Ray Pasquale - Founder, CEO and President of Unified Office

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicitor implies shall be extended to W four CY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Kevin helen n believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com and now your host, Kevin Helenn.

0:52 Thanks for joining in again today. I'm Kevin Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV and Radio on W four cy dot com. We are streaming live on talkfour tv dot com. That's the number four, in addition to live on Facebook and that's at Winning Business Radio and of course at YouTube on our channel, and we available in podcast after the live show wherever you get that content again, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Again, wherever you like to go. The mission of winning business radio and TV, as regular viewers and listeners know, is to offer insights and advice to help people avoid the mistakes of others, right to learn best practices, the how tos, the what toos, the what not tos, to be challenged and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others. Consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders and owners, entrepreneurs, people with expertise. Well, every successful person I've ever had a chance to talk to is had some form of failure in their lives and careers.

1:54 So while we all have to keep our knee skin once in a while, I'm driven to keep those scrapes from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history so we don't repeat it. I've spent the better part of my career equipping businesses to grow from solopreneurs to small and medium sized companies all the way up to the Fortune fifty, and I've seen some of those companies win, and to varying degrees, i've seen some of them fail. I've had the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the highest performing people around in with some who probably should have found other professions and my own businesses. I've had lots of success, but some failures too, and I like to think I've learned a lot from those experiences. So sure you're going to hear from me, but mostly you can hear from our guests, those experts, consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders and owners and entrepreneurs. And today's no exception. Today my returning guest is rapist Quality, entrepreneur, founder and president.

2:41 And here's his bio. Rapist Quality is the president and CEO of Unified Office. He spent the last twenty five plus years as an entrepreneurial technology professional. Has extensive sales and customer engineering experience, along with proven management team leadership in dynamic, emergent emerging technology companies. In recent years, he's played a key leadership role in professional and customer services, business development, pre sales, and technical marketing. While at Saunast Networks, a market leader in voice over IP technologies, Ray was a founding member of their service organization services Organization, recruiting many of its most senior members. In fact, from ninety six until ninety nine, Ray was a key technical leader in Sales consultant for Cascade Communications worldwide sales organization, and during his tenure they were purchased by as Send and Assend as a leader in remote access technologies for the Internet market, was subsequently absorbed or subsequently I Can Talk absorbed by Lucent in a merger. Prior to ninety six, Ray was with Digital Equipment Corp. A company excuse me, including positions as Senior Consultant for worldwide network Operations and technical leader and Senior consultant for the Network Products Group.

3:53 Ray's commitments to excellence and ideas were recognized by Digital who received a Customer Satisfaction Award, Storage X Excellence, Yeah, Storage System Excellence Award, and Delta Ideas Recognition and Award. He's attend of the University of Maine. Ray, Welcome to Winning Business Radio and I really appreciate you taking time to be here and how busy. That's good. Good to be here again. And if you mix it in there, some of that was I did a lot of engineering work as well. One of the first people that actually built and the Internet network without actually having touched a router, that ry on the Internet protocol back in those days, those early days back in the late nineties or mid nineties, I should say, when the Internet was finally coming to life. It was being delivered for free on the Unix Berkeley distribution, and I was a digital We had this thing called deck Net that was all rage, and I remember telling people, you know, when something is given away for free, even even as inferior as it might be, people are going to try to use it and lo and behold they did. Well here we are, right, So it's going to be back, Kevin.

5:03 It's been a. While, it has it has now. You're largely self taught. That's true. How does that happen? That's very technical. Well, it turns out that, you know, you don't necessarily have to go to school to be smart. Apparently I in high school, my mom, unbeknownst to me, enrolled me in a experimental program, was a college level program beginning in my sophomore year, which is interesting because I was playing in bands then at nightclubs at the young age of fourteen thirteen years old. That's funny telling me that, Yeah, trying to help my mom pay the bills, divorced mother of three boys, right, but yeah, so there was Those are interesting times. But you know. I did go to University of Maine after that. But my point is, in high school and I graduated. The principal said, you know, Ray, you could have graduated as a junior. You don't need to come back for your senior year. And I said, why is that? You are in an accelerated program that your mom put you in. You to a college level of mathematics. You did all I did? Okay, I slept through half the classes. Apparently I did well enough to graduate.

6:12 So yeah, when I went to you in the University of Maine, I didn't graduate there. But the first mathematics course I took was advanced algebra and something else. I believe it was a mixture of calculus and Trigg. And I said, you gotta be kidding. I had this in high school. Yeah, so yeah. I'm you know. Anyway, so I decided to have children, dropped out, went to work at goat a computer company, and the rest is history. Taught myself by reading things called books. They had these things called libraries back in those days. Strange was there was no googling of anything. But you know, I worked a lot alongside a lot of very very smart people, and you know, in those days to mentor people because you just weren't churning people out of school with these degrees in networking. Again, it was relatively new, but yeah, I know, I'm self taught, did all kinds of cool stuff like digital. I oh him quite a bit a gratitude towards that company. If you wanted to learn and advance, Digital never held you back.

7:22 So did that. And then I went to these things called the startup company because I saw these people driving porsches, for sure, and I saw a digital go out of business. You know, one hundred and fifty seven thousand person company that invented interactive computing could go out of business, and they did call the PC. I remember Ken Olson, God bless him, took us into a meeting at the Mill Mill Cafeteria. Maynard he would take all of the groups through the cafeteria and he had an IBM PC sitting on the table and he said, basically, I'm paraphrasing, go back and do really good stuff at Gordon Bell's VAS platform, because nobody's going to do serious computing on this thing.

8:05 And we walked out of the I remember looking at this guy Amos who was working with me. I said amos, I think we're in trouble, and we were anyway, So that long story short, I was a really big of the networking. I then left and went to Cascade Communications, which was a high flight startup in the Westward area, building ATF and frame relay switches, which was supposed to replace routers in the I said, well, ability out of the router business because ATM is going to kill it. LATM did well. It didn't wipe out the router business, but it did extremely well. And I did very well at Cascade. That's where I really I was a sponge. You want to learn how to be an entrepreneur, you get you work with entrepreneurs and you listen. I was just watching everything they did, emulating the behavior, and all of us went through sales training. By the way, I think I told you this once. Everybody, including the janitor that we actually had a custodian, he went through sales training. Actually, there wasn't anybody in that company that you couldn't talk to.

9:02 The understood why Cascade was in business and what it meant for the industry. That was I got to tell you. When I went in front of I was there for like three or four weeks and it would give you a case study, a fictitious case study, designing network of facts, a fast pack at facts Network nationwide. And here's the budget, right, so you had to work within the budget. And we had a marketing guy and a team of four people, and you went into this big room and they had all these lights and camera. It was really done out. It was very very intimating that the founders and CEO, Dan who was now my biggest investor and best friend and my chairman of the board, was the CEO at Cascade, and they were all looking at you, and you got to get up there and sound intelligent. I'm not so sure I actually sounded better intelligent. In fact, I don't think we won the prize for that. But it was really a good experience and I owe a lot to Cascade.

9:57 Cascade was amazing and Dan, and then we'll wrap this up. You can ask you sorry the questions. But I remember Dan, I worked in professional services there. He founded that group. Right. Oh no, that was a no, that. Was anest So the professional services at Cascade was really an overlay marketing, sales and engineering group. So if engineering was too busy to implement a feature, we would do it. If we were too busy doing no marketing was too busy, we would chip in and do marketing and so on. And I helped build a demonstration laboratory that used. In the very early days of internet television, a company called Precept out of California had an IPTV streamer. It was the first of its kind, and I remember calling the CEO and she let me. She gave me a free copy of it, and I would use that to demonstrate quality of service by playing a CNBC interview of Dan on squad box, and I'd put it up on three screens and then I would introduce network and gestion, and so all three screens would go bad, and then I would go ahead and lift a screen up at a time into an elevated priority and that would work fine, and the other two was still degraded. And that became a visual demonstration of quality of service, which up until then was just a belief that you had to have right.

11:19 But in any event, I remember Dan asking me, Hey, Ray, I like to introduce you to the CEO of Chipcom A three Com rather three Colm was a big network manufacturer back in the late nineties, and I'd like you to you know, give him a tour of Cascade and tell them all the good things that we do. And I'm like, okay, all right. So I would do that, and then, you know, two or three weeks later, Damn would come to me and say, Hey, Ray, this is Mari Edgebob. He's the CEO of a Send Communications in California. Did you take him around, introduce me to the company, tell him why we're important and all that. I'm like, okay, another CEO? Really, what am I doing? And little did I know that a couple of months later we get bought by Assent. So I said, oh, okay, that's all that one I was up to. Yeah, but that that was very empowering to be the CEO of this Cascade had that kind of faith in me. You know, this professional services guy right to you know, spend time with these CEOs, both of which were intending to purchase Cascade.

