Donna recalled listening to Dorothy say over and over, “Come on in and have a cup of coffee.” Doro- thy always listened very carefully with genuine inter- est to the clients. It never seemed like sales. Often a potential customer would take her up on her offer to come in. She was genuinely earnest in saying an answering service can make a valuable difference to a small company. She always signed them up on the spot. Donna continued, “I also worked along with Wendy, Diane, and Stephen. At one point, Diane and I sat at the Coral Ridge office for a couple of months to collect payments and let people pick up their mail until everything moved to the new office in Margate.” Herman Shooster - the largest deal I ever made at the time was Proxy Answering Service. I sent our operations manager, Barbara Turner with Donna, to get them ready to transition to our office. Opportunities presented themselves along the way and we slowly got involved in the call center business. Donna helped me close our first custom- er, a vitamin company called Sun-Up/Sun-Down. We quoted him $300 to get started, $150 to set up, and $150 for the first month. He remained a client for almost ten years. Quickly, we learned call center clients required much more hand-holding than answering service customers. Donna helped to make sure everything was handled. Eventually, I hired a professional salesperson, Joe Blumenthal. When Joe came into the picture, a new era started. We learned lots of lessons in those early days. It wasn’t easy. Donna’s reflections: “Stephen explained to me about the Internet and how eCommerce was the future. He showed me my first search engine. He also started a company with partners that developed software. That company audaciously became a competitor, so Stephen decid- ed to cut them out of our systems and write his own software. In a short period, we were so proud of a patent he earned by doing this.” “Wendy always amazed me with her natural social and business skills. She knew everyone and could remember every detail about whose who in the business. She should have a Master’s Degree in social skills.” “Our new sales guy, Joe took a separate trip with each of the Shooster kids, Mike, Steve, and Wendy.
Yellow Pages Logo
When we asked him what did he learn? He said, from Michael I learned about finance, from Stephen I learned about technology, and from Wendy I learned that Mindy was Jane’s cousin. We couldn’t stop laughing.” “When Wendy’s husband, Max, came on board, the operations side of the business grew. He and Barba- ra Turner cultivated the secret recipe by finding great project managers and taking us to the next level of service.” “I believe, The secret of my success was learning from Herman and Doro- thy to take pride in whatever I was doing; to always to be honest and to accept mistakes. They taught me it’s OK just to be myself, and to always make decisions that will allow you to sleep
394
Joe Bluementhal
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease