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Telephone Answering Service

What Are Your Future Plans?

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Most telephone answering services are small businesses with closely held ownerships. Even many larger ones are still privately held, while a few are public companies or part of a public company. Regardless of size and structure, all answering services must plan for the future. Interestingly, their core concerns are essentially the same.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

They all must look to the future, with the present in mind, and consider what overarching strategy they will pursue. There are three primary paths:

  1. Develop the TAS: The common solution is to continue to develop the business. Considerations include investing in infrastructure, pursuing controlled growth, seeking competitive advantages, controlling costs without sacrificing quality, and increasing revenue without irritating clients. Often all of these are simultaneously pursued to varying degrees.
  2. Sell the TAS: Sometimes selling a TAS is necessary because it is unprofitable and possesses no reasonable chance for a turnaround. However, most times selling is a calculated decision. Reasons include the owner’s retirement, no one able to take over the business, or the owner leaving to pursue other interests, such as family, charitable work, or other businesses that are more appealing or have greater profitability.
  3. Buy Other TASs: Answering services can enjoy an economy of scale, where larger operations are more efficient and can generate higher profits. Though a TAS should already be in good shape before looking to buy another one, there is another possibility. It is feasible for two struggling answering services to unite – through either a merger or an acquisition – with their combined sizeable to become profitable.

Wise owners periodically re-evaluate their future plans. They don’t follow what everyone else is doing; they do what’s right for them and their business. There is no right answer, but it’s important to seriously ask the question. Not asking is the best way to flounder.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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Telephone Answering Service

Six Steps to Surviving an Acquisition

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

I’ve been involved in buying over a dozen telephone answering services. While some parts of the transition were fun to plan and easy to handle, the employee aspect was always the hardest.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

Despite my hard work to successfully integrate new operators into our existing workforce, they often thwarted my best efforts and ended up quitting in spite of themselves.

If your TAS is acquired, here are six steps to help secure your future with the new company:

  1. Stay Positive: Change is hard, and change is scary, but complaining won’t make it go away. No one likes to be around negative people; having a positive attitude is your first key to success.
  2. Treat It as a New Job: Regardless of what stays the same, this is a new job, with different procedures and new expectations. Accepting this quickly will ease your transition.
  3. Avoid an Us Versus Them Mentality: Staff from the acquired answering service invariably bands together and opposes everyone else, a.k.a. the enemy. While understandable, this “us versus them” mentality is divisive and harmful. The solution is to simply change from exclusive language to inclusive wording. “Us” means all of us, and there is no “them” anymore. This makes you a team player. Then avoid anyone who persists saying “us” and “them.”
  4. Be Willing to Learn: Yes, you amassed years of experience with the prior company, but some of that doesn’t apply now, and some may need to be unlearned. Be open to learning whatever you can, whenever you can. This can be hard, especially if you have more experience than your trainer, but set your ego aside, and be easy to teach.
  5. Look Forward: When your old TAS was sold, there was a time to mourn what was lost and revel in how things used to be. Work through this; don’t dwell there. No amount of wishing will bring it back; focusing on the past will keep you from realizing new opportunities.
  6. Put Potentially Toxic Relationships on Hold: Staying connected with former co-workers who, for whatever reason, are not part of the new team, is a bad idea. They will try to pull you down and make you as miserable as they are. Simply tell them, “Right now, I need to focus on my new job; once things settle down, maybe we can hang out again.”

Implementing these six steps will help turn you into a dream employee in the mind of your new employer.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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Telephone Answering Service

Managing a Distributed Workforce

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Last month I wrote that many TAS owners use a management style called “management by walking around.” The default method of many entrepreneurs and small business owners, this is a simple yet effective way to oversee a single-location business, provided the owner is on-site.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

However, if the manager isn’t present, the business can quickly degrade. For that reason, absentee owners and telephone answering services with multiple locations or work-at-home agents need to use another form of management.

Management by Objective

Once a popular management method, the basic premise is simple: set objectives, and evaluate staff based on meeting those objectives. This works best for higher-level employees. For agents, the objective could be to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, but this veers into the next option.

Management by Numbers

Set numeric goals for employees; reward them for meeting those goals. Of course, only work that can be measured will be done.

Management by Manual

Larger businesses develop policy-and-procedure manuals, which grow increasingly heftier as the enterprise expands. These documents specify everything imaginable, from where to hang your coat to what to do during a disaster.