12:26 I didn't know that at the time. I'm glad I didn't know that, but that was very empowering for me. And Dan did a lot of those things, and so it was a very special company. And the Assent acquisition, of course, and then loosened twenty four billion dollars year. Yeah, unbelievable. Made some very strong friends, got good relationships to this day. But you know several of the executives, In fact, one of them has become a very good customer of mine very early. So yeah, that's kind of the And then the Sonus Networks the Voice thing. I knew nothing about Voice except I didn't like answering the phone after eight o'clock at night. That was an interesting play in the market that we took that public of two thousand. I got there, it was about a year old. They already had probably fifty people something like that, maybe a little bit more, working off of Series A Venture and Hassan, who is the CEO, brought me over from then lucent.

13:24 Hassan was the VP of a generic Cascade. They just come over here and do your thing. Let's copy what Cascade did. Ray and helped me build out the rest of the company, and then took a public. Went through everything you could possibly go through, including Starbines, Oxley Hell and all kinds of things, so that you learn a lot of what not to do in business. I think, and I tell. People, I've got a lot of the questions. Yeah, founding this company was really based on my experience at Sanas when a lot of the void companies came into being, and in those days, Kevin voiceover IP wasn't intended to be an innovative platform. The play by the venture capitalists were to build an inexpensive BBX, so prior to voiceover IP.

14:18 ABX for the listeners and viewers, is a box for phones, right right. It makes phones ring, and the wires on top of these phone calls would split into twenty four smaller wires. Each one would connect to a PBX and that would run the phone system for a company private brank branch exchange. I have no idea why they named it that, but a computer that makes phone calls and those things were really expensive. You would spend for a small office two hundred and fifty thousand dollars easily along comes IP enabled voice, putting it on small routers and you know servers for a fraction of that, and so it was really priced disruption with a little bit of innovation. You know, visual voicemail is becoming a thing in those days whatnot. And so anyway, yeah, taking the company, helping a ticket public, being part of that process was really amazing. And then the voice or IP companies that came into being really didn't have the quality and reliability built in.

15:19 All right, pause, right there, let's get back to quality. But we're going to take our first commercial. We just be back in about sixty seconds. Everybody will be back with rapist quality, unified office excellently. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helenet on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. Best in Wealth Management is family owned for two generations. They take pride in thoughtful financial planning and wealth management with a family feel for your closely health family business.

16:01 Best in Wealth Management focuses on deep planning. Integrating your business planning with personal tay will help put your money to work and your mind at ease. Go to Bestinwealthmanagement dot com for more information. Advisory services offered through Commonwealth Financial Network, a registered investment advisor. Join the best Family and let our family advise your family. That's Bestinwealthmanagement dot com for your complementary initial consultation. Have you ever dreamt of being on the radio, Well, now is your chance. Be a radio show guest on the number one ranked Internet radio station and promote you and your business for free. Yes you heard it, free business advertising right here on W fourcy dot com. Call five six one five zero six four zero three one now to get booked on one of our shows. That's five six one five zero six four zero three one.

16:57 Get your free advertising now. And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helena, presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helena. We're back with Rapist Quality, founder, CEO and president of Unified Office. So take us back to Quality go from there, because that's going to take us to where you are now. Yeah. So, you know, back in those days, there was a lot of shoppiness, right. It still is through a large degree a lot of the cloud providers. For example, the idea behind Void in those days was let's put a plastic PBX in the cloud someplace in the United States and then we'll ship plastic phones through people's desktops and you won't need any on premise equipment. In those days, the PBX was an on premise device right right, And so now putting it in the cloud, now you'll be able to be able to ambergate thousands of people in that one platform instead of just twenty five to thirty.

18:05 But there is no Obviously Internet wasn't built for real time data. It was basically built for the military best effort to built or survived by the way, right, That was the whole idea behind it. It's survivability. Uh. And so the quality thing was you know on you know in the early days, and I could try to explain how I think it works today when you watch you know, Netflix is basically they've all over engineered networks. Even as bandwidth has become basically free. It's not exactly the width of the highway. If you've been to California, you've driven to the four wal five is a pretty wide highway, but it's always stopped right. So the quality of the connections were always uh the key to offering you know, reliable high quality voice or video, but it never quite worked in practice. So I decided in late two thousand and eight or so nine whenever that I was going to go off leave Sonus and build I called it pulling a Steve Jobs. I was going to reinvent voice over IP so that it had the same cost characteristics. It was going to be inexpensive, but it would work and it would work with extreme reliability and extreme quality. And once I figured out how to do that, and that took a two or three years of engineering in patent development, we patented something called highest quality Routing,

19:36 which is having been a veteran of early day routing protocols in the Internet, Tom and I my CTO, we worked together at Network Engineering a deck. We were there for the early days of Internet protocol development, and so we borrowed concepts from the data protocols that we helped implement and applied that to voice networking. So we're able to build a nationwide voice network out of virtual servers with companies like backs face go Daddy's another type of company where you can rent a part of a server without buying the whole thing, so your input costs are quite low and you're able to pass that along to your customers. And the other thing is something called a SIP trunk, if anybody wants to know what they are.

