he felt could be applied to the payroll business.

“It was a nice homecoming and nice to be back in a familiar environment and have a little more say in what we were doing and how we could operate more efficiently,” he said.

A PayrollOrg Intro

In 2000, Jim set his sights on making a change in his career. He decided to leave Dominion Systems after seeing an advertisement for USF Holland Inc., a trucking company in West Michigan looking for a fuel purchaser.

A few days later, the controller at USF Holland Inc. asked Jim to interview for the recently available payroll manager’s position.

“I had this 10-year plan, and I wanted to build myself up to being the payroll manager of a large company,” Jim said. “I had steppingstones to where I wanted to be in my career.”

When he went to speak with the company’s controller, he learned that USF Holland was a $1 billion company with 10,000 employees, and they wanted him to supervise the company’s payroll operations.

“This was like, year 10 of my 10-year plan,” he said. “I was a bit nervous, and the first couple of years were a bit of a challenge.”

Jim knew he needed to be around like-minded payroll professionals, and while doing an internet search one day, he discovered the West Michigan Chapter of APA (now West Michigan Payroll Professionals). He made connections there, including Luanne Brown, CPP, who joined the same year as Jim.

“We walked into a chapter that had been together for a long time, and we were the ‘newbies,’ and we quickly bonded,” Brown said. “Jim and I really worked as a team. We would not just talk about the chapter and the Michigan Statewide, we would talk about our payroll careers, the teams we were leading, and our families. It was a shared mentorship. We would ask each other hard questions and give honest feedback.”

Jim served as the President of the West Michigan Chapter from 2004-2006 and has been a member of the Michigan Statewide for Payroll Professionals Board since 2004.

In 2006, he was honored as the Michigan Payroll Man of the Year. Then from 2007-2011, Jim served on the PayrollOrg Board of Advisors, and he led PayrollOrg’s Nominating and Elections Committee from 2020 to 2022.

The gap years in volunteering were due to Jim’s new role in 2010 at then-BASIC Payroll Plus, as the Vice President of Payroll Operations. BASIC Payroll Plus was founded in 1989 by Mike Stoddard, an accountant by trade, and according to Jim, an avid “payroll enthusiast.”

Jim saw this new job as a golden opportunity to help build a payroll business, and Mike saw Jim as the right person with the right experience to help him achieve that goal.

It was a win-win of sorts.

However, Jim realized that he would have to step away—at least temporarily—from his duties at PayrollOrg to focus on building a successful business.

For six years, Jim focused his energy on helping Stoddard, his friend and mentor, to build BASIC Payroll into a viable and growing company.

“Mike was a strong businessman who’d built several successful companies,” Jim said. “He was a great person to bounce ideas off of, and he was always there to listen to me. He was also very family-oriented and that’s one of the things I really liked about him.”

In 2018, Jim felt like BASIC Payroll was in great shape. The company was steadily growing and gaining new clients, and Jim missed being part of PayrollOrg.

“It started getting to a point where I felt comfortable. I felt like I wanted to get involved with PayrollOrg again,” he said.

In 2019, Jim was named President & COO of the newly formed Basic Payroll LLC. He spoke with his payroll friends about getting more involved with PayrollOrg once again in the West Michigan Chapter where he was still active. They advised him to consider rejoining PayrollOrg and serving again on the Board of Advisors.

Jim jumped at the opportunity.

In 2022, Jim returned to Payroll Congress for the first time since 2010, where he sat down for a heart-to-heart talk with PayrollOrg Executive Director Dan Maddux.

“We’d had a good relationship before I left, and Dan was excited that I’d decided to come back [to PayrollOrg], and I was glad to come back,” Jim said.

A few months later, Dan called Jim to ask if he would be interested in being a candidate to become the next PayrollOrg President. Jim spoke with his wife and several close friends before agreeing to be added to the ballot.

“Jim is the right person because of his industry expertise, his commitment to PayrollOrg, to our members, and he is an amazing role model and mentor to many,” said PayrollOrg Immediate Past President Linda Obertin, CPP. “Jim will lead the organization with the strong business savvy he has developed since he first joined PayrollOrg. My advice is to continue to be himself. … He is the perfect President for PayrollOrg.”

Bruce Phipps, CPP, who served two consecutive terms as PayrollOrg President, said Jim’s background in business leadership, outstanding people skills, and his vast payroll knowledge make him a great fit to serve as PayrollOrg’s next President.

“I firmly believe that Jim will be an awesome President,” Bruce said. “My advice to him will be to meet as many members as possible and learn from them what we, the association, can do to support them as payroll professionals.”

Jim said his experience being part of PayrollOrg has, so far, been an unbelievable adventure.

“I have met a ton of people over the years who’ve all given me such wonderful advice,” he said. “This is a great organization. This is such a big step, and I want to give it my all and do my best for this association.”

Bryan Kirk is the Senior Writer and Editor of Membership Publications for PayrollOrg.