Totem turns round annual loss
Chief executive Brassington takes the credit after reversing fortunes of alternative carrier
Alternative carrier Totem Communications has reported a £300,000 profit, two years after it appointed a new chief executive in an attempt to reverse annual losses of £4.3m.
Bullish chief executive Chris Brassington last week took full credit for turning the company's fortunes around.
"Totem had high turnover but very low margins, which was the nature of the business we were in at the time. But most of the telecoms operators that operated like this are now out of business. The real strength of the company was its technical expertise," he said.
Brassington attributed the turnaround in the company's fortunes to two strategic changes.
First, Totem launched its automated service provision to increase efficiency. Teams of administrative staff were replaced by systems that handled automatic online service provision, thus saving time by avoiding the need for manually provisioned orders.
Second, the focus of the business was changed radically.
"Instead of selling direct, I felt we should go wholly indirect," Brassington said.
"The other mistake telecoms companies often make is that they spend all their time talking about outbound calls, when the real value to most companies is in handling the calls coming in," he added.
Dave Rushton, product manager at Totem reseller IDN Telecom, agreed with this diagnosis.
"We're doing significantly more inbound call handling business for clients," he said. "Before we took on Totem we'd worked with a number of alternative carriers, but they always lacked product specialisation and the service was bad. None of them saw inbound call handling as important."
Brassington said the skills base in the company had also changed. When he took over the company, he placed emphasis on sales and technical staff and has seen annual turnover increase by 34 per cent to £5.4m.