20:27 The old days, if you had an on premise PBX made by Loosen, for example, you had to pull a black cable from the telephone pole into your office and plug that in to the PBX, and that's what would carry your voice. When the Internet came that kind of you got an Internet connection which carried data. Voices now become data, just like web browsing. They built a software extrapolation of that hardware cable and called it a SIP trunk. SIP not for drinking. It stood for a session. It stands for Session Interconnect Protocol, which means build me a voice session over the Internet. It's like dialing numbers. And most boid companies even today today require SIP trunking. You need to buy a SIP trunk for your business before you put voipe on it. Well, that's an added cost, and some of those trunks can be They range between fifty one hundred bucks a month. That's before you pay me to be your voice provider. We engineered this thing called HRP that got rid of that notion. We don't need SIP trunks. You won't be as a customer. You will not need to buy one of those, and so your cost goes to zero from whatever they were charging.

21:50 So that was a big deal. And reliability though, the reliability and building a nationwide interconnected network of rack space, virtual servers and other companies. And this is geographically diverse. They're all sort of fully duplex and best together, which is it's a Faull tolerant network. It it can survive the failure of several components. And so that's the always available voice aspect of HQRP that you also enjoy as a basic voice customer. So we took care of all that, and so that invention brought you the quality and reliability of the old fashioned phone network on your Internet. And you don't have to buy special circuits to get this. To do this, you could buy just a simple circuit from Comcast, like you would feel home, and you can run the unified Officer with that and it works perfectly fine.

22:39 So that was step one. Step two is how do I then make voice become more valuable? Well what do you mean by that? Right? Well, it's taken for granted or it was. Well, yeah, I mean it still kind of is until it doesn't work. When you go to pick up the phone to call the fire department and you get no dial tone, then it's important to you. Right, Nobody emails the fire department saying my house is on fire, or the police department, you know, somebody's breaking your home. But having said that, what I mean by more valuable is communications is valuable. But the idea of void in the early days was a lot of marketing that went out and said we're going to make this cheap for you, and John Chambers and so co said, in fact, we're going to make this free. So that dreaded f word free became part of the nomenclature that everybody said, I shouldn't have to pay for voice, it should be free. Well, I don't know about you, but you've been here. I don't have people here that don't work for They all get paid, right, they get salaries, they get benefice to make sure that that free network or sort of free is always up and running and is there when you need it. Now, how do you make it valuable? We basically we know all about your digital life. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, everybody.

24:02 They've been data mining all your key strokes. You're purchasing habits, you're viewing habits, Netflix, Hulu to be all these things. But really nobody has done this with conversations. Now, when I say data mind that that's sort of pejorative. Term, and I don't mean it to be in this context. So what I wanted to try to do, and we've done that really very successfully here was build a suite of analytics. In the early days, we built and we still build it, I said, but after HQRP became a thing, then it makes sense now to innovate on top of that. Intelligent applications. These are drag and drop or pre built applications that required no engineering expertise on behalf of our customers.

24:51 The first incarnation of that was something we call Visual Performance Suite. It runs on a big screen television and monitor with speakers. A lot of our pizza customers use this. It's not just for pizza customers, Dominos being one of our largest customers. But that application is going to ask you to talk about that. That's an easy to understand application for the audience. Yeah, I mean, basically, it's a visual coach. It shows you all the people that are dialing in. It shows you whether they're a supervisor, manager, a driver, whether you're an MVP returning customer. Right, you'll see that and you'll hear it. But we basically our software will actually answer the phones for you and engage the customer and conversation by playing your marketing messaging meanwhile, so you know we're engaging you and saying, hey, today you can buy three pieces for the price of one. Please hang on while somebody and then somebody will have to pick up the phone and take your order eventually. But the interesting part that eventually is that this young lady in Orlando has told me that with unified office we're way more productive.

26:00 And she and said, we increased her yield yield. How do we increase your yield? Because Ray, I don't have to stop and pick the phone up. I can continue to make the previous pizza order. Well, you guys are playing my marketing messaging. I get it in the oven. Then I can take the call. And so you multiply that times four or five workers, and you can see where a yield makes sense there. So they can let me interject, they can see each caller yep, and they can know how long they've been on hold, and they can actually in some cases no ordering history. You'll know, well you all know their ordering history, yet, do you. Uh? We do integrate with your point of sales system. So that's douaba. But you know the idea is that you know, we show you, we show the workers who's calling in. We actually show them what language they speak, so that somebody that calls in and speaks front of Spanish, you'll know that ahead of time, so somebody that happens to speak that language in the store can pick up the call and take it. You also know things like drivers, where are the drivers? You can see in one lower corter into the screen, the drive osity application that shows you where all the delivery drivers are at that moment in time and your jurisdiction. You'll also get these speedometers that score the behavior of the business.

