Michel Vaillancourt, a member of the Asterisk developer community, entrepreneur, and small business owner of JKL5Group, shares business and technical experiences, advice, and plans. Get ready to enjoy not only learning more about open source technology and telecommunications services from a great storyteller. The podcasts are in three parts and are available on Techistan, DIDX podcasts and on iTunes. The transcriptions of the podcasts will continue from here.

Part 1

Suzanne Bowen: Michel Vaillancourt is CEO of and among a team at JKL5Group. He is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. He has served in the Canadian Naval Reserve. He enjoys reading. That last item I do have in common with you, Michel.

Michel Vaillancourt: Thank you for having me, Suzanne, very kind.
Suzanne Bowen: I met you kind of by accident. I met some of a company you used to work with Softel at an ITEXPO conference. They even attended one of our DIDX dinners. When I returned home, I looked for more of you online via Facebook and Linkedin. That’s where I found you. I’ve been learning quite a bit from you since then via Facebook. That’s what I enjoy most about Facebook, learning.

Michel Vaillancourt: Social media is one of the best things that have happened to be in touch with the industry.

Suzanne Bowen: It puts more control in your and my hands instead of just a select few. I heard you were and are a telecom junkie, starting in the BBS era that eventually led to running a 500 seat call center.

Michel Vaillancourt: The first time I heard of telecommunications was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I was born and raised. A friend of mine said, “Hey, I heard about this great thing called the BBS.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s this bulletin board system where you hook a modem to your computer. You could call into someone else’s computer and leave messages.”

I think I fell in love the first time I heard that squeal. That was back in the day when you had to use your phone. You dialed the phone number on your touch tone phone. You waited to hear the squeal of the other machine answer. You flipped the switch on your modem. If you did it fast enough, you might be lucky enough to get the two machines to hook. I’ve had a passion for telecom ever since. That’s how I got started.

Suzanne Bowen: How did that evolve into running a 500 seat call center?

Michel Vaillancourt: We uh… I’m so used to talking about my company, it’s hard to talk about myself. I knew I wanted to get into IT. Back then, everyone said they wanted to get into computers. I studied modems, how they work, how phone lines work… and then I progressed into a career of networking.

I started out as a Novell network guy. Through a long and interesting chain of events, I wound up in Montreal working as a Linux administrator for a company that was developing an advanced contact management system. The process of doing that landed me a contract to Microsoft tech support for their Office Suite. The plan was for a 250 seat job, but they were ramping the call center straight to 500. They didn’t have a phone switch nor an administrator.

They searched the resumes of the Sys Amins they had for Linux, Windows and other OS’s. Hey, this guy at his last job managed a phone system. That must make him qualified. That’s great except my experience was with a 25 person Nortel Startalk that was hung on a wall. You programmed it with the keypad on the administrator phone. This is a little bit different from running a call center.

They sent me to Toronto for a training course. I came back, and we set the whole thing up from scratch. We purchased an Avaya Definity, a G3R, from eBay. The budget was tight. The phones were refurbished, recycled licenses. To get going, we spent over $70,000. Over the course of the project, 5 years, we probably dropped another $80,000 on this switch for upgrades and license expansions.

My first big gig in telecom was running this call center. For Microsoft campaigns alone, we had eight dedicated T1s that were run from Redmond through a long chain of events to Montreal. Take a look at that on a map sometime.

Suzanne Bowen: What year was that?

Michel Vaillancourt: That was from 2002 through 2005, something like that.

Suzanne Bowen: I think it was around 2001, believe it or not… my background is in English. I was an English teacher for over 15 years. I wrote a pamphlet. It was called “How to Start and Run a Successful Call Center in a Third World Country.”

So, you were definitely a geek, so tell us about that first Asterisk project, the Guerilla IT.

Michel Vaillancourt: A lot of people get scared when we talk about this, but come along for the ride anyway. We had 300 agents on the floor. We had ten T1s hooked up to this system. It was impressive and ran well. I always hold myself to achieve that kind of excellence. We figured the downtime was a $1000 per minute was what would lose if we were off the air.

Our vice president for global IT was standing behind us. He complained that this cost them $5000 per month in conferencing fees they were paying to a conference provider.

A few days before, another chap said, “Hey Michel. You’re the phone guy, there’s this thing called Asterisk.”

We read up on it, placed a call into the machine. This would be cool, but what will we use it for?

Two days later, this VP of global technology wants us to come up with a way to cut the cost, $60,000 to $100,000 per year in conferencing fees.

Me and the other guy looked at each other like are you thinking what I’m thinking?  They’ll fire us if they catch us. We had bought a $5000 Dell monster server, RAID 5, 4 GB RAM, Quadzine on it… this was 2003. Then, that project got canceled. So, it’s doing nothing. We installed Asterisk on it. We got the info required for everyone’s PIN numbers. We duplicated the video conferencing company settings on the Asterisk.

We re-pointed the 1800 number to the Asterisk server. A lot of IT directors who are listening to this podcast are cringing right now.

Monday morning, the general conference of all the VPs, the directors, 25 people for the big POW WOW. One director asked if we changed anything with the conferencing system?

“No, why?”

“Oh, it sounds much clearer today.”

We knew when the conference was over because the guy sitting behind us on the phone. When he hangs up the phone, we run down to the server room, pop the disk out of the drive. We burned a recording of the conference to MP3 format and gave it to the Senior VP.

He asked, “How’d you do that?”

We explained what we had done. He replied that we must realize he would have fired us if it didn’t work and what would this system cost to run?

We said, “Nothing but the server that you haven’t been using anyway.”

He said, “You guys just saved me $60,000 per year.”

Suzanne Bowen: That’s a good story.

