Professional Answering Services Help Small Businesses Grow

By: Daniel Marcus Click author's name for more of his/her articles

John is a guy who started his own business from scratch five years ago. He worked on the assembly line at a Ford factory, saving his money and watching for an opportunity. He was a trained tool and die maker and familiar with the car company’s manufacturing standards. When one of the local parts suppliers began to run into financial difficulty, John saw the chance he’d been waiting for.

Working closely with his supervisors, John left Ford and started up a small shop, hiring a friend who was also trained in the trade. They signed on as a supplier and the shop (it was too small to call it a factory), was profitable in its first year. Ford expanded its order and John’s business was able to grow to the point where it moved into a larger building. He bought additional equipment at auction and brought on several more full time production staff, allowing him to move off of the shop floor to concentrate on running the business and securing additional contracts. At year four of the business, John expanded a second time. His company moved into the factory building that once housed the supplier he had originally replaced. By this time he had eight full time staff, including his friend who was now the production manager. Operationally, the company was firing on all cylinders, but John was beginning to be overwhelmed in his role as the point of contact for customers. A single telephone line and an answering machine was simply not going to cut it any longer, especially of John wanted to be taken seriously and treated like the bigger, more established suppliers.

“I had a choice,” John says when asked about this stage in his business growth. “The status quo wasn’t cutting it -clients told me they were always getting a busy signal and, while that may have been cute and folksy the first time, they were getting a bit peeved. I was worried I would start to lose customers.” Instead of hiring additional staff to answer the telephones, John opted to contract out that facet of his business. “Let’s face it, I know how to build the parts the Big Three need at a competitive price, but I don’t have a clue how to run a call center or whatever they call it. I decided to use another company that would manage the customer part, the telephones and all that stuff for me. They know what they’re doing and they make my company look far more professional than it ever did.”

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About The Author: Benjamin Holdt is a marketing professor and telecommunications consultant. His business case on telephone answering service options for small businesses has already been reprinted twice. The premise of the case study is that many businesses are better served by staffing to their core strengths and contracting out answering services.