27:19 And you don't get any busy busy signals from unified Office. You never lose no such thing as a busy signal. We're going to drive and deliver all the calls that you can generate inbound demand for. And so the combination of us so afterare answering the phones for you and showing you the real time analytics that allows you, as an owner or an operator to make real time adjustments and your business often results an increased revenue without anything else happening. Just by putting unified office. We've had one, only or two of these independent guys call us within a week after implementation of our platform, saying, you guys are amazing. I need to tell the world about you.

28:02 You drove my revenues north of thirty five percent the first week we turned you on. That's incredible. Now. I remember asking one of these folks, I'm a little dumb here, what's a piece of shop like you guys do on an annual basis? I really I didn't know. He said, well, I'll tell you what we do. Every week. We do about forty five thousand dollars a week. Forty five thousand a week. Yep, most of that over two nights. You're claiming we added thirty to thirty five percent. Absolutely, In fact, we had to redesign our kitchen around your display. So I looked at my CFO, who was with me. We were having a slice of piece for lunch. They didn't know who you were. By the way, we didn't, you know, we're not out there with our faces in.

28:47 And they said, Peter, ten percent of forty five that's forty thirty percent, fourteen thousand bucks a week. They paid for their entire four years contract in a few nights. Yeah. Right, So I remember saying to Peter, we're not charging enough of this platform anyway. That that's the unintended side effect of this. I didn't build it to generate wherever, but it just so happens it does. And so that was the underpinnings of our first incarnation of visual analytics. Now you take an apply artificial intelligence. Yeah, this is where it gets cool to this. And we've done a couple of things with AI, one of which is our most recent announcement is something called easy Create IQ. So what is that. It's a drag and drop interface. You can use your iPad, you can use your mouth and your laptop. Basically there's a palette with some widgets and this widget might say sentiment analysis.

29:50 That was the first product that we announced several years ago. Was AI wasn't a thing back then when we first introduced the idea ear of sentiment detection in phone calls, which was we just simply wanted to say, hey, Kevin, you need to take it down a notch through some we can tell that you're starting to aggravate the customer because you know whatever. It was almost like real time voice for coaching. So but you could look at these recorded calls after the fact and determine as an owner operator where you needed to do training. You can see how the staff was or the customers were abusing the staff potentially.

30:31 And let's pause, let's pause on that. Prior to that, those that had the budget and the willingness or somebody on staff, they'd have to mystery shop. They have to listen to those recordings or calling themselves. Very inefficient, very time consuming, costly as well. Oh that's right, that's right. You had to do this manually. And that was just a sampling versus now they can hear or the system can every call. Everything, every single call is analyzed and in real time you're given information you can you can use. Right, So that's that's a good point by you. And I should probably know this. I do know it, but I often take it for granted. And so there's a lot of things. This is an AI generally I platform. You can build all kinds of AI services with the easy Create. You can build an agent. You're an agent. Now, you know, we're not here to replace workers or people. Our philosophy around AI is to build safe AI for businesses. And what I mean by that is, you know a lot of people really don't understand AI hallucinations and the the trouble these things. Remember, this is a synthetic device, it's not a human and generative AI in particular was built to guess the next statistically probably probable next word and a sentence, not accuracy or truth. And so it takes a lot of work for us, and we're an engineer income to maximize the reliability of the information that you're

32:06 seeing and to eliminate as much as possible hallucinations. And I really can't get into it in this interview how we do this. It's very complicated work. One of the fellows that works for us came from Amazon's and worked on Amazon's Alexa platform. It's got a really rich history in AI. Tom My CTOs done machine learning for most of his life. I've got a little bit of everything in me. And so this this is, you know, not your average ordinary small voice over IP company. In fact, we're not really small. And so now you know, we've given you the opportunity to drag and drop your own AI services using your fingers, not having to hire an engineer.

32:54 Right, it doesn't this is not a technical thing. This is a if somebody can use what's an analogy. They can use pace can use them. If you can use a mouse, there you go, right, you can you can design your own services, and I don't know what they might be. For a lawyer, they might be very different than a piece of shop operator, than a car dealer. One of those is sentiment detections. There's there's several others, and we're always adding pre built widgets that you can drag and drop. And for example, call inbound call coming. So you grab inbound call, you connect it to a sentiment a transcription engine transcribe the call, and then there's outputs. If it's transcribed, send it to sentiment detection box. You drag a line to that and out of the detection blox, sentiment says if it was a good call, go this way.

