Asher's Blog

There is a certain kind of company everybody wants to talk about. It is usually building artificial intelligence, rockets, autonomous vehicles, military technology, clean energy or some new financial product that appears capable of changing the world. These are important fields, and I understand why they attract attention. The ambition is visible, the technology is exciting, and the story is easy to tell.

But some of the most important companies in the world are built around problems that rarely produce that kind of excitement.

They process payroll; they manufacture adhesives and safety equipment. They maintain databases, manage taxes, move waste, produce packaging, distribute industrial components or ensure that money reaches the right person at the right time. The underlying work may be repetitive; it may be predictable. It may even appear dry to someone who has never experienced the consequences of it being done badly.

That is why I would not say that boring problems always build important companies. Some boring problems are simply small, unnecessary or disappearing. The more accurate statement is that sometimes boring problems build important companies.

And the word boring needs to be understood carefully. I am not using it to mean pointless, uninspiring or unworthy of creativity. I mean the problem is repetitive. It returns every day, every week or every month. It does not disappear after it has been solved once. It is often an ordinary part of life or business, and because it is ordinary, people stop noticing how important it is.

Payroll is like that. Every month, employers must calculate what every employee has earned, account for deductions, remit taxes and pensions, keep proper records, meet deadlines and ensure that salaries arrive correctly. The process repeats itself. From a distance, it does not look as dramatic as launching a rocket. But if payroll fails, the consequences become personal immediately. People cannot pay rent, school fees or household bills. Employers face dissatisfied employees, penalties and damaged trust. A routine administrative process suddenly becomes a human crisis.

The importance of a problem is not determined by how exciting it sounds. It is determined by what happens when the problem is not solved.

Repetition can be a business advantage

Founders are naturally attracted to novelty. We want to make something new, announce something surprising and participate in whatever appears to be shaping the future. Novelty helps us attract attention, talent and sometimes capital.

Customers, however, do not build their lives entirely around novelty. Much of life consists of recurring obligations; people need to be paid again. Taxes need to be remitted again. Supplies need to arrive again. Records need to be accurate again. Machines need to work again. The same apparently boring requirement returns, and somebody must fulfil it reliably.

This repetition can create the foundation of an enduring company. If a customer faces a problem once, the business may make one sale. If the customer faces it every month and the company becomes the trusted solution, the relationship can last for years. Repetition creates opportunities for recurring revenue, accumulated expertise, deeper customer relationships and continuous improvement. A company performs the task thousands of times, learns from every variation and gradually becomes much better at it than a new entrant.

The repetition that makes a problem seem boring to an outsider can make the business more valuable to the person experiencing it.

Automatic Data Processing is a useful example. ADP began in 1949 with what its annual report describes as a simple idea: helping businesses solve payroll challenges. Payroll is one of the most repetitive functions inside any organization, but more than 75 years later, ADP reports that it serves over 1.1 million clients and pays more than 42 million workers across over 140 countries and territories. In the United States alone, it says it pays approximately one in every six workers.

That is an important company built around a recurring administrative responsibility. The lesson is not that every payroll company will become ADP. The lesson is that a familiar problem can contain extraordinary depth. Payroll connects employment, identity, taxation, benefits, compliance, financial services and workforce data. The visible task is paying people. The deeper work is making employment function reliably at scale.

Ordinary products can produce extraordinary companies

Warren Buffett made a similar observation in his 1987 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. After examining a group of businesses with exceptional economic performance, he noted that most of them were not operating in glamorous high-technology fields. Many sold what he called “non-sexy products or services.” His conclusion was even more useful: Berkshire’s managers had produced extraordinary results by doing ordinary things exceptionally well.

That is the distinction founders should pay attention to. The problem can be ordinary without the execution being ordinary.

A company may manufacture tape, uniforms, screens, packaging or fasteners, but it can still be exceptional in product quality, distribution, customer service, operational efficiency and innovation. There is nothing inherently small about an ordinary product. What matters is how many people need it, how frequently they need it, how well the company serves them and whether the company can keep improving the way the problem is solved.

Consider 3M. Many people associate it with tape, adhesives, Post-it Notes and other products that have become almost invisible through familiarity. Yet 3M is not merely an adhesive company. It applies material science across safety, industry, transportation, electronics and consumer products. In 2025, it reported almost $25 billion in net sales. Its industrial adhesives and tapes business alone generated more than $2.2 billion in sales, while abrasives generated approximately $1.3 billion.

