Michael Gokturk has been an entrepreneur for 27 years – and he’s only 34. When most kids were learning to ride bikes, VersaPay’s CEO was learning how to read the currency exchange tables and stock quotes. While Gokturk’s friends were playing tag, he was haggling with banks over interest rates and selling his old and unused toys in his garage. Gokturk doesn’t think this is anything unusual. “All kids are interested in business,” he says. “Aren’t they?”

“Uh, no,” is the answer from Kevin Short, 33, VersaPay’s Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President. “I was more interested in building and taking things apart to find out how they work.”

In the work they do at VersaPay, a company they founded together three years ago, both men still follow these childhood passions, something they feel has allowed them to work hard without regret and achieve unprecedented success in their industry. Gokturk – after cutting his teeth in the world of brokerage – is the money guy, the business expert.

Short, with a background in I.T. architecture for some of Canada’s largest companies, is still building and taking things apart to find out how they work and how to improve them. It’s payment-processing systems now, instead of cars: he uses this ability to build better payment-processing solutions and design custom products and services for VersaPay’s clients. Their products and services are changing the way companies think about accepting payments – and it’s catching on fast. Since early 2007, VersaPay’s monthly revenue has grown by 3,000 per cent.

As smart, young entrepreneurs, Gokturk and Short recognize their market niche depends on providing the best customer service in the industry, period. It shows in everything they do, from their willingness to respond to a client’s phone call at 4:30 a.m., to the colour they’ve chosen to represent their business. The big banks use a lot of blue in their branding, conveying a more traditional financial image of cold austerity. VersaPay’s colour is yellow – a fresh, youthful, feel-good hue that they hope conveys a feeling of safety, warmth, and stability. You don’t generally get warmth from a bank.

Changing the paradigm in their industry is something VersaPay prioritizes. By focusing on the customer and providing custom solutions and top-notch support, they simplify a complicated process and offer transparency that allows merchants to understand exactly what services they need, and how they benefit.

VersaPay’s main business is credit and debit card processing and electronic funds transfer for Canadian businesses of all sizes. It’s a $300 billion a year business in Canada and is dominated by some of the biggest players a start-up could face – the big banks.

But with scaled-down infrastructure that allows them to offer lower processing fees than the big guys, and a focus on creating custom solutions and delivering customer service that are second to none, VersaPay is taking the Canadian payments market by storm. The “Versa” in VersaPay means “versatile.” They’re smaller than the older generation of payment processors, but much more nimble, and can adapt to changing needs at lightning pace.

In 2007, their first year of business, they processed close to $40 million in transactions to bring in $685,000 revenue. Revenue ratcheted up to $5.1 million in 2008 as they processed over $230 million. This year, they’re on track to bring in over $10 million in revenue. They have more than 2,500 clients and are growing at about 200 per month.

Pushing for even more growth, VersaPay is getting ready to launch an Initial Public Offering (IPO). They’re concluding the final audits required now, and plan to be a public company listed on the TSX within the next 12 months. Gokturk and Short are clearly excited about the new growth opportunities their public offering will bring, and they’re equally pleased at managing to shepherd their young company to a stable place where an IPO is possible despite chaotic economic conditions.

This partnership has been a long time in the making. Gokturk and Short met back in the mid-’90s, when Short was one of Gokturk’s first investment clients. They soon became friends and started discussing the possibility of starting a business together. It took 10 years for the right opportunity to come along.

Knowing they’d finally found the idea that would maximize both their skill sets, they took a leap of faith from their steady careers to start VersaPay. With a business plan, initial fundraising and team assembled, now came the challenge of finding a banking partner that would be interested in their plan to capture market share from the banking giants in Canada. Fortune smiled on VersaPay when Chase Paymentech, a subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase, agreed to partner with VersaPay in Canada.

Short, practicing his “straight-to-the-top” philosophy, contacted Chase’s president and suggested VersaPay was the partner Chase needed to grow their portfolio in the Canadian marketplace. Soon, Gokturk and Short had solidified a partnership with the largest payment processor in North America.