33:43 If it was a negative call, send a text message and an email immediately to the following email and phone addresses, and you know, four or five blocks and you hit apply and you've created a service that will do these things. And so you go from that to coaching. You mentioned scoring calls. I think the early days of you know, it's one of our largest operators of dominance franchise orders. He's got I think well over one hundred stores by now. He had to go manually cherry pick a handful of calls every week, call his stores a c to make sure that their customer service reps were were portraying the company properly. And that's how he knew where to go spend his time in coaching and whatnot. So now you've got unified office with the easy creat a qute with their coaching plug in, which we call Engage IQ. That plug in, pre built will do the scoring for you.

34:42 You answer a few questions, right, the configuration is relatively easy to do, and you hit apply and go and we will score all the conversations taking place in your footprint, thousands of them by the hour, you know, the day, what have you. And so that's a very big deal, right, you didn't have that kind of instrumentation before. If you're a pilot, you can appreciate the old When I took flying lessons in these old trainers, these piper cubs, they had steam gages. These things are brutal, right, and then you look at a garment cockpit today it's fully instrumental.

35:23 It's like it's so much easier. And so by providing you with the you know, giving you as a pilot. The information at your fingertips to run your business is basically what we do. All right, let's pause right there, Ray, we're going to take our last commercial. We'll be right back with rapist quality. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helenet on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. Bestian Wealth Management is family owned for two generations. They take pride in thoughtful financial planning and wealth management with a family feel for your closely held family business. Best in Wealth Management focuses on deep planning, integrating your business planning with personal They will help put your money to work and your mind at ease. Go to Bestianwealthmanagement dot com for more information. Advisory service is offered through Commonwealth Financial Network, a registered investment advisor. Join the best and family and let our family advise your family. That's Bestinwealthmanagement dot com for your complementary initial consultation.

36:39 The yp dot com website is your local search engine. If you're looking for a good restaurant, it can help you find the right one nearby with ratings and reviews, or if your car breaks down, you can use the YP app to find the closest repair shop. Or maybe you're just looking for something to do on a Friday night. While it has great local coupons for all sorts of things in your area, no matter what, when or where. If you're looking for something, YP Local Search can help you find it. So go to yp dot com or download the app to search local, find local, and save local. And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helen.

37:32 Ray. You like to say we're not a phone company, and you also like to remind people that our potential customers don't know what they don't know. So why do people need analytics? What do they need? What you bring to the table and they don't even know they need it. You don't know you need it till you see it, right, You've never listened to these conversations, You've taken them for granted. And half the time most people react to when somebody when a customer walks in and starts yelling at you right, what do you do your workers swore at me last night or whatever the case may be. Right, you sort of in your conversational world, you're flying blind. By using unified offices, pre built or build your own apps, you're going to be able to avoid these one star Google reviews.

38:15 You're going to be able to avoid the angry customer to a large degree. And we can't prevent one hundred percent of it. Yeah, they would never know if they lost to. You never know. You don't see anything right, and so by giving you that's why I'm like, we've given you this airplane, a full cockpit of instrumentation, and we've made it easy to look at, easy to digest. And furthermore, because of the noise and the hype in the AI market, then there's a lot of noise, the signal is very faint. Still. We're platform agnostic, in other words, cloud anthropic cursory, I chat GBT from open Ai. Nay, these guys end up not being in business one day or God for something happens with pricing, which happens almost every other day. It's a changing environment there. This is there's going to be a shakeout. We're outside of that, right, we're orbiting that that structure, and so we're able to tolerate the failure of any one of these companies and not even the failure of it the changing business models. Access restrictions recently occurred with Claude Solanthropic. There was proper the government. Yeah right, yeah, well the government, that's one thing. That's another, that's another issue.

39:38 You've got other issues regarding privacy. You've got my most recent issue where somebody was taught how to use a gun, how to load it in the best time of day to shoot at somebody. And I think it was a high school or a college in Florida. There's all these things happening again, there's a shakeout coming, but in my customers should know that we are outside of that. And there's lots and lots of companies around the world now that build their wrong language models that have transcription engines are becoming more and more open source, i Eate less proprietary, which means the price gets lower. And I believe that the all this hype that you're hearing about and we need nuclear power plants to generate these powerful data centers, that's all starting to move to the edge and I would say, what the next five years, it's all going to be at the edge of the network and by the time these power these data centers are ready, they won't be needed. So, you know, we do protect our customers from that as much as we can. So there are companies that don't do that, that're in the belly of the beast, and god forbid, something doesn't happen to one of these Even one feature added over a weekend can put some of these companies out of business. I'm not going to name them, but I know who they are.

