It’s a Great Day and CSC. Back (left to right): Carol Coleman, Diane Shooster, Unknown, Unknown Front: (left to right) Unknown, Donna Dudchok, Wendy Shooster-Leuchter, Dorothy Shooster
location. Eventually, it was paying its way, but still, the profits sagged. I kept my eyes on the financials and took myself off the payroll. I was satisfied with our progress, but I knew I was making a calculated risk to grow the compa- ny. It took great resolve during those earlier years to stay the course. I had already lived through an over-ex- pansion at Shooster’s Drive-in, years prior, and I did not want a repeat of that to happen ever again. This time, I believed, as long as I watched our financials and focused on sales we would make it work. Our new office drove Stephen crazy. The computer systems required constant attention and maintenance. He said he felt like a circus clown spinning plates. As soon as he got to the last one, he had to spin the first one again. His responsibility ratcheted up. He was capable, but getting stretched. To make things easier for him and more profitable for us, we decided to close the old office. This resulted in placing two large Tascom answering service systems side-by-side in our new office. Having two systems gave us an ace in the hole when we realized we could allocate a
single 800 number across both of them. Direct marketing was taking off. Using staff from both of our systems doubled our ability to manage the traffic. Still, something was wrong with our busi- ness plan. We found it impossible to staff the late-night hour for short bursts of calls. Giant companies sprang up to take orders for phone calls based on television ads. The Home Shop- ping Network was one of them. We just hoped for a piece of the action. Small marketers bought cheap remnant television ad space in the middle of the night and expected us to take the calls. It would take us years to learn we were going after the wrong market. When we figured it out, we did not allow those clients anymore. Just about every answering service was trying to make the change to become a call center, few did. The technology was changing rapidly. We found ourselves on the cutting edge. Some- times we’d get cut, but if we were careful, each advancement would also help our clients. The next advancement arrived with alarms from the answering service association. They were fearful that the phone company had an unfair advantage in selling a new service called, Voice Mail. Voice Mail is a robotic answering service.
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