TelePacific Monthly
Looking Forward, Looking Back
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To commemorate TelePacific’s 10th anniversary this year, we conducted a question and answer session with Dick Jalkut, company CEO and President, and David Glickman, TelePacific founder and a member of its Board of Directors. They spoke about TelePacific’s humble beginnings, where the company is headed and what the future might hold for the telecommunications industry. Editor: Can you tell us the story behind how TelePacific David: After the Telecom Act of 1996 took effect, I saw an opportunity to provide better service than the incumbents were providing to businesses in California. When we were on Wall Street raising money, people who had hundreds of millions of dollars to invest asked how we were planning to complete with companies that had been in business for 100 years and I said, “It’s simple—we will answer the phone when a customer calls and show up when we say we will.” They were blown away at that simple prospect. I wanted to focus on a geographic area to ensure quality service, so we picked California and Las Vegas, where 15 percent of the U.S. population is located. And I assembled a team of experienced professionals to build our network, which is now larger than AT&T or Verizon’s networks in California. Editor: Wow...that’s quite a story! And what were your goals when you founded TelePacific 10 years ago? David: I really wanted to prove that we could be a competitive phone company and offer better service and prices. I also wanted to make sure customers had access to the executive team. That was a huge selling point when I was signing up customers, because the average SMB could never get an executive of Pac Bell or Verizon on the phone. Customers will always be able to do that at TelePacific. Dick: That’s something that has always been true: if I’m in the office, I’ll take the call and if I’m not, I will return it as soon as possible. Every member of our executive team is available to customers and that’s really unique, not just in our industry, but in the business world in general. David: The biggest issue for me personally was really investing in the right team that could offer 99.999% reliability. That translates to about 5 minutes of downtime a year, which is very important when offering local service. We went out of our way to have the highest and best reliability we could—and still do. |
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