Small Business Phone Systems – PBX, VOIP and Mobile – Small Business Show 139

It's October 5th, 2017, and this is episode 139 of the Small Business Show. Hey, folks. Welcome to the Small business show at BusinessShow Co, the show that's by, for and about small business owners. I'm Shannon Jean in Lafayette, California, and.

Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. It's glad to be back, man.

Yeah. It's been a hectic week and a half for you. We've been juggling schedules and like we always say, it's good to be busy, though, right?

Yeah, sure.

Yeah. It can be. It can be challenging. But I think when you're. All things said and done, it's better for you all around when you're hustling and busy. Because I find that when I have more downtime, I. I have. I have more trouble putting together, prioritizing what needs to be done.

Totally. Yeah. Because I have too much time on my hands. Yeah. Yeah.

And I'm, you know, and I find myself kind of dealing with that right now is adding structure back to my day. Yep. Because my structure used to be, you know, I'd roll into the office and I'd walk around, check with everybody, and. And often those checks would. Would, oh, okay, I gotta do this, I gotta do that, and kind of set up maybe the first couple of hours of my day. And now that doesn't happen. So it's interesting to see that. So I think being busy is the way to go.

Oh, no, I agree with you. It's just nice to. Not. Last week I actually had two different theater shows happening on top of each other. They were intertwined. And then I had some business stuff. Oh. And then I went to New York in the middle of that for a press event. And then yesterday and the day before, I was back in New York for another press event. And now I'm back in the office. And for the foreseeable future, I. E. You know, the next five days or whatever, I don't have, like, anything that's. That's disrupting my. My routine. Not that I know what my routine is. Sure. But. Yeah, it's kind of nice. So. So. But I'm sure, you know, within the next four or five days now, I'll be. I'll get antsy.

Yeah.

For all the same reasons you just said. But it. Today, it feels nice.

Yeah, that's right. Little breather.

Yeah. Hey. Yeah.

Yeah. So we were talking about, you know, I'm kind of restructuring my whole life here, especially all my business stuff. And, you know, so much of my charmed life was run through, you know, the company that I, that I recently sold as far as like, my expenses and all kinds of stuff that would just kind of get under the umbrella of the business. And one of those was, you know, our, our phones, you know, and we had all kinds of, you know, business lines, different things. And I was joking around about how, you know, about. I think it was, you know, 14 years ago, I bought this PBX phone system, you know, for actually was used. And I bought it for about ten grand. And I think I was paying, you know, four or five hundred dollars a month for a maintenance program and because if the thing went belly up, you know, you were, you were out of luck. Right. And they would dispatch a thing. And to back up even further, this phone system that I had originally bought from, I think it was Lucent at a previous company, and it was like almost $30,000 that we bought for this phone system. And, and now as we're, you know, everything's so different. So the, the, the group that bought the Tech restore, of course I said, hey, you guys, if you want this phone system, you can have it, you know, And I was like, a thousand bucks. And he's like, oh yeah, sounds great. But then of course, as Amori research, he's like, well, you know, and, you know, went with a, A voice, you know, a VoIP voice over IP, yeah. System, which totally makes sense. And there has some idiosyncrasies that I don't really like, but for the most part, it's super convenient. I think you just have to change how you manage it. And at the same time, you and I, we were talking about cell phone plans too, because we had all my phones wrapped up in.

So let's delay cell phone. Let's talk. Talk about both of these things. I have some thoughts on. On your office phone system. So, yeah, like, curious. I'm sure you told me this at some point, but how many employees on average did you have, you know, at Tech Restore that typically.

Yeah, typically that were involved with the phone system that needed access that about 15. And then they'll use typically about five to 10 other ones that didn't have to have access to this.

Yeah. Okay. All right. So, you know, for 15 people to spend 10 grand on a system and then another 500 bucks a month, like that starts to get expensive. Especially when you factor in that every single one of those people has a cell phone.

That's right.

Right.

