A tax pro, an HR pro, and an owner who's been stung.

David Korpel

Founder & CEO

I've spent over a decade in the tax trenches with small business owners — as the COO of ENGAGE CPAs, and as a preparer and advisor to hundreds of S-Corp owners. What I kept running into wasn't people who didn't care about the paperwork. It was people carrying all of it, alone, in their heads.

I've personally prepared over 2,500 federal tax returns — and closer to 10,000 total when you count all the state and local filings. That's a lot of coffee-fueled late nights (shoutout to Wawa and Panera Bread).

Salary Sherpa came first. Reasonable compensation was the question I answered most often and could defend least easily, so I built the thing that produces a real number with real research behind it.

Keystead Vault is the bigger idea. The salary question turned out to be one item on a much longer list: the deadlines nobody reminds you about, the records only one person can find, the business that quietly stops working the week its owner does. That's the whole administrative weight of ownership — the scorpion — and it deserved more than a spreadsheet and a good memory.

Solo owner or a partnership five layers deep, the goal is the same: get that work out of your head and into something you could hand to somebody else.

Laura Stout, MS HRM, SHRM-CP

Director of Compensation & Compliance

Laura brings deep expertise in HR strategy, compliance, and compensation design to ScorpEase. As the founder of Stout HR Solutions and a certified HR professional (SHRM-CP) with a Master's in Human Resource Management, she's known for helping organizations navigate the complex world of wages, recruiting, and pay structure design.

After more than a decade in the startup world, Laura learned firsthand that building teams and systems often means figuring things out as you go — an experience that gives her a practical, real-world edge over the typical HR expert. Now, as a business owner herself, she brings that same resourceful mindset to every ScorpEase project.

At ScorpEase, Laura makes sure our Scorpion Science is grounded in real-world HR best practices and pay strategy, so every recommendation is practical, defensible, and data-informed.

She's also the person Keystead Vault is built for. Running her own firm means she lives the same scattered records and unreminded deadlines as every other owner, which makes her the first and least forgiving test of whether any of this actually helps.

She's also my wife, which makes our partnership at ScorpEase one more thing we've built together.

Matt Martyniuk

Head of Customer Experience

Matt bought a landscaping company the year most people are starting their first internship. Twenty years later he's still the owner-operator — which means he has never once had the luxury of someone else handling the paperwork.

David brings the tax work and Laura brings the compensation side. Matt brings the part neither of them can manufacture: two decades of being the person the admin actually lands on. Quarterly estimates due in the middle of the busiest stretch of the season. A sales-tax return that doesn't move because you're three people down. Deadlines that lived in exactly one place — his head.

He's the clearest case for why the reminders matter. Estimated payments and sales tax are the two that quietly cost owners the most, because penalties and interest don't announce themselves — they turn up months later, attached to a return, long after the date you missed. Matt can tell you what that felt like. He can also tell you what it's worth to stop thinking about it.

He's spent twenty years around other owners — the ones who made it, and the ones who quietly didn't. He'd rather the difference came down to the work itself than to the paperwork around it.