This requires employees to study, internalize, and adhere to the manual. If a situation falls outside the manual, it’s often ignored.

Management by Monitoring

At the most basic level, this is why we have shift supervisors. This method can also entail remote observation of employees. Monitoring is labor-intensive; in extreme cases companies end up with people monitoring the monitors.

While some of this can be automated, the human element cannot be removed completely.

All of the Above

In most cases, business owners combine elements of all these management methods to effectively oversee staff working in multiple locations.

Much of it hinges on the business goals and personal preferences of the owners. They’ll likely mix in a bit of management by walking around as well.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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Telephone Answering Service

Management by Walking Around

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Many small business owners, including TAS owners, use the simple yet effective management style of “management by walking around.” They manage what they see. However, to be effective the manager must be physically present.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

If the manager can’t be around on a regular basis, the results are often disastrous, producing either micromanagement or mismanagement that can thwart growth, hamper quality, and limit profitability.

Most TAS owners work hard to grow their business. Regardless of their management style, this growth is generally workable when it occurs under the same roof. However, problems can crop up when a single location TAS adds a second site or acquires a geographically removed competitor.

Management by walking around works great for an active owner in one location, but not two or more. It’s impossible to successfully use management by walking around for multiple sites.

Only the location where the manager is present will be “managed,” with other locations left to themselves. This is especially true for service businesses such as answering services.

The solution is simple, albeit difficult. Quite simply a change in management style is required. Either the owner must adapt to a new way of doing things or find someone else who can – and then give him or her space to do the job.

However, this often is uncomfortable for an entrepreneur used to putting his or her mark on everything that happens and making all the decisions. Such is the challenge of growing a business!

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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Telephone Answering Service

The Next Generation: Successfully Passing Your TAS to Your Kids

By Peter LyleDeHaan, PhD

The majority of family businesses aren’t successfully transferred to the second generation, and only about 15 percent make it to the third. There are many theories why.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

A likely factor is that the second generation, who didn’t sacrifice to launch the business and see it through the lean, early years, lacks the resilience to persevere. Another reason is that problems occur if parents hand the business over too quickly to adult children who still lack experience.

Some entrepreneurial parents attempt to avoid these problems by making their successor children start at an entry-level position and work their way up the organization.

But this fast-track status often backfires, causing resentment from non-relative staff who may be more qualified, better educated, or have longer tenure.

To circumvent this, some founders require their children to earn a college degree and put in time at another firm to learn essential skills before joining the family business. Although this approach offers the greatest chance for success, it’s not a sure-fire strategy.

Regardless, if your goal is to pass your TAS to your children, be intentional about it and plan.

Don’t leave the business succession to chance, or you may end up like the majority of family-owned businesses that fail to successfully pass the baton to the kids.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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Telephone Answering Service

Preparing the Next Generation of TAS Owners

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

I’m not sure how the telephone answering service industry compares with other industries, but there seem to be many second and third generations running the answering services their families started. (If you’re a fourth or fifth-generation owner, please let me know.)

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

While the process of handing over ownership and control to the next generation used to be straightforward, the path is less clear today. Not only are TASs more complex to run from a technical, legal and business standpoint, they’re also bigger.

Learning the answering service business from the ground up is a perennial prerequisite in preparing the next generation.

Having a college degree was once an optional bonus, but it is more critical now, as running an answering service has become more complicated with additional layers to comprehend. Another common stipulation is to first work outside the industry before joining the family business.

This gives the future leader a better understanding of business and added a background to provide a more balanced perspective. It’s also wise to study other multi-generational family businesses to learn the pitfalls and challenges of succession.

Lastly, while each decade has presented its share of threats to the TAS industry, there seems to be more now than ever before. Being ready to deal with these challenges requires even more preparation, as well as fortitude.

As long as the next generation receives all the training needed to continue the legacy, a TAS is still a great business to own and operate, especially when it’s the family business.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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Telephone Answering Service

A Possible Messaging Opportunity

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Two common ways to grow a telephone answering service are through acquisitions and via sales and marketing. A third way is to provide additional services. With the announcement that Frontier will offer texting on business landlines, TASs will have the opportunity to offer more services.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

In some cases, the need to handle text messaging will occur by default when text-enabled Frontier customers sign up for an answering service. Another opportunity resides with Frontier customers who feel pressured by their customers to accept text messages but aren’t prepared to receive and respond to those messages.