40:56 So we try to do the best we can to limit the damage that the dot calm like burst, Yeah, burst, We'll do. So you're you're in verticals like quick serf, quick serve restaurants, Domino spiez of places reverting us. We're a vertically focused company, right, h focus on a handful of verticals. Full service restaurants, mental, full service cagial practices, medical, allied hospitality, auto dealer's wellness. Talk about some of the examples like why would a dental practice need this? You know, some of these are these features that we implement a pretty arcane on the surface, but when you think about it, look at the dental practice with a lot of people. We have one of the largest ones in New England and Boston. As a customer, right, I think there's like one hundred people that work there. They pick up the phone, Hey Kevin, how are you Hey?

41:51 It looks like you needed to a flint me for your daughter. Okay. Oh, by the way, you always one hundred and fifty dollars, hope. I got to put you on hold, covin hold on. I put you on hold. Somebody else in the office picks it up prior to you unified office, they're going to have to rediscover you again. Who's this Kevin? What can I do for you? I just had this conversation. We preserve that context, so if somebody else picks up the call, they already know what you've gone through. They already know that you one hundred and fifty bucks and you want to make it a point for the daughter. So we do those kinds of things, and we actually give them the same instrumentation for their business practice as we give to everybody else. Engage IQ. We can look at your recorded calls. We can give you a classify the data that we see in those calls.

42:34 You might have patients calling and trying to enlighten you to a new procedure they saw recently or heard about that you didn't know about. So it's a two way sort of It benefits both the client, the patient and the doctor in the practice. So again it's not ever having looked at conversational information, you have no idea what has taken place over the voice channel of your practice. Look, they all get the same instrumentation, they all get the same classifications. The data is different for each of these verticals. But you know, it's one of those things where you know, we run discovery mode for example, when you first put us in, we're going to sit there and just look, and then we're going to tell you this is what we found. And largely what we'll be able to do.

43:22 What we're working on right now is to actually distill that pie chart, which is very structured, but there's still a lot of wedges, so it's still kind of noisy Visually. What we're going to do is provide the four or five top things that we think you need to focus on, and we're going to make recommendations as to how to remediate this with a button that will say, by the way, if you want to see all the rest of the pie chart. Click here. You're going to explode the whole thing. The idea is to take that. We're going to do all a lot of the thinking for you so that you don't We don't want to give you more work to do. We're trying to take work away from you and make your life as easy as possible in this noisy, noisy, fast changing world. That's all we do here. Every feature we implement, every product we build, is completely focused on making your life easier and more giving you the information that you've not had before, and in helping you process it so that you benefit from it, you and your your patients or your a lotto customers or what have you.

44:22 Hotel operators, you have a new new big one coming online soon tell us. Big Use came online a week and a half ago. Nice. Uh, it's in Martha's vineyard. And what we developed several years ago for the hotel industry was something called I called it an ingram called sierge. It's basically a tablet uh, and it's it could be just a straight tablet and you can talk to this microphone on it, or you can grab a tablet with as a handset and buy that from our distributors. Uh. And the idea was the return passive revenue generation to the hotel rooms. How would they do that? These would have the album would have tiles, will have tiles on it. Each one of those tiles can be sold to a local area of business, right to advertise a restaurant, vicecol rental shop. Who knows what.

45:12 It's going to replace this? I think this is funny. It's going to replace the photocopy, photocopy photocopied list. Yeah, a piece of paper. That's they're not getting any even thank you from really referring. So you're getting paid to carry in all one hundred and ten rooms, not ad right, And I don't know how much you guys, you know the marketing teams will charge for it. It's up to them. But the whole notion is you can touch that tile and you can either order food, let's say, or make a reservation from that device. You can check and check out, you can order supply for the room. We've even got you've been here, you've seen the robot in our lobby. We've integrated with robots for the hotel operators that need help in other words, they don't have a lot of humans.

45:57 I go to a lot of hotels. There are a lot of those, actually. Right, So the WATTS is to help maximize the housekeeping staff to do deliveries to the rooms of certain products. But after long story short, yeah, so it helps. It helps the hotel operators become more productive. We integrate with their prime, their PMS systems, so that we can when you say I need a shampoo of the room, hit go. We'll integrate with their messaging system if they have but if they don't happen, we will use our messaging system to look at the nearest worker that can satisfy that request. You'll also get in room dining, you won't get. Uh.

