Todd McKay grew up in Warren, in a modest house, with a single mother who worked seven days a week to make it happen for her family. He always had a plan to make something of himself. At 22, that plan looked like moving to Santa Barbara and becoming an actor.
It didn't go that way. But what happened instead turned out to matter more.
A friend suggested that banking would give him the flexibility to audition while building something stable. So Todd started at a Bank of America branch, opening checking accounts — where he quickly realized he was more interested in the business owners sitting across from him than in any script he'd ever read.
"I developed this relationship style," he says. "Referrals would come from people that I knew."
He started asking open-ended questions. He invented a class: How To Start Your Own Business, featuring a banker, an accountant, and a city representative. And he grew the business checking portfolio through the relationships it created. Small and charming Santa Barbara turned out to be the right place to learn that a business built on trust could sustain itself on word of mouth alone.
He moved to New York, then back to Michigan, working in merchant services, growing a portfolio of clients and a reputation for doing the right thing. In 2015, he started TM Services Inc. And after completing Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, Todd had a clearer vision of what TM Services could become.
The merchant services industry has a standard playbook: sign the client, collect the commission, move on. Lock them into a contract. Increase rates quietly, year over year. Let customer service handle the calls.
Todd runs TM Services Inc. the exact opposite way: his phone number is on every piece of his marketing. When a client calls, he picks up. When there's a problem, he calls the customer service line for them. He waits on hold for them.
"I put my face out there. I put my name out there. I want there to be a person associated to the relationship,” Todd explains.
He currently serves a wide range of businesses in the Detroit Metro area, including large multi-location deployments where he builds out both the hardware and the training infrastructure around it.
And there are no contracts. You can leave at any time.
To Todd, a client going with him is not something he takes for granted.
"If you're a business owner, and you've chosen me? That's an incredible honor. I consider that a privilege."
A client worked with Todd for a number of years, then left for another provider that promised more. Without hesitation, Todd helped them through the transition and kept picking up when they called.
A few months later, they came back.
"I was humbled," he says. "The intention to do the right thing prevailed."
For the first several years, Todd ran TM Services Inc. alone. Then he hired three people. And not just any three people.
His sister, Jami Cannistraci, handles customer service: research, problem resolution, client communication. Sandra Hook, his mom, runs reporting, auditing client accounts line by line to make sure rates are accurate. Anthony Manino, his partner of 13 years, manages marketing.
Together they've taken something Todd built by himself and made it larger, more structured, and more sustainable.
"I could have hired anyone," he says. "Or I can have a beautiful life with my family. What's life about?"
He's quick to note it hasn't always been easy. Working with family creates issues that don’t usually exist in traditional work settings. For instance, his perfectionism — forged in a childhood of instability — served him well enough alone. With family in the office, it created a different problem: the pressure he put on himself to succeed turned into a tense work environment. His family started expressing frustration.
Hearing that was the turning point. "It was like a mirror," he says. "Like how I treated myself."
He learned to separate the role from the person. His mom doesn't need to understand why a particular line item exists; she needs the line item and the number. That's her job. It's enough.
Sandy, turning 70 this year, was able to leave her waitress jobs. Now she works from home and sets her own hours. Because Jami started working for TM Services Inc., she now has more time with her kids. Anthony gets to be creative about growing the company.
"They watched me from nothing," Todd says, and falls silent.
The way some people tithe, Todd gives a portion of his income to his mother, the woman who worked seven days a week so he could have a plan. Their struggle became his north star.
"Creating the stability," he says, "that was always the anchor."
For someone building a business on relationships, his advice is short.
"Trust your instinct," he says. "Trust your gut."
It's the same instinct that took a kid from Warren all the way to Santa Barbara, into a bank, into a conversation with a business owner — and eventually into building a business of his own, on his own terms, with the help of the people he loves most.
For Todd McKay, that's not a side benefit of success. That's the answer to the question.
For more about TM Services Inc., visit tmservicesinc.com or call (248) 480-3545
A client left for another provider that promised more. A few months later, they came back.
"I was humbled," he says. "The intention to do the right thing prevailed."