With the partnership in place to actually make payment processing happen, VersaPay was soon licensed by Visa and MasterCard and landed their first client in March 2007. In the early days, Gokturk and Short leveraged Chase’s name to build their credibility.

But after just one year, they’d established enough of a reputation and had enough word-of-mouth referrals to remove the name from their marketing materials and fly on their own. They now process over $10 million per month in electronic funds transfers and $30 million in credit and debit card transactions. With $300 billion in transactions done in Canada every year, they’ve got a strong market presence and plenty of room to grow.

One of VersaPay’s key growth strategies is partnering with associations and trade organizations, and offering preferred rates to each association’s members, allowing the association and VersaPay to grow in tandem.

Their initial coup was when the BC Chamber of Commerce added VersaPay to the top of their list and together, they started to understand what small- and medium-sized Canadian businesses really wanted from their payment processors.

Now, with over 30 associations signed and more signing up each month, they’ve got the process of crafting a true association partnership down to a science.

“In some small towns, we have a 90 per cent market share,” Gokturk says. “You know you’re doing things right when your clients do your selling for you.”

In fact, doing things right is VersaPay’s mission in life. Despite its early success, things have not always come easy. Gokturk and Short work hard, and they work a lot. They recognize that without the support of their shareholders, their employees, to whom they refer as partners, and families they would not have been able to make it this far.

“We thrive on challenge,” Gokturk says. “No matter how many obstacles we encountered, we pressed on, we just had no word for failure – it was not an option. We have a duty to ensure success. We would do A, B or C, but we would not walk away or fail.”

VersaPay maintains offices in Eastern and Western Canada, including a bilingual call centre in Montreal. While other companies are going through layoffs, VersaPay is in the middle of a hiring spree, scooping up top young talent recently laid off from other jobs.

They treat their 45 employees right, focusing on core values of “diligence, integrity and ethics,” and offering an excellent benefits package that includes profit-sharing, stock options and opportunities for tremendous growth.

The team at VersaPay works hard. Gokturk and Short routinely put in 18-hour days, seven days a week. With an average age of 33, the staff are developing their careers and recognize that the intense effort they put into building this young company will pay off (VersaPay’s first telemarketer just became a vice-president).

There are no sales agents. Instead, they are relationship managers. Each has an ongoing relationship with the clients they service, and the profit-sharing structure means they are quite literally invested in helping clients succeed and grow. Each relationship manager’s phone line is forwarded to a BlackBerry, meaning they’re available to offer support and service to their clients 24-7, a level of service simply unheard of when dealing with the banks.

“They protect VersaPay like it’s their baby,” Gokturk says. “And it is.”

Gokturk and Short, meanwhile, still work the front lines. All of VersaPay’s executives still sell for the company, and just like the rest of the staff they pitch in to help keep the office clean, even loading the office dishwasher. They simply don’t see themselves as a tier above the staff. At the same age as their employees, they both look and feel like part of the team. It allows the staff to feel comfortable sharing ideas, too.

Gokturk and Short are both quick to say that some of their best ideas come straight from their staff. In fact, they say really listening to all employees across all business lines is one of the key things that makes them as young entrepreneurs different from the previous generation of businesspeople.

“You really have to listen to everyone you work with,” Gokturk says, “which includes employees, partners, clients, shareholders – everyone is in this to succeed.”

During our interview, Patrick MacDonald, VersaPay’s president, called from the Montreal office to ask for server access for a new association partnership he was finalizing that day. Without a second thought, Short was off to get the job done himself. Within minutes, the server was ready, Short was back in his interview seat, and MacDonald was able to go about sealing the new partnership from Montreal.

That drive to serve the customer means VersaPay is constantly innovating new solutions. Whereas banks offer take-it-or-leave-it packages, VersaPay specializes in creating custom-designed solutions for their clients.

Rather than sell clients on existing products, they give their merchants what they want. If a merchant needs something VersaPay doesn’t offer, Short finds a way to build it and then offers it to all of VersaPay’s clients.

With their focus on people and partnerships as well as profits, the young entrepreneurs behind VersaPay are offering a new vision for payment-processing in Canada. And with their exponential growth and upcoming IPO, they’re sure to be doing it for many years to come.