Herman Shooster 1976
Those old switchboards were connected to the phone company with very reliable hard- wired extensions. It took two exclusive wires to serve each customer. To support the physical needs we had to be located as close as possible to a telephone central office. The Coral Ridge central office was a block away from our office. At our peak we had nine switchboards serving 100 phones each requiring 1,800 separate wires to enter the building, a huge bundle. Our switchboards were an extension of our client’s phone. When the phone rang at their office, a light on the associated slot flashed and a low buzzing sound occured. If the client answered the phone, and we pluged in at the same time, we could hear them speaking. It wasn’t an easy job. Each client, had differ- ent rules for when to answer and what to say. We typed abbreviated instructions onto a piece of paper about 1-inch by 1-inch and placed them into a tiny holder, and more extensive instructions on index cards located above the switchboard in slots designed for the purpose. Message slips were filed into those same slots. The market for providing our service was limited to clients that used the same local tele- phone office as our switchboard. To extend our footprint into another local telephone office, we paid extra for a set of machines, a concen trator and an identifier. Each was about the size of a tall skinny refrigerator. The concentrator remained at the central office, and the identifier
was placed in our office. Those were the days before today’s silent computers. They used crossbar switching. Crossbar switching has a very clear clickity clack sound whenever a phone rang. It also gave true mean- ing to the expression, ‘a bug in the machine,’ because often a real bug would get caught in the relays and block the circuit from working. My dream when incorporating Broward Business Services was to one day be able to serve all 30 cities of Broward County. There was a very slim chance of achieving that goal as it would take at least 30 switchboards. Who could have imagined we would not only achieve that but eventually extend our footprint throughout the entire USA and beyond. THE ACCOUNTANT One of the first things I did was hire an accountant. From our very first month, we had monthly profit and loss statements, as well as summarized balance sheets. Doing this was a type of big thinking. We were a small busi- ness and had no requirements for that level of accounting, but for me, it was almost a reli- gion. I wanted the information to make sure we moved the profits in the right direction. My vision was a much larger company from the beginning. That is how I met Sam Kapit, our accoun- tant. It didn’t take long before I intuitively
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