For the first three years Ding-a-Ling kept growing bit by bit, answering calls for more and more customers. We moved out of our rented house and bought a house in Palm Aire. We didn’t know it at the time but the world of the answering service business was on the verge of some very dramatic changes . We were about to go from the world of switchboards with plugs and jacks into a world of much more sophisticated technology. Messages would no longer be scraps of paper in pigeonholes but electronic bits and bytes. FROM DING-A-LING TO GLOBAL RESPONSE Everything that Herman learned about business from the days of Shooster’s Drive-In and the frozen food businesses he applied to growing the answering service business. He understood that hard work and long hours were necessary to succeed but he also knew that some mazel, meaning luck, was also necessary. The answering service business tended to be a group of isolated competitors who didn’t share much information with each other. Herman
often someone they would call to see if he was interested in acquiring their company. And, by carefully arranging the terms of acquisition, Herman was able to begin building a larg- er company that spread its costs and operated more efficiently. At the same time technology was rapid- ly changing the business. Each technological innovation that came along required major decisions as to how to react to it. The home answering machine was supposed to put answering services out of business. Personal pagers, called Beepers, were non-existent one day, then on everyone’s belt or in their purse the next day, and gone seemingly as fast as they arrived. Early on the range of our telephone service was a mere four or five miles. Beyond that you needed a so-called Concentrator to extend the range. The capacity of our switch- boards was 100 customers and we had five switchboards. Every change required Herman to decide what to do about it. Sometimes he needed a little help with his decisions. I remember a
convention at which a new computerized system of managing calls was intro- duced. Barbara Turner and Lois Cornwall were with us at the convention. Herman was considering putting the system in our business but decided against it because it meant that the operators
“It was clear to Herman that the business needed to grow substantially in order to support everyone in the family.”
took the opposite approach. When it became apparent that some unscrupulous clients would change answering services just to skip out on fees they owed their current service, Herman encouraged an informal exchange of informa- tion on these deadbeats. He saw that all the answering services had a common interest and that not everything needed to be competitive. We began attending industry conferences and events, getting to know the people in our business and what they were doing. Herman began to get a reputation as a person whose opinions were worth listening to and a man who could be trusted. When one or another of the owners of an answering service decid- ed to retire or go out of business, Herman was
would have to also be typists. Barbara and Lois had to talk him into adopting the system. They told him not to worry about the operators, they were completely capable of learning how to type and run the system. If Herman had not listened to those two women we would have been held back from growing the business. THE CHANGES KEEP COMING The changes kept coming. With the intro- duction of the 800 number we began to attract a new kind of customer – larger companies with sales and customer service issues far beyond the needs of our usual small business or professional clients. We needed to learn a lot fast.
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