Reflections of a Call Center Owner

I don't think that anyone that is in the call center industry sat there as a kid and thought - I think I will grow up and work in a call center. Through out my career, it seemed that everyone I met, wound up in the industry through some back channel.

I have a friend who is a veteran of the call center industry and he jokes that once you get into the call center industry, you can't escape. We laugh, because we both have tried to leave the industry behind us several times, but we keep coming back to it.

My background was a civil engineer. I actually worked for a few years as a civil engineer. One of the things that I loved, was the process of building something that didn't exist before. That was one thing that really surprised me about starting a call center - the immense satisfaction of building something of value that didn't exist before, except in my mind.

I started the call center because I knew a little bit about the industry and I knew the key numbers that I had to control to make it profitable. I had worked at a Market Research Survey House during college and I worked in the data center as well as helped with the books. I really got to understand the telecommunications requirements, the importance of watching labor and telcom costs and how to make money at the business.

I didn't start the call center because I was in love with the business - it just was a business that I knew. And I was in love with the idea of running my own business and having that freedom to create, to make mistakes, to become enriched, and most importantly, to learn. Above all else, I have the most incredible education. Sometime the education was incredibly expensive, enough to put a whole class of High School Seniors through Harvard it seemed, but other times the rewards were immeasurable.

So now, I have sold my call center and I am out of the business. Yet, I still publish a website called

http://www.freecallcenterquotes.com

that provides a lot of information for potential call center clients as well as information of the vertical industries served by the call center industry.

Overtime, I hope to give an overview of the types of work we performed, some of the lessons learned, and share some of that hard fought education that I have picked up along the way. Some days we were brilliant, some days we bumbled along, but we had a good time along the path.