46:41 Here's what I saw recently, which game of the idea of Disney, a big hotel and Disney. You want to eat in your room, you want to order room service, You make a phone call. The kitchen can't take the call. This thing went over to a point of sale printer at the bar, and I was watching the paper just spew onto the floor, and I asked the bar, I said, what's that goes? Oh, that's room service orders that the kitchen can't take because they're too busy. I said, but it's on the floor. He goes, yeah, I can't take it either. People were coming up to the bar screaming at this guy. Yeah, this is like you know, seven or eight years ago, and I said, you know what, I can fix this. So again, you know, part of what we do is we observe, We listen and we observe, and we build that kind of deterministic structure into our product.

47:27 Street For the hotel operators that says that won't happen, We're going to route those calls. We give you an intelligent routing application that it's easy to implement on your own. That ensure is that somebody is going to get that order that will not go to the floor off a point to sell printer. So again, I you you know, we can lead a horse to water, but we can't make it a mule. But we're going to give you every opportunity to maximize the potential of your business. There's no excuses with unified office, and so by being vertically focused, we're able to understand the pain points of each of these verticals exactly and then build those products that are important in Germane to them.

48:11 All right, one more topic. We're almost out of time. You offer a partnership program as well, where example would be a managed service provider, an IT company who's in front of the same audience. Often they can carry our solutions in their suite. Talk about that, so they can. So we're a channels or a channel basically a channels based company, right, And to your point, and these guys are out there, these I people in particular, they don't have much to offer, right, They're offering plain old vanilla. They just have a phone right, right, and many of them do. Right. And a lot of a lot of businesses today don't want to deal with multiple IT companies, right. They want one one person to sell everything for them. Right. So you know a lot of our partners, before Unified Office came on the scene, for them, they would either drop voice because it was problematic. It was the quality was horrible and so it was hurting their practice. Well, that prevented them from going and answering a lot of our fees and said you must also offer voice. Yeah, So by combining Unified Office with your I platform, they're able to open and we're able to help them open up new markets together. Right, And you know, now they're relevant.

49:21 They're offering something that's life changing for their customers that up until now it's just been cheap voice, cheap voice. Right, right, It really is so different. I hope we got that point across. It really is so different. And that partner can develop a recurring revenue stream. Recurring revenue stream, that's right, everything every month they'll get paid as long as they get a customer. And we asked them to do some Tier one work and by building if they want, they can also monetize the AI platform by building those easy create services. Or their costs, well, they could do that. So that's a professional service that they're able to offer should the customer decide they don't want that responsibility. So yeah, I know it's a great platform, not because I built the company, but it's just it's an amazing company that there's so much more that we do, and you know, from talking to me, I sometimes forget to talk about these things, and I'm used to it because I'm here every day, right, and I forget that it's, you know, such an important company, especially in today and the AI storm that we're all sort of trying to navigate our way through.

50:26 So all right, last two questions, who in the viewing and listen listening audiences should reach out and why? And the second is the best way for people to get in touch. Look at the crawl it's coming in a second. Let's start with that. Who should reach out to you or anybody, your teammate. A reseller, you know, an IT shop, a current legacy phone system reseller. They want to be part of this new world right end users as well. So we also sell direct. And the reason we want we want to sell direct is because we don't we can't identify every MSP that might be out there. We'll learn who their I T shop is and then and then get a hold of the I shop and make, you know, help them become a reseller, right, and so it works in both directions. So Unified Office dot com there's easy contact.

51:12 Those forums on the website that's the easiest way to do it. Are yours. I'm five eight nine thirty seven hundred fat numbers out there as well. Til the bittle hold of ken, you'll get a hold of the lory in the team and you'll be well taken care of. Sounds good, DJ, All right, so listen, thank you so much for giving of your time. I appreciate it. I know the audiences will appreciate this, and I appreciate you good. Thanks for having me, Thank you, and. Thanks everybody for watching and listening. This is a show about business, business success, business challenges. If you've got sixer excuse me concerns about the sales effectiveness of your company, whether you're small or large or somewhere in the middle, give me a call, well, reach out to me. That's Kevin at Winning Business Radio dot com uh one of my many email addresses. We're Winning in corporated part of Sandler Training. We develop sales people, sale and sales teams into high achievers and sales leaders into true coaches and mentors. Hey, we're not a fit for everybody, but maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you again to one our engineer and producer for another job well done. Be sure to join us next Monday, May fourth, when my guests will be Erica Wasserman, founder of your Financial Therapist. Until then, this is Kevin Helen.

52:23 In You've been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host Kevin Helen. If you missed any part of this episode, the podcast is available on Top four Podcasting and iHeartRadio. For more information and questions, go to Winning Business Radio dot com or check us out on social media. Tune in again next week and every Monday at four pm Eastern Time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on W four CY Radio W four cy dot com. Until then, let's succeed where others have failed and win in business with Kevin helen In and Winning Business Radio M