Frisco, Texas Sep 17, 2026 (Issuewire.com) - William Stapleton is putting a name to a rule he has followed since his first company. He calls it a personal policy now, not just a habit: never hire someone who thinks the same way he does.
"You don't know what you don't know," Stapleton says. "So you surround yourself with people who are smarter than you in the areas where you're weakest. That's not humility. That's just math."
The policy is simple to state and harder to practice. It means Stapleton actively looks for candidates who will disagree with him, correct him, or point out a blind spot before it becomes a costly mistake.
Where the policy came from
Stapleton traces the standard back to his early years in private banking in New York, where he worked closely with high-net-worth clients and watched how advisory teams were built. Some teams were built for comfort. The strongest ones were built for coverage, meaning every gap in one person's knowledge was covered by someone else's strength.
He carried that lesson into PayFacto, the credit card processing company he founded in Montreal. PayFacto grew and was sold to Visa in 2019. Stapleton says the sale did not happen because he had all the answers. It happened because he built a team that filled in where he did not.
"I've never been the smartest person in any room I've built," he says. "I've just been good at finding the people who are, and giving them room to do their job."
How the policy works at Iron Rock Payments
At Iron Rock Payments, Stapleton is formalizing three commitments tied to the hiring standard:
First, every new hire is measured against a gap, not a resume. Before Iron Rock Payments brings someone on, Stapleton says the company identifies a specific weakness on the existing team and hires against it directly, rather than hiring for general talent.
Second, disagreement is treated as a signal, not a problem. Stapleton says he asks new employees to flag decisions they think are wrong, and he tracks how often that happens as a sign the team is actually thinking, not just agreeing.
Third, the policy applies to Stapleton himself. He says he reviews his own decisions the same way he reviews a hire, by asking what he missed and who on his team caught it.
"Success by itself doesn't tell you much," Stapleton says. "What matters is the financial outcome a decision produces, and whether the people around you saw something you didn't. If nobody caught anything, either the team isn't talking, or I got lucky."
Why he is naming it now
Stapleton says he is putting the policy into words now because Iron Rock Payments has grown enough that the habit needs to survive without him repeating it in every meeting. The company is an Inc. 5000 company with 15 employees, and Stapleton says the hiring standard is one of the few things he wants applied the same way whether he is in the room or not.
"When it was just me and PayFacto, the policy lived in my head," he says. "Now it needs to live in how we hire, how we review work, and how people talk to each other. That's the only way it scales."
Stapleton is direct about the tradeoff. Hiring people who challenge him is slower and sometimes uncomfortable. He says he accepts that cost because the alternative, a team that agrees with him by default, is more expensive in the long run.
"I'd rather be told I'm wrong in a meeting than find out I was wrong six months later," he says. "That's the whole policy, really. Everything else is just how you put it into practice."
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About William Stapleton
William Stapleton is the President and CEO of Iron Rock Payments, a credit card processing company and Inc. 5000 honoree. He previously founded PayFacto, a payments company based in Montreal that was sold to Visa in 2019. Stapleton holds degrees in Rhetorical Theory and Global Economics from California State University, Long Beach, and lives in Frisco, Texas.
Contact:
Info@william-stapleton.com
Media Contact
William Stapleton info@william-stapleton.com http://william-stapleton.com
