In this brief vlog, Ryan Shank, founder of PhoneWagon, outlines the company’s rapid growth and the operational challenges that come with scaling. He notes that PhoneWagon is hiring across virtually every department—sales, customer success, service, design, product, and engineering—while adding over 100 agencies and potentially up to 1,000 end‑customers each month. The rapid expansion has pushed the team into a reactive "defense mode," which hampers strategic work. To shift to an "offensive mode," Ryan emphasizes prioritizing high‑impact tasks, outsourcing or delegating low‑value work, and building systematic processes. He highlights PhoneWagon’s live‑chat support (responding within seconds at any hour) as a key differentiator and describes a feedback loop with customers that drives product development, including call‑flow testing, outbound calling, two‑way messaging, and CRM‑integrated automations currently in private beta. Ryan also stresses the need for consistent, documented customer experiences—comparing it to the uniform service at Starbucks—so every interaction feels the same regardless of the representative. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to subscribe, comment, and email him, and a statement of the company’s ambition to reach $100 million in annual revenue.
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What up guys, it's Ryan from Phone Wagon. Today's gonna be a super short video. We used to do videos just like today, just things I'm thinking about as we are growing the business. I wanna go back to the intro that we used to do, so roll the clip. Alright, cool. So that was the intro that we used to do. So as we used to say, what up guys, it's Ryan from Phone Wagon. What up guys. What up guys. What up guys. What up guys. Ryan, Ryan, Ryan from PhoneWagon, from PhoneWagon. What up, PhoneWagoners? So today I want to talk about getting organized and creating systems in order to hire and also prioritizing. So basically right now we're hiring in nearly every single position. We're hiring in sales, we're hiring in customer success, we're hiring in customer service, we're hiring in design, hiring in product, front-end engineering. We're hiring pretty much all over the board. We're exploding with growth right now. We're adding over 100 agencies a month. And each of these agencies, we're probably adding like hundreds maybe even 500 to 1,000 like end customers per month right now. Absolutely insane. So point is, it's all about prioritizing because like one of the things that we found ourselves doing was like we were basically getting caught up and we're in like defense mode the whole time. So if like you're in defense mode, it's hard for you to be proactive and to do the things that like matter the most in the grand scheme of the company building, the company building your team. You're always like responding to customers. One of our differentiators is like we respond in live chat within seconds every single time throughout the day. Like I'll be live chatting with a customer like literally at midnight and like the rest of our team is in there, like, because you can do an internal note and we're talking to each other. Everyone's following along throughout the day. Like, we don't sleep. And that's why value, value, value, give, give, give. At the end of the day, you know, right now you're talking to the founder of the company at 9:00 PM on a Sunday. You know, customers appreciate that because at all hours of the day we're able to talk to customers, able to win customers. But if you're in defense mode, if you're reactive all the time, then you can't actually like spend time on like high-level strategic stuff because you're always like in the trenches doing these little things. So one of the things that we've been focusing on recently is like, let's prioritize what we're going to do with our day so that we can get the most out of it, the biggest bang for our buck. And the things that we're doing that are like smaller tasks, like let's hire for those, let's get someone else, let's outsource those, those smaller like data entry tasks, things like that, so that we can then zoom out. We can do onboarding, we can have a great customer experience, we can focus on product, we can talk to customers and figure out what we need to build because we're talking to customers in order to build the product. We're not just like having the same product and stagnant. We have a bunch of customers that are testing out call flows, phone features, outbound calling, messaging, two-way messaging, automations hooked into CRM in private beta right now. So like those are the The things that I want to focus on is really product, is talking to customers and creating that feedback loop so that then we can kind of like, you know, deliver a beautiful experience product-wise and then also just like customer service-wise to our customers so that then they can deliver better service and win more customers for their business as well. So those are the things that I'm focusing on is prioritizing, but then also systematizing and organizing a lot of the structure of like the organization. The second you make that decision, then you can go on the offense. Every single touchpoint should be documented so that like every single customer has the same experience, similar to when you go into Starbucks. It's like the same experience, same product every single time, no matter if you go to Starbucks in Wichita, Kansas, or Hong Kong. I haven't been to the one in Hong Kong, but— or like New York City, right? It's the same exact experience. You're going to get the same product, that same level of service. And that's what I want with us is like whether you come and go through this rep or this rep or whatever teammate, it's going to be the same, same experience, same product. It's going to be beautiful. So those are things we're focusing on prioritizing, but then systematizing and organizing things that we're doing. Love you guys. Hope you guys following along the journey. If so, comment, subscribe, let me know your feedback. I'm getting people to email me every single day. Anyway, smash the subscribe button, follow along, send me an email, Ryan@Funewagon.com. And thank you so much for coming on our journey as we build this company into a $100 million a year revenue company. I love you guys. We'll see you tomorrow. Peace.