Adhesives may not sound like the frontier of human ambition, but modern manufacturing, construction, electronics, transportation and packaging depend on materials performing precisely and reliably. The more closely you examine the supposedly boring problem, the more sophisticated it becomes.

This is true of many enduring companies. What looks mundane at the surface often contains difficult science, complicated operations, extensive distribution and years of accumulated trust.

Do not confuse a boring problem with boring work

There is an important warning here. Building around a repetitive problem does not mean the people doing the work should become bored, careless or uninspired.

I believe people should be passionate about their work. In fact, when I think about whether someone should continue in an important leadership role, one of the things I consider is whether that person is still inspired by the mission and passionate about the work. A leader who has become indifferent will struggle to inspire excellence in anyone else.

Passion is evidence of hope. It suggests that you still believe something meaningful can be accomplished. It is also evidence of alignment between the person, the problem and the mission. Passion is contagious, and so is its absence.

The solution, therefore, is not to pretend that every daily task is naturally thrilling. The solution is to connect repetitive work to a consequential purpose.

Someone may be checking payroll calculations for the hundredth time, but the purpose is not merely to move figures around a spreadsheet. The purpose is to ensure that real people receive the money they have earned and that the employer fulfils its obligations. Someone may be confirming a pension remittance, but the work connects an employee’s labour today with that person’s security in the future. Someone may be reconciling transactions, but that process protects customers from losing money and protects the institution from becoming unreliable.

The task may repeat itself; the consequence remains human. This is why understanding the why of the work matters. Simon Sinek popularized the idea of starting with why because purpose helps people interpret what they do. I would take it one step further: your why must not be merely an attractive sentence written on an office wall. It must be visible in the problem your customer trusts you to solve.

If your team cannot see the meaning in the work, bring them closer to the customer. Let them hear what happens when the product works and what happens when it fails. Let them understand the anxiety being removed, the money being protected, the time being returned and the mistake being prevented.

Your customers will often explain the importance of your company more clearly than your mission statement does.

What our customers taught us at Eazipay

When we started building Eazipay, payroll and statutory compliance did not initially look like the most glamorous category in technology. You could describe the work plainly: businesses need to calculate salaries, pay employees and remit statutory deductions such as taxes and pensions.

It is repetitive work. It is also work that many founders and business owners do not enjoy.

But our customers gradually taught us what we were really building. They told us how much money we had helped them save by managing remittances and statutory deductions properly. They told us that they no longer needed to become experts in payroll, taxes or pensions before they could run compliant businesses. They told us that they could rely on Eazipay at a time when failures elsewhere in the market had caused businesses to lose money and confidence.

Reliability became part of the value; the product was not merely a payroll application. It was relief from a complicated and consequential responsibility. It allowed business owners to focus on running their companies while knowing that an important obligation was being handled. The work became exciting to us because we understood the value it created, not because the underlying administrative process suddenly became fashionable.

That distinction matters. You should not need the market to call your category exciting before you recognize its importance. If customers would be exposed to financial loss, regulatory penalties, operational disruption or personal distress without what you do, then the work already matters. Your responsibility is to perform it exceptionally well and communicate its value clearly.

Value is decided outside the building

Founders sometimes fall in love with the elegance of an idea. We decide that something is valuable because it uses sophisticated technology, attracts impressive people or sounds good in a pitch. But value is not finally determined by the founder.

Value is determined by the person whose circumstances improve because the product exists.

Customers reveal value through their behaviour. Do they pay? Do they return? Do they recommend the product? Do they trust the company with more important work? Would its disappearance create a serious inconvenience or a genuine sense of loss?

This is especially important when building in a traditional or unfashionable industry. You cannot depend on excitement to conceal weak demand. You must study the size of the market, the frequency of the problem, the customer’s willingness and ability to pay, existing alternatives, regulatory changes and the direction in which the industry is moving.

A boring problem is not automatically a good business. Some repetitive processes should disappear. Technology may automate them, regulation may remove them, or customer behaviour may make them irrelevant. A founder must distinguish between a problem that is enduring and a process that is merely outdated.

The goal is not to preserve old work because it is familiar. The goal is to identify the enduring need underneath it and find a better way to serve that need.

People may no longer want to prepare payroll with paper files, but they will still need to compensate employees accurately. People may no longer want to submit forms physically, but governments will still collect taxes and employers will still need to comply with the law. The process can change completely while the underlying obligation remains. That is where innovation belongs in a supposedly boring industry.

A boring industry can contain serious innovation

Innovation is not defined by the industry in which it occurs. It is defined by the improvement it creates.

