This story isn’t about a big company or a big bill. It’s about a small Alaska contractor, a few phones, and an owner who wanted his business to fit the next chapter of his life.
Where they started
The office had three desk phones on traditional phone lines. The managers ran their part of the business from their own cell phones. It worked, the way these setups usually do: calls to the office rang the office, and everything else depended on who had whose cell number.
Meanwhile, life was changing. The owner is getting older, the kids have left home, and he wanted to spend several days a week at his lake house in Wasilla. That’s hard to do when the business phone is a desk in town.
Step one: phones that go where he goes
We replaced the traditional lines with three desk phones on an IBeXc hosted phone system and set up the Bria Enterprise app for three people, including the owner.
That one change gave him the flexibility he was after:
- Office calls reach him anywhere. His office extension rings on his desk phone and in the Bria app on his cell phone at the same time, so he answers wherever he is.
- Customers see the business, not his personal cell. Calls he makes from the app show the office caller ID.
- The managers are on the same system. They can transfer calls to each other and to the office instead of passing around personal numbers.
On the phones alone, the business pays about 40% less than it did for the old lines. But that wasn’t the part the owner talks about.
Step two: the rest of the office came along
A phone that works from the lake house only helps if the rest of the business does too. So our managed IT team at Finite Technologies, the Alaskan-owned family company behind IBeXc, took on the computers and data. They modernized the business’s systems so files, email and business software are securely available wherever the owner is working.
Now it doesn’t matter where he is. In the office, at the house in Wasilla, or on vacation in Germany, it’s all the same: calls reach him, customers see the business number, and the information he needs is there.
The big win: one team looking at the whole picture
Saving about 40% on phones is nice. The bigger win for this owner was having one local team look at how his whole business works and fit the technology to his life, instead of a phone vendor, a computer person and a cell phone plan each solving their own small piece.
Because Finite hosts the phone system, builds the software it runs on and manages IT for businesses, we could plan the phones, the apps and the data together. One call gets the right people. And when something needs changing, nobody has to figure out whose problem it is.
Could this work for your business?
If you’re a small business that’s outgrowing a few desk phones, or an owner who’d like to work from somewhere other than the office some days, a few questions to ask yourself:
- Do customers call you on your personal cell phone? (See why you shouldn’t run your business on your personal cell phone.)
- Could you do your job from home, the cabin or on the road if the phone and your files came with you?
- Are your phones, computers and data looked after by different people who never talk to each other?
If any of those sound familiar, let’s talk. We’ll look at your phones and, if you’d like, at the rest of your technology too. For a closer look at running a business mostly from the app, see no desk phones at all? Running your business on the Bria app.
Tell us how your business works today and where you’d like it to go. Get a quote for your office →