The reasons could be many: a lack of the needed technological infrastructure, not enough staff, a desire to focus on other activities deemed more important, unable or unwilling staff, or the perception that texting is a distraction.

Regardless of the motivation, answering services can screen, respond to, and reroute text messages, just as they do with phone calls now.

Of course, working out the technical details of interfacing telco texting services is another issue, but it should be relatively easy to figure out on newer, Web-enabled systems. While this opportunity may not be a good fit for every TAS, it is worth considering.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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Telephone Answering Service

Memories of Moving

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

My wife and I plan to move in a few weeks. The last time we moved was twenty-seven years ago, so the process of preparing, packing, and loading isn’t too fresh.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

Yet the enormity of the task has never left us and is now being reinforced. Moving represents new opportunities, a new start, and new friends. It also means saying good-bye to the present and to longtime friends.

We’ve only moved our household a handful of times. What I’ve experienced more frequently is moving a TAS; I’ve lost track of how many. For my company, sometimes the moves were the result of an acquisition, while others were to a new facility.

Often I’d be involved in every aspect: preparing the facility, scheduling staff, ordering telco services, communicating with clients, forming an action plan, physically transporting equipment and furniture, and cutting over – ideally all without any downtime.

Of course, this takes a team of qualified employees to pull off, and I was fortunate to be surrounded by some truly great people.

As a consultant, sometimes I focused just on the technical aspect of the move. Other times I merely developed the plan, with other people to carry it out.

Moving a TAS is intense. There is diligent planning, careful preparation, long hours of work, possibly a night without sleep, lots of pressure, and often the need to respond to the unexpected at the worst possible moment.

Yet when the move is complete and call processing has returned to normal, there’s time to take a break, survey the situation, and realize it was all worth it.

May I say the same about our move in a few weeks!

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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Telephone Answering Service

Two Ways to Grow Your TAS

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

There are just two ways to grow your telephone answering service. One is through sales and marketing; the other is via acquisitions. Any other strategy is merely a subset of one of these two methods (usually a variation on marketing).

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

I enjoyed doing acquisitions. And I was quite good at it – or at least the strong team I had made it look that way. I still relish our dozen-plus transactions: the search, the dialogue, the offer, closing the deal, planning the transition, overcoming problems, and realizing the results. I miss it.

Conversely is my feeling about sales and marketing. I’m not wired that way. Although awkward at it, I have a decent closing ratio in sales. However, selling sucks the life out of me, so I avoid it whenever possible. If my livelihood depended on sales, I’d surely starve.

Parallel to sales is marketing. To increase my marketing knowledge, I’ve attended seminars, gone to workshops, and taken graduate and post-graduate classes. I’ve amassed much marketing theory but had trouble successfully transferring it to real-world situations.

My marketing efforts required much time and produced little results. Of course, this is no wonder since I dislike marketing almost as much as sales.

Not surprisingly, under my leadership, the TAS grew mostly by acquisition and not much by sales and marketing.

From this, I’ve learned two things: if you have a strength, go with it; if you have a weakness, work to improve it.

With all this in mind, check out our monthly webinars to help your TAS grow through marketing.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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Telephone Answering Service

The System’s Down

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

On Monday I called a vendor about my invoice. “I’m sorry,” the rep said, “but we’re doing an update, and I can’t access your records.”

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

Given that they only operate sixty hours a week, doing an update in the middle of the day was strange timing. The evening would be a great time, and the weekend would be even better, but not in the midst of the busiest day of the week.

Then I realized the true meaning of her words: “The system’s down.”

I remember in the early 80s, switching from cardboards to a computerized TAS system. This was in the early days of computers, before many businesses had them and before many PCs existed.

On occasion, we needed to tell clients the system was down. They reacted strongly to that, especially given the relative stability of cardboards and the accessibility of handwritten messages.

However, as more businesses installed computers and more people brought PCs into their home, the concept of a down computer became understood – and accepted.

I’ve heard the “doing an update” excuse a lot recently, but it’s been years since I heard “The system’s down.” I guess the euphemism of an “update” is less jarring than “We’re down.” An update sounds planned; a down system isn’t.

However, as much of the industry migrates to cloud-based solutions with monitored data centers, redundancy, backups, and controlled upgrades, the chance of being down or caught in the midst of an update decreases dramatically.

The new threat becomes a lost Internet connection. But I’m not sure what reason call centers will give for that problem, because if they also use VoIP, they won’t be able to tell callers anything.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.