Well, plus, plus the thing is only good. It's sitting on a desk that's it, you know, I mean totally.

It's not wireless.

No. It's not connected to anything. Any aspect of you know, your, your mobile life that you know, you're always managing your business and you can't do.

Anything and you need, I mean certainly you need to be able to reach customers and you need customers to be able to reach you via phone. But we use phones so much less than we used to. Right. We have slack and even just text messaging like email. Right. All of that stuff and we've had email but, but you know it's become more, more inter office communication happens on you know, one of these non phone platforms than it does with the phone which is, I mean it totally used to be that way. Like that's right. We'd call people, we'd call each other from our offices. Now you're walking around, you just slack somebody from your iPhone or whatever.

That's right. And it got to the point with like our, our office system that you know, I really shut down, I shut off my voicemail because it became, you know all it was was a catch all for, for telemarketers, you know, calling and I was like, you know what? And I, and I changed my message to say hey look, if you know me, you have my mobile, call me there.

Yeah.

If you, if you don't, here's my email. Send me an email.

Send me an email. That's really smart.

Yeah. Because it would just be like I just can't this one more thing to check. And it just kept, you know, delete, delete, delete. And it was just, it was just a waste of time. And you know, we, we did some things with it. I mean this thing for what it was could do a tremendous amount of stuff, you know and we had it forwarding to some off site, you know, salespeople and doing different things but it's nothing, no versatility. You know, like obviously your, you know, your iPhone or your Android device that is we have now. Yeah, it's totally night and day and it's another, another industry that probably has been at least from a small business standpoint has been you know, wiped out from. By the smartphone.

I really think so. Yeah. I mean you know we use, we want to have everybody in the company of course has a cell phone because that's just, you know, it's crazy that we all have these device, these thousand dollar devices in our pocket. Every single person. Right. But so it's just an accepted thing. But we do want to have a single phone number that, that someone can Call and get directed to somebody else in the company. And that whole thing. Which you used to need a PBX to do, right?

Correct.

And now, you know, there's, there's IP based services that'll do this for you. And we, we use a service called phone.com that I signed up with. And honestly, as I'm saying it, I know that somebody else is going to be listening and say, dude, why are you still using them? You know, X, Y, Z is so much better. Yeah, Y. Because I've been using phone.com for like five years, but it cost me like 400 bucks a year. And it has voicemail and it has a conference bridge and all of that, but you can dial one number or anyone. I mean, you can assign multiple numbers to it and you can have them route different ways. Oh, it's. And it's all online. It's like, it's way more powerful than the best PBX I ever used.

Absolutely. And programming a PBX is just, you know, it's hell on wheels versus looking at a browser interface going, oh, I want to forward these calls for the next two hours.

Correct.

You know, or whatever. And I want this to do this and at this time of the day, I want it to do this and do this. And it's just, you know, it's software. It's just software.

It's ultimately, it's web secure, it's totally cloud. Right. And so phone.com has been great for us. Like I said, I know there are others out there, but it works out great. And somebody can dial and type in my extension and it, it rings my cell phone, you know, if I want to do it that way. Right. And we can have a phone number that rings everybody's phone until one person answers and then it stops ringing everybody's phone. Yep.

It's nice.

You know, and then we can have a voicemail, obviously that goes to one person or every person. And you know, it's just, I mean, the limits are endless.

Yeah. So, okay, so we talked about the positives. Everything obviously cost and of ultimate flexibility. What, what are some of the negatives? What do you think are some of the, the problems that people run into when they use these kinds of things?

You know, I guess the only one is you've got to deal with the fact that you're having your employees use what's likely their personal cell phone for business stuff.

Okay. And how do you then, do you pay for their phone or do you compensate them somehow, do you think? What do you think?

