ACCURATE TELECOM INC. Year Founded: 1989 Core Business: Telecommunications systems and networks Revenue in 1999: $4.5 million Revenue in 2000: $4 million Revenue in 2001: $5 million-plus (projected) Employees in 1999: 37 Employees in 2000: 38 Goal: Hold No. 1 position in customer service for communication challenges Driving Force: Having the best available talent with highest standards of integrity Unhappy with a former boss’ vision of the telecom world, some former employees decided to try to do it right Back in the spring of 1989, K.C. Jones took a long look at the future of the telecommunications business he was working for. He didn’t particularly like what he saw. So, one Friday afternoon, he and colleague Buddy Chancellor left the company, Spectrum Telecom Systems Inc. By Monday morning their own company, Accurate Telecom Inc., was up and running in Studio City. “That Monday was my birthday, and I remember being particularly nervous on my birthday that year,” said Jones. But Jones and Chancellor didn’t stop there. By that fall, the pair had raised enough capital to purchase Spectrum’s customer base a list 10 years in the making and entice all eight of the company’s employees to jump ship. “The owner (of Spectrum) was not interested in feeding the company and growing it,” said Jones, now Accurate’s president and chief executive officer. Chancellor is the company’s vice president. Today, Accurate, working out of much larger quarters in Van Nuys, installs and maintains business telephone systems and networks for roughly 1,300 clients in Southern California, including PETCO, Galpin Motors, Learning Tree University, Miller Nissan and the Motion Picture Association of America. Jeff Boss, systems administrator for Miller Nissan in Van Nuys, said the company has used Accurate for the last eight years. He said Acurate’s products and systems rarely go down or hit major snags. And if there is a problem, he said, the company typically responds to service requests within about an hour. “That’s a very quick turnaround response time in our book,” Boss said. Accurate’s annual revenues were roughly $1.6 million in 1992 and have continued to climb every year, hovering around $4 million the last two years, down only slightly in 2000 to $3.99 million, compared to $4.55 million in 1999. Jones predicts Accurate will surpass the $5 million mark this year. The driving force behind the company’s success, he said, is a commitment to quality customer service. “We think the key to any business is making sure customers are happy with the service they are getting, and for that to happen your employees have to be happy doing what they do,” Jones said. Accurate has 40 employees today, a figure expected to grow to about 47 this year. The company continues to hold a quality service rating in the 90 percentile with T.D. Marketing, sort of the J.D. Power of the telecom industry, and runs its own in-house aggregated quality control checks on a weekly basis. But providing quality products and keeping the number of those products down to a minimum is also a significant part of the customer satisfaction equation. So, while some of its competitors may strive to provide a wide range of products in order to appeal to a broader customer base, Accurate’s systems utilize a core of about three. “We do not and never have been a master of none,” said Jones. Accurate is one of the largest suppliers of products made by Canada-based Mitel and has secured that company’s coveted “Platinum” dealer designation, which allows it to work with and market Mitel Network’s Internet-based products. In 1993, Accurate signed a dealership agreement with Toshiba America Information Systems Inc.’s telecom systems division. Networking systems products come from San Jose-based Cisco Systems. Jack Dean, president of Los Angeles-based Adee Plumbing and Heating, which serves the San Fernando Valley, has used Accurate for a decade. He said his company has always relied on Mitel products and when vendors in the late 1980s started dropping out of sight, he found Accurate. “We hired them to come and do maintenance on our systems and they just did such a fantastic job. When it came time to upgrade our system, we stuck with them,” Dean said. With an average of 50,000 service calls coming across the lines each year, Dean said there is absolutely no room for down time. “In our business, when the phones go down, we are done, we are out of business,” Dean said. Accurate is also an authorized agent for Pacific Bell, so it can provide a one-stop-shopping service for telecom infrastructures for new companies or companies setting up new locations. The Y2K meltdown did impact subsequent annual revenues to some degree, but not because of problems with Accurate products. On the contrary, Jones said, many companies essentially “blew their budgets” preparing for the technological disaster that never really arrived. As a result, they have delayed investing in new Internet-based phone technology that Accurate is now preparing to provide. But all that is about to change, Jones said. “Buyers of new products tend to move to the sidelines when they don’t completely understand what it is, and that affects sales,” Jones said. “But we are starting to see more and more interest from our customers in these products and services now, and I see it as an integral competitive weapon that will set businesses apart.” But how much of that interest might again be shelved with a slowdown in the economy? Not much, according to Jones. “Because we went through the last one and we’ve been through the economic cycle, I know when to hit the accelerator button and when to hit the brakes,” Jones said. “This is also a good time to invest in your company and make those technological changes. And I will be updating our technology and training our employees and preparing my company for the release of this pent-up up demand.”