Threat: Voip Business Solutions Are Fully Featured, Cost Effective And No Maintenance

One of the biggest sources of revenue for my business is working with other small companies that decide they’ve outgrown their basic telephone system. The PBX systems marketed by the phone companies is way out of reach of these guys, but they still want to make it seem as though they’re an established, professional company, and that means things like toll free numbers, fax integration, virtual numbers (if they happen to have several offices in different area codes), remote access, call conferencing capabilities, dial by last name and an auto attendant.

They call me in as an IT consultant, since they don’t usually have their own dedicated IT department, or if they do the IT staff are too busy trying to keep systems online to bother playing around with telephones. I can tell you that in ninety percent of the cases, if these companies knew what they were getting into by having someone like myself install a system for them, they’d run screaming. It’s great for me. First we have at least a few days of consultation meetings where I sit down with whatever manager has been assigned to overseeing the project.  We review facts, figures, capabilities, needs, requirements and costs. I recommend different solutions based on their requirements, and then we start into the details. In most cases, they aren’t just looking at software licenses and phone line rentals, there are telephone sets to buy, dedicated computers to buy and then we get into operational redundancy (in case a critical component fails) and back up for crucial information like voice mail.

Once we have approval to proceed, I can spend anywhere from days to weeks installing and configuring all of the equipment and software and that’s when the IT folks usually ring the alarm bell. Who is going to maintain the system after installation? There are several options, all of which work well for me: the company can retain my services on a monthly basis, or they can pay me to train their IT staff. In most cases, they end up retaining me because even if the IT department learned the intricacies of the system, they don’t have the personnel available to deal with it.

The biggest threat to this cash cow isn’t competition from the phone companies, its vendors offering hosted PBX and VoIP systems. When small businesses figure out that they can get enterprise telephone features with offsite hosting for far less than the suite of software and hardware I’m selling, that revenue stream is going to dry up.