Yeah. I mean, honestly, with Backbeat, both of the guys are like, oh no, I would use my phone anyway, so don't worry about it. Yeah, it's like, okay, you know, I mean, look, we, you know, every company has sort of a give and take and we do some things for our employees that other companies might not and we don't do some things that other companies might. So. But yeah, with that it just makes sense because we're not using our phones. It's not like somebody. I mean, of course now you have unlimited minutes, but even when we made this decision, you didn't. But we weren't using our phones that much. Even if we talk voice to people, it's Skype or Google Hangouts or, you know, one of these other things. So it's like, yeah, I mean, what's it going to be? You know, 20 minutes a month or maybe, I mean, even if it's two hours a month, that's still.

Yeah. And I think that there, there can be, especially for non tech kind of folks, there can be a bit of a learning curve.

Yeah.

And getting it set up. So one of the things I would recommend recommend is most of these places, like I've used grasshopper.com I've used RingCentral. Most of these places will guide you through, you know, the kind of basic stuff and have tutorials, but they also, you know, for a little bit of, of cash, they'll onboard you and handle everything for you. So if you're not, you know, savvy about setting this kind of thing up and you want to just be like, hey, here's what I wanted to do. It's pro. I think it's a good investment. You know, I mean, looking at like Grasshopper, it was under a hundred dollars, like $89. And they do this concierge setup and they do everything. They'll even record, you know, a professional studio based, you know, auto attendant, which I think is critically important. The auto attendant even, you know, nobody likes those things.

No.

And I think the way we, I've always done it is I've recorded it myself and I would.

It's been personalized. It's awesome.

Yeah. And I record it and in a, in a fashion that I kind of make fun of the fact that hey, you know, I know a headache. Nobody likes this. So let me just, let's get you to where you need to go.

That's right.

And so there's an opportunity there. It's almost like because the auto attendant can be your first, the customer's first contact with you if they're calling in. And I think that is an often overlooked opportunity to set the tone for who they're going to be dealing with or to tell them a little bit about your culture.

By telling them something about the culture. Yeah.

Not by telling them this is who we are, but how you handle the interaction with the auto attendant and the end and the customer.

You're making me think that I got to go. I mean, I know, I know ours is fine, but having this conversation, I'm like, I bet it. I got to go listen to it. It's been.

Yeah, well, yeah. And I would say, like, I recorded one years ago and I said, hey, you know, thanks for calling. You know, I hate. And I just was really blunt. I said, you know, I hate these auto attendants as much or more than you do, but this is a world we live in. And then, you know, I kept going. And then I, what I would do is I'd put little cues in as I was walking them through, you know, how to get to certain departments. And at the end, you know, if I figure, well, if they listen to every single thing, maybe they'll. And I said, look, if you, if you want to learn about our secret handshake or this press, you know, eight. And they would go into this other thing and then I had, I had a chance to like, okay, this guy's, or, you know, this, this person is listening, listening, wants to learn more, then I could talk to them a little bit more and you know, and then I, they'd go to the voice or that voicemail thing and I'd say, oh, wouldn't it be we don't really have a secret handshake, but wouldn't it be great if we did? And then I would talk a couple more minutes and we used to get tons of positive feedback about the way it was handled. And, you know, it was just kind of this off the cuff thing that I did, but I left it and I re recorded it. Obviously changed it over the years, but I found that it was a great way to make a first impression and add some humor. You know, hey, we're just like you are. You know, we call these, these companies and have to wait on hold and all this, you know, I can't stand it, but trying to make fun of that whole thing. So the one thing I've noticed with these voiceover IP things is that if you're not savvy about setting them up, you can lose that opportunity. And like, if you, if you don't set up ring central Right. You call and it says, please hold while I try to connect you with that party. That's it. And I just recently had this happen, and I told the person, I said, hey, you need to go get this figured out, because that's not a good thing. It doesn't sound like you're even a business. It doesn't sound like you're, you know, it sounds kind of shady, if you will. And so, you know, I think that's an opportunity you really need to look at and use their, their services to help you get it set up.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And make sure you, you know, like anything, you've got to go in through the front door and beat on the system a little bit and make sure, like you said, that somebody can't get stuck in a black hole or, you know, any of those things or don't. Or pay them to. To do that.

