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CEO Interview
November 14, 2000
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Chet Thaker, CEO of TeleBright
The Bredin Report recently chatted with Chet Thaker, CEO of TeleBright (www.telebright.com). TeleBright, located in Rockville, MD is a B2SB comparison-shopping site for telecommunications services.
TBR: What are your key business goals this year?
Thaker: At the top of the list is to gain market acceptance as the leader in the online telecom market space. Part of that is to raise awareness of integrated technology, which is one of our competitive advantages. We get the customer information automatically vs. the RFP [request for proposal] sites.
TBR: What are the greatest challenges your company faces marketing to small businesses?
Thaker: We aim to serve the small business market and there are a lot of these folks out there. Getting to them is the challenge. They feel phone bills are phone bills. They are tired of listening to the pitch from all of the carriers and tired of getting fees. They have been disappointed before. It is our challenge to get them to realize that they can save a lot of money by spending 10 minutes on our site.
TBR: What do you do to separate yourself from your competition?
Thaker: One, we offer a superior experience with the site. The RFP model faces a big problem of not being able to give customers information on the spot. The RFP says "I'll take it to the vendors and get back to you". If you are ATT or Sprint how many small RFPs are you going to review? We instantly compute the packages and give an apples-to-apples comparison immediately. We offer this without going through registration, so there are no barriers for small businesses to make a decision. This superior interaction leads to purchase.
Second is our superior technology. We also license our technology to the service providers if they want to use it as part of their acquisition and retention strategy. Two Bell companies have signed contracts.
TBR: What are the key components of good partnerships?
Thaker: Number one, we want our partner to be consistent with our values, which creates trust. We don't want flim flam. It's one of our intrinsic values - we require trust. Trust requires intelligence and ethics.
Secondly, instead of being focused on money, we're focused on a good customer experience. If we are focused on experience we can get to the customer's core concerns immediately. Money is important, but there are various ways of making it. We want to make sure our partners make a good return, and we want to stay attuned to the way we make money vs. profits at any cost.
TBR: What were the most significant changes in your organization over the last year?
Thaker: The shifting focus in the growth of the company. When we first started, the focus was on making decisions about who we are and who we serve. Then we focused on building the site from an engineering point of view. Then we were in the phase where we signed up a large number of service vendors, now over 75. That was a tremendous challenge. Getting everyone's rates and getting systems working correctly was very difficult, but we had to make sure our customers had a broad, good choice when they came on the site. Now that we have completed that phase, we are in the partnership phase. We need to get the message out, which is done through partnerships with portals serving the small business community.
TBR: How did you go about developing a marketing approach - how did you select the audience and the media vehicles to use?
Thaker: We decided that the direct message would work over the indirect message. You will not see us do Super Bowl or full-page Wall Street Journal ads. In my opinion they are not efficient. By working with portal partners that are in tune with values such as trust, customer experience, and time responsiveness, we will get to the customers who are ready to make purchase decisions.
In addition, our portal partners are not shy about how we can integrate better into their sites. The lessons we have learned are excellent. Now we are so good that once we ink a deal with a portal, in 3 days we can have a co-branded site up and in a week we can have a private label site up. We have come a long way to give very fast response time to our partners.
TBR: In five words or less, what advice would you give entrepreneurs entering the B2SB market?
Thaker: You must know their pain.
Unless the entrepreneurs know the pain that small businesses are going through, they just can't create solutions to serve the market. As a small business person and a consultant who helps people choose these services, I know the pain small businesses have felt.
TBR: If you could lunch with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be and why?
Thaker: Abraham Lincoln. I'm a man without too many heroes but this man led the country through a pretty bloody conflict. The demands that were on him for leadership and management were incredible.
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