Undress4Success - Work From Home

Flying old 1920s biplanes, making people happy, working from home in our underwear when we weren’t flying—that’s what we did to keep groceries on the table until a year ago. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, there were a few nightmares involved. In fact, telephone issues were one of the reasons we decided to sell the company. Either that or takes turns in a mental hospital. But we hit on some solutions that might help you work from home.

It would usually start like this:

Ring, ring . . . ,”Hi this is Cash Register Kate at Barnstorming Adventures. Tailspin Tommy and I are up in the air right now, but stand by, and we’ll tell you about our swell vintage biplane and WW2 warbird rides . . . .”

CLICK.

Another potential customer hanging up. We paid big bucks for ads that made them call, and then we let ‘em get away.

When we realized customers were having trouble reaching us, our first approach was to install more phone lines. However, phone jacks are hard to come by on taxiways, where we spent most of our time.

So we added voicemail, hoping it would satisfy callers’ curiosity until we could call them back personally. But with its endless commands sending callers into a message-center abyss, voice mail can be as frustrating as no answer at all.

Well, we thought, maybe a pager might work. Customers could page us whenever they were suddenly possessed by the urge to give us money. But we soon found lots of folks are pager-phobic.

Continuing our search for solutions we sought cellular salvation. In the car, at the airport, in the grocery store–even in the bathroom–we could just flip our phone to stay in touch with everyone, everywhere, all the time. And even if we missed calls, cellular voice mail could snag some of ‘em. But the phone company ads neglect to mention cellular purgatory, where callers aren’t quite connected, but can’t access voicemail, either.

And what about our headache of having to retrieve messages from four phone numbers (two office lines, a cellular line and a pager) that use three different voice-mail systems? Try memorizing four passwords and three sets of instructions, not to mention trying to keep track of which system you happen to be using.

What genius decided the instructions should vary from one system to the next, anyway? More than once we’ve deleted messages from customers by pressing the wrong key. Talk about the thrill of victory and the agony of delete.

By the time we were done brainstorming a solution to our barnstorming dilemma, our telephone system, if you could call it that, was a maze made up of a cellular line (forwarded to the office when necessary); office lines (forwarded to the cellular when necessary); an office ring-over line to accommodate high-volume periods; voice mail for the office lines, cellular line and pager; and the pager number on all voice mail messages (for folks desperate to fly today or tomorrow).

On top of that, we carried the cellular phone everywhere we went–making us real popular at fancy restaurants.

The results? Ring . . . CLICK. Ring . . . CLICK. Aaargh!

Finally, we swallowed our entrepreneurial pride and called for help from the suits at the phone company:

“Hi, I wonder if someone there could help me figure out how to improve my phone system.”

“Sorry,” came the reply, “After 5 p.m. we’re only open to walk-in traffic.”

Great! Even the phone company hasn’t figured out how to do business by telephone.

So we tried an answering service, and as a new company they started out great . . . and became progressively worse. The stress of dealing with their mistakes was almost as bad as handling the calls ouselves.

The we discovered FreedomVoice, a company that offers an amazing suite of communication services. We hate voice mail, but we made it fun (”Please hang on, we’re as bsuy as a one armed wing walker with a wedgy, but we’ll be right with you.”) and informative. We even sexied it up with some sound effects and people loved it! Some would even complain when we answered the phone, believe it or not! In fact, we  had a little problem with  call conversion rates until we discovered people were telling their friends to call just for the fun of it!

So, like everything else to do with running your own business from home, you have to be creative. But you can succeed if you persist.