That's right.

Yeah.

Don't, don't, don't. You know, you're going to save a ton of money doing it this way anyway. So don't, you know, oh, I'm gonna save 100 bucks by doing it myself. And then you're gonna just beat your head against the wall trying to do route this. Set this up, set this up. I mean, when I did it, we company in China and we were going to be there, you know, call center and logistics center. And I just wrote it out on a piece of paper, took a picture, emailed it to him. I said, this is what I wanted to do. When the call comes here, I want it to bump to here. This is what I want it to say. And they recorded it in a studio, and it sounded so great. And I'm like, I want a female person recording the thing because I think your voices are more uplifting and this. And it was great and worked out well. So I would suggest that is a way to avoid one of the pitfalls of using a voiceover IP system.

Cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, so now let's talk about cell phones, man.

Yeah. So, you know, we all have them in our pocket and it's now we're talking about, okay, how much money are we spending on these plans and all this kind of stuff? And when my, you know, when my larger company was paying all the bills, and I hate to say, to admit this, but I never even really looked at the bill. But now I'm like, okay, I'm going to run this through my new business, which is, you know, just generating far less revenue than my other business was. And so I'm sensitive to those things. And I was like, wow, you know, I gotta. I'm spending 350 bucks a month for cell phones. What can I do to. To lower that cost?

It's funny, I. I just, I just went through. I started down the same path. I have not gotten to the end of it yet, but. But yeah, it's like, oh, wait a minute. I feel like. Because I'm with AT&T here.

Me too.

Okay. And I feel like, you know, the same thing like I was saying before with phone.com, like, I gotta rethink this. Am I, like, am I just being stupid by not spending the time to research this? Because if I can make the right decision, you know, if I can save even 50 bucks a month, but if I can save 100 bucks a month, that's, you know, over a thousand bucks a year. Right?

Yeah. Well. And I think it goes to. We were talking on a. We did a previous episode about merchant services and credit card processing.

Yeah.

And you were talking same kind of thing where it's. Once you kind of get systems in place and you're always moving forward, it is difficult to go back and really analyze what, what you're doing, especially if you don't see the bills.

Right.

If the bills go to your bookkeeper. And you know, because like you, it's. It's just really important to set time aside to look at this stuff.

To look at it. Well. And the other thing is you can't, like, if you change your self provider, you know, now going back in December and looking at it and then going in February again and looking at it, and, you know, that's obsessive and not productive, especially if you do that for all of the things. So you have to make a decision and then, you know, kind of put it maybe on the back burner. Is that just. But you got to put it out of your, out of your, you know, direct view and move forward. But it is good to come back around to these things, you know, even. Even on a regular basis. Just codifying it, like, looking. Okay, are we making the right decision? Yep. Nope. And then just keep moving on. Yeah, yeah.

And you just name any service or, you know, anything that you're using. This, I think applies. I mean, I can tell you from looking at UPS bills and, you know, finding things like, wait, wait, you know, we're not supposed to be billed for that. And then, oh, we've been getting billed for it for the last, you know, 10 months or whatever.

And you can't get that money back. You might be able, able to convince them to give you last month's back, but that's as far as it's going to go. Yeah, yeah.

And so it, it's easy to, for this kind of thing to snowball. And you know, last week I talked a lot about, you know, finances, financial statements and this kind of thing. And, and you know, like, I'm a, I'm a real top line person, which has, it can be a real weakness when, you know, if you don't pay attention to all these things that are leaking cash out of your business. And, and that is definitely one of my weaknesses. So I always try to work with people that can mitigate that by here, you got to keep an eye on this. Here's our UPS agreement. Here's what we're supposed to be, you know, our FedEx agreement. This is what we're supposed to pay.

Yeah.

Are we actually paying that? You know, and, and, and it's, it's tough.

Yeah.

It's, it's a challenge for, you know, to keep up on it.

