Finding the Right Business

By Gary Pudles

I’ve been asked a number of times how I got into the telephone answering service and call center business.  Most people are surprised to learn that I had little significant call center experience when I bought my first telephone answering service in July 1998.  In fact, other than going through Sprint Spectrum’s agent training with the start-up wireless company I worked for, I had never worked in a call center.

In 1997 and 1998, I decided that I wanted to run my own business.  Over the first ten years of my career, I had worked for other people and knew that I was ready to forge a path of my own.  My first thought was that I would have to start something from scratch, to come up with some great idea that was new or better than businesses that were out there.  Every week, I would meet with my friend Leslie at a coffee shop in Manyunk (a part of Philadelphia), and we would brainstorm about ideas that we thought could be big. 

At one of those meetings, I confessed that I was worried about starting my own business because I had a family to feed, and I wasn’t sure I had enough money to support them while I built my business big enough to create a salary for myself.  As a result of those discussions, I realized that I would either have to start a business that could get early investment (venture capital) or that I would have to purchase an existing business with strong cash flows that would be strong enough to turn my savings into current income.

With this realization, I went on the Internet to find an existing business to buy.  I was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer number of opportunities.  Restaurants, retail, cleaning, franchises, and so forth – the list and types of opportunities were staggering.  Plus, there were hundreds of Websites dedicated to business opportunities and businesses for sale. 

This is when I had my brainstorm.  I listed everything I might want in a business.  I liked businesses with recurring revenue, heavy in communications technology (particularly telecom), where I could manage people, and where the company focused on selling its services to other businesses. 

I also wrote down the kinds of businesses I didn’t like.  I didn’t want to own a restaurant because it is hard to do well in that industry.  Owning a retail shop wasn’t in the cards because of the risk involved in picking the right inventory.  In addition, my father-in-law at the time was a retailer, and he continually told me how tough it was to be successful.  There were other things on the list, but I think you get the point.

With these lists in hand, I went back to the Internet and matched the businesses for sale with my list, eventually concluding that the telephone answering service and call center business was for me.  Today, because of my small amount of preplanning, I now own and operate a business that I really enjoy and which continues to interest me every day.

Gary Pudles is CEO of AnswerNet.                [download issue]