Michel Vaillancourt: That’s my Guerilla IT project. This told me that the traditional powerhouse systems at $100,000 were dead. They didn’t know yet that the fight was over because guys like me who were in the trenches were going to see Asterisk and see things like, “So I take a $5000 server which is one month’s cost for a conferencing solution. I bring it in house. I save myself a minimum of $55,000 my first year.

I’m sorry. You can’t compete with that. You’re done. That’s how I got started with Asterisk.

Suzanne Bowen: We’ll be back for part 2. Thanks, Michel.

 

Part 2

Michel Vaillancourt discusses a charmed life that led to the JKL5Group business and his favorite book Re-imagine! Business excellence in a disruptive age” by Tom Peters. The transcription continues…

Suzanne Bowen: You’ve started your own business the JKL-5 Group in telecommunications now, so let’s focus on that in this podcast, Michel.

Michel Vaillancourt: I’ve personally known three millionaires. All three had one thing in common. At one point or another while working for them, I was fixing their computers. I asked how did they get into business. One thing that stuck with me. They all got tired of seeing someone else’s name on their paycheck.

I found this profound in a prophetic kind of tone. Always in the back of my head, something I’ve always wanted to do is run my own business. I was working for a company here in Montreal as an Asterisk Systems Administrator. I had completely transitioned from traditional telephony.

We had just wrapped up a call center for the Mary Kay of France. We built them a custom appication. I came back from Christmas vacation. The company president told us about a revelation he had over Christmas with me and some other senior administrators about where the future was going to be and real money was going to be and what he wanted to do with the company.

He started talking about “defusion web” (what we call in French)… web broadcasting. He wanted to set up a company that did world-class web broadcasting. He asked, “What do you guys all think about this?:

I said, “I only have one problems. You’re scaring the hell of me. I haven’t used the word “telephony even once. Let’s talk about that now.”

The president of the company said, “I’ve decided I don’t care about telephony. I can’t run a company that doesn’t excite me.”

“Where does that leave me?” I asked.

“Unemployed unfortunately,” he said.

That wasn’t the answer I was looking for after Christmas vacation. He was an old school guy from France where many things are done on family connections and handshakes. It was exceedlingly rare in my experience of working for this company with all the service work we did in France, for there to even be a project definition without a handshake a glass of wine. Gentleman’s agreements… the whole nine yards.

He said, “I have this problem though, a whole bunch of customers here in Montreal, Quebec who are all friends of mine that I helped get going in Asterisk, and I’m going to leave them high and dry.

He passed me a piece of paper and informed this was his customer list. Call them.

“Michel, in the time I’ve known, I have faith you can run your own company, so I’m giving you my customer. I’m giving you permission to take my customers.”

He wrote me a letter of undertanding that all the intellectual property that I had worked on while I was with him was now mine. Go!

Suzanne Bowen: Perfect.

Michael Vaillancourt: I looked at him. That’s mighty kind of you. Not what I was expecting as a separation agreement, maybe a severance package.

When I was in Nova Scotia, I attended a seminar. I remember distinctly a guy from the Royal Bank gave some advice. Write your pitch. Sit down with your spouse and give them the pitch. Look at them and say, “I think there is a lot of money we can make here, but we’re going to have to mortgage the house to do it. He looked at the crowd and continued that if they blink, go get a real job.

So this is what I am thinking about on my subway ride home. Someone just passed me the key components of my dream. I just have to convince my wife of this. Need to come up with a really good sales pitch.

I explained it to my wife Christine. We had a long talk about it, and she thought if it is really what I want to do, go for it. So that’ how I got started.

It was a bit of a zero to sixty exercise. I was outside all my safety nets. Money was typically tight after Christmas. That was the genesis of the company.

Suzanne Bowen: The first adjective that came out of my mouth was “perfect,” but what about “scary?”

Michel Vaillancourt: There’s a story to the name of our company and what to do about the website. I didn’t even know what the name of the company would be. I only knew that I needed a web presence, I need some credible to start telling the customers.

I was going to have to start calling all those customers and tell them, “The company they had been dealing with no longer exists. They don’t want you to call them. I’m the guy who was doing all the work for you, so I am going to just take over if that’s okay with you.”

You really can’t say that to somebody. I’m wracking my brain, flipping through stock exchange pictures. There was a picture of the keypad of a Blackberry, 1920 x 1280 resolution, so that’s huge. Right in the middle of the thing is the “5″ key. Take a look at the 5 key on your phone, that’s “JKL5.”

That’s got to be it, so I Googled it 20 something times to make sure that no one had used it before. I called the lawyer I had been referred to. Register the name. God forsakes before someone else.

Suzanne Bowen: You like to read. I like to read. I wish I had more time to do it.

Michel Vaillancourt: You and me both.

Suzanne Bowen: I have books stashed everywhere, and I’m in the middle of reading about ten of them. I heard you talking about your favorite book, “Re-imagine?”

Michel Vaillancourt: That’s right, Tom Peters. Excellent book! My business mentor here in Montreal was one of my first customers. I gave him my pitch.

He said, “I’d be more than happy for you to keep taking care of it, but you need some help.”

This is a guy who has made his million a couple times. He had gotten bored in his current career. He likes helping other guys get started on their companies. You need a business mentor. I’d be more than happy to help.

“The first thing you want to do is get the book “Re-imagine” by Tom Peters. Read it. I won’t give you my copy because I read it every day.”

Usually people will say, “I’ve got this great book, and the least I can do is
give you my copy. I buy another copy.”

He wouldn’t let go of his copy. That was an interesting accolade to the book.

 

Part 3

Michel Vaillancourt discusses the benefits of Asterisk and the mission of