Yeah. So it's so you, so. Okay, so we're both with AT&T and I think we both made the initial thought of T Mobile, right?

Yeah, I'm thinking about it.

Yeah. That attracts all of us. Right.

And then we got, then I was talking to you about it and you threw this monkey wrench.

Well, of course there's a monkey wrench. So I started, I was ready to go to T Mobile. I'm like, oh, this is great. The coverage is close enough, whatever. And look at what they're building out not only for the rest of 2017, but 2018. Man. Like, I'm gonna get ahead of this.

Game and I think they are going to, I believe that they will, within the next 12 months, merge with Sprint.

Yes.

And now I don't know how their network works, but that will certainly build up their, you know, well beyond where they are right now.

It's true. Yeah. So I was ready to do it and then Apple announced the iPhone 8 and iPhone 10. And I was like, oh, even better. Right. Like, great. I can. It's a good, it's good timing. I only have to move some phones over. Like, awesome, awesome. And thankfully we have great listeners because one of you chimed in and said, hey, yeah, so you know, though, that the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X don't support the spectrum that T Mobile is using to expand their entire network. And what that means is T Mobile negotiated and got. I think it's something in the 700 MHz spectrum.

Yeah, I think that's correct.

Yep. And that's what like all their build out is for the remainder of this year and all of next year. Like all the stuff that they've announced is all in that range. And the nice part about 700 MHz is, you know, not to get too geeky, but lower 700 is A. In the cell phone world is relatively low frequency. Like things are at 900 or even above that. The lower the frequency, the farther it can travel. Okay, okay. And so it's like, oh, cool, they're doing this. That's great. Here's the problem. They didn't tell Apple they were doing that in the US Until Apple had committed their radio designs and all of that stuff, you know, six months ago to get these phones out that we're having now. And so the current crop of iPhones don't support the new frequency spectrum that T Mobile is going to use.

And this is not like something they can fix with software or a firmware.

This is hard. Yeah. So radio will never support it. It is, right? They would have to build a different radio chip in. Yeah, yeah.

So you're at least a year out, right. From an 8s or a 10 point whatever they do for them to start. Unless, you know, so they announced something and says, okay, yeah, these models after this date. But I can't. I don't know.

I think even some of the older iPhones support it. It's just not in these. Which is the frustrating part. Yeah. And so there's a little more homework to do. But as soon as that came up, I was like, oh, crap. Okay.

Yeah. There's one more thing.

I don't want to do this because of where we are here in New England. We're sort of right on the edge of where cell coverage just kind of ends for everybody. So it matters, like where town, everything's covered. But if I go an hour north of here, things start to get a little wonky. So I got to be careful about this. And Verizon is the one that owns New England, Right. I mean, their coverage is outstanding, but they're no cheaper than AT&T. In fact, I think I've got grandfathered into a plan with AT&T that would make Verizon quite a bit more expensive.

So it's like, okay, yeah, it's a tough one. And then you also mentioned, you know, the, the Comcast.

Well, that's got interesting.

It's a new player, right?

Yeah. I went to a press event last week and the Xfinity Mobile people were there and so I'm like, okay, I've heard something about this, but I don't really know much. So I went and talked to them and they're like, okay, this is a value add service for existing Xfinity customers where you have TV, sure, Internet, whatever, landline, VoIP line or whatever at home. And I'm like, okay, fine, great, that qualifies me. But also good to know for our listeners. Great, no problem. And they're like, okay, so if you've got up to five cell phones, you can put that on your Xfinity plan and you pay 12 bucks a gig flat. That's it. There's no service charge, like no per line charge. You're just paying for data. SMS and voice calls are table stakes was their term. Yeah.

Do you know what network they're using?

Yes, they're an mvno, which means they've partnered with Verizon.

Oh, yes.

So you get arguably what winds up being the nation's best coverage through this. And what's cool is I've got one person, my daughter on our plan that uses a crap ton of data. She, you know, she's a self admitted data holic with all the other providers. Everything on your plan either has to be on one of these, you know, data limited. You know, you buy a package of data that you can share or whatever, or everybody's on unlimited. With Xfinity Mobile, you can move individual devices to Unlimited for 45 bucks a month.