If a company reduces a three-day process to ten minutes, that is innovation. If it prevents expensive errors, makes expert knowledge available to small businesses, expands access, improves safety or turns an unpredictable experience into a dependable one, that is innovation. The customer does not need the technology to look futuristic. The customer needs the outcome to be better.

Even ADP, after more than seven decades in payroll, continues investing in cloud platforms, workforce data and artificial intelligence. The apparently boring problem did not prevent technological innovation. It supplied a valuable context in which technology could be applied.

This is a useful way to think about AI too. You do not necessarily need to leave a traditional industry to participate in a technological shift. You can bring new technology into an old problem. AI can help identify payroll anomalies, answer compliance questions, improve customer support, predict cash requirements and reduce repetitive work. The important question is not whether you can describe your company as an AI company. It is whether AI helps you solve the customer’s problem more accurately, quickly or affordably.

Technology should serve the problem. The problem should not be invented merely to justify the technology.

Fashion and importance are not the same

Every period has fashionable sectors. Capital, media attention and ambitious people move towards them. Some of these sectors will produce transformative companies. Others will become overcrowded because too many founders are attracted to the same visible opportunity.

Meanwhile, thousands of valuable problems remain neglected because they look too manual, too local, too regulated, too operational or insufficiently impressive.

This creates an opportunity for founders who can see importance where others see inconvenience.

Fashion asks, “What is everybody building now?” Importance asks, “What must continue to work?”

Fashion asks whether the idea will attract attention. Importance asks whether customers will experience a serious problem if the company disappears.

Fashion changes quickly. Human and commercial necessities are often much more stable. This does not mean a founder should avoid exciting sectors, nor does it mean every traditional business is safe. Energy transition, automation, policy and technological change can alter even the most established industries. A large refinery, for example, still needs to be evaluated against real energy demand, supply constraints, national needs, capital requirements and the long-term direction of transportation and energy. Neither “oil is old” nor “oil has always been important” is a sufficient argument. The market, economics and trajectory must still make sense.

The same discipline applies everywhere. Do not build something simply because it is fashionable. Do not reject something simply because it is not.

How to recognize an important boring problem

When evaluating an apparently ordinary idea, I would ask a few questions. First, how painful is failure? If the task is done incorrectly, does the customer lose money, time, trust, safety or access to something important?

Second, how frequently does the problem return? A recurring obligation can support a more enduring relationship than a rare inconvenience.

Third, how are customers solving it now? Spreadsheets, WhatsApp messages, manual reconciliation and teams of administrators are often signs that a real problem exists, although they can also be formidable competitors because customers already understand them.

Fourth, will customers pay to transfer the responsibility? People complain about many things for which they will never pay. Importance must eventually meet willingness to pay if the solution is to become a sustainable business.

Fifth, can technology or a better operating model produce a significant improvement? The opportunity becomes more compelling when you can make the work substantially faster, safer, cheaper or easier.

Sixth, can trust accumulate? In consequential industries, each successful transaction increases the customer’s willingness to rely on the company for more.

Finally, is the underlying need likely to remain even if the current process changes? You want to build around the enduring need, not become emotionally attached to yesterday’s method.

Make the work worthy of passion

If you are building something that other people describe as boring, do not disparage it. Do not become ashamed because it cannot be explained with rockets, robots or dramatic demonstrations.

Look more closely at the value. Understand the customer whose salary arrives correctly, the business owner who avoids a penalty, the factory that receives an essential component, the household whose waste is removed, the patient who receives a dependable product or the employee whose pension is protected. The company becomes important through the lives and systems that depend on it.

Then make the work worthy of your passion. Bring creativity into it. Apply better technology. Tell the customer’s story. Raise the standard of reliability. Build a culture that understands the consequence of failure. Keep studying the market so that repetition does not become complacency. An enduring company is not one that performs the same task carelessly forever; it is one that continues improving the way an enduring need is met.

The problem may be repetitive, but the standard should not be ordinary. Sometimes boring problems build important companies because important societies depend on ordinary things working every day. Salaries must be paid. Records must be accurate. Materials must hold. Systems must remain available. Promises must be kept.

The work may never look as dramatic as a rocket launch. But when you solve a necessary problem exceptionally well, repeatedly and for enough people, you may discover that you were building something just as consequential: a company people can depend on. —

References and further reading

• Warren Buffett, 1987 Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders.
• Automatic Data Processing, 2025 Annual Report.
• 3M, 2025 Annual Report.
• Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.
• Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management.