From the time Paul Roper first thought about starting Proper Placement, his vision was to create a virtual company. As president and CEO of the firm, which helps individual business professionals market and advertise their businesses online, he knew that going virtual would allow him to tap into a broader base of experts than he could find locally. And that it would help him reduce overhead – a critical consideration for any start-up.

 

Yet he was also concerned about the impression of having multiple phone numbers with no central virtual receptionist would leave on customers. Fortunately, as he launched his business, so did another company – my1voice, a virtual phone service for small businesses that allows virtual companies to unite widespread offices under a single phone number and feature set.

 

“Having multiple, individual phone numbers in different area codes or with different exchanges would make us look rather unprofessional,” Roper said. “Our clients would be investing what they considered to be a lot of money with us, so we needed to make sure they felt comfortable in doing so.”

 

my1voice solved that issue by providing the features associated with corporate phone systems – such as a virtual receptionist with a professionally-recorded greeting, voicemail, conference calling, call forwarding and more – without the need to purchase any special equipment. Yet since it is provided as an outside service, it also does things those large corporate systems cannot – including allowing Roper to assign extensions to all 17 of his employees regardless of where they live or work.

 

One of the first things Roper did after signing up for the my1voice service was to use the online control console to establish formal business hours. During business hours, when a call comes in the virtual receptionist helps direct it to the proper extension. After business hours, the message changes to let callers know the “office” is closed and direct them to voicemail.

 

Roper also showed all employees how to use the console for their individual extensions so they could set them up to ring an office phone, forward the call to a home or mobile phone, or even go directly to voicemail. Roper has his personal extension forward calls to his mobile phone after hours to make him more accessible to clients. He also has voicemail messages forwarded to his email account.

 

“We are in a service business, and so are our clients,” he said. “They depend on us to stay on top of things. Since some of our people are out in the field a lot, having voicemail messages funnel in to email is a failsafe to make sure any urgent client requests or questions are handled quickly.”

 

Because the whole search engine business is still a mystery to many, particularly small service providers, Roper says that Proper Placement is a relationship-oriented business. Many of the questions clients ask can’t be answered on a Web site or through an FAQ sheet, making phone conversations involving one or more team members that much more important. In the end, however, it’s the ability to take a disparate, virtual company and make it into a single unit that’s key.

 

“Everyone is amazed that there is a phone service that works like this,” Roper said. “If we didn’t have it we wouldn’t feel as connected and whole as a company. With my1voice we can be a very professional, service-oriented company while still allowing people to work where they’re comfortable. It’s really enabled us to achieve the vision we set out in the beginning.”