That's pretty cool.

That's pretty good. The problem. Go ahead.

No, I want to hear the problem. Okay, so we say damn you, Dave Hamilton.

That's the problem. Yeah, because otherwise I would have moved to this too. The catch is that they don't support bring your own device right now.

So you have to buy all new devices or do they have some kind of thing. Well, there where they will. They don't have any sort of buyout type thing. Okay.

It's, it's, it's non optimal. But they have said that BYOD is coming by the end of the year. But I don't, I don't know what, like what the numbers look like on that. So. Yeah, yeah, so, so what all this meant for me was okay, we take AT&T and ride it out another few months.

Yeah, I wonder if that's the, you know, that's, that's the thing. I'm gonna have to look more into that. But you know, it's, it's really important because I mean that's what I think, you know, most small businesses have moved to is managing everything with.

That's it.

They're mobile phones and. But. But if you're like a shop key, you know, if you actually have a physical presence. Well, I guess same kind of thing. I mean, you don't need to buy. And I can, you know, know some guys that opened up places and they go, oh, get a main landline and a two or two phone line thing or three phone line, you know, handset or whatever. So you just don't need to do that anymore.

Yeah.

You've got how many lines you need in your pocket.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's fascinating and complicated.

Well, that's the thing. I mean, look at what we just went through here. It's like we had all these great options and now we're sitting here still with no good option.

Well, you know, if the Xfinity thing is good, I mean, if it's significant, like, you know, I'm paying, you know, I pay like 350amonth.

Yeah.

So. And I. We typically. Yeah. I have one data hog on my.

Right.

On my plan that I'd have to deal with that. So that would be 45 bucks. And then if it was 12, you know, we maybe use five. I still think you're going to save, I would say probably about 150 bucks a month. Maybe even more. Maybe more. So if you look at that, just.

Make sure when you're doing that math, and I say this for everybody's benefit, but obviously for yours too, you know, if you're paying whatever, 350amonth, make sure that you're only looking at the service portion of your bill.

Correct.

Because a lot of people will factor like the, you know, 0% interest financing of your phones in on the phones. If you're going to change plans, you got to buy that note out, you know, and some providers I've. I've heard, and I didn't dig this far because we didn't get there, but, you know, like, T Mobile has had. Had deals where they'll buy your, you know, your thing out or whatever, which is great, but you gotta, like, be aware of comparing apples to apples and really split the numbers the right way. Yeah, yeah.

T Mobile has that right now they'll buy your plan out and do all this kind of stuff. And I mean, they're hungry to do it. I don't know what Xfinity is, but it seems like. And it's a critically important thing, but it's really complicated and it just reminds me of there's so many things to consider. It's not just, okay, great, I'll save money, I'll go this way. And you really have to lay your plan out. And it takes planning, like you said, well, okay, I'm going to upgrade or switch carriers, but I got to wait three months until this happens and then I can look at it. And you got to be careful. Beware of the pitfalls of is the hardware compatible? I mean, that's, that's the key. Really, really important.

I'll link to a good article that Peter Cohen wrote about all of this. It fully explains it and it's great. It's actually 600 MHz is the new band that T Mobile is doing. But, but okay, but other than that, everything we said is exactly correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, you know, it would be great. What do you, you know, listeners, what are you using for your small business? It's, you know, all mobile voiceover ip, what, whatever you're doing, we'd love to hear from you. Feedbackusinessshow.co. or you can comment in the at the Facebook support group for small businesses at businessshow Co. Facebook.

We'd love to hear from you. Yeah, easy for you to say.

That's correct.

I'm like, wait, that's right.

Awesome.

Good stuff. Well, keep living that charmed life and see if you can weasel a couple extra bucks out of your, your mobile carrier.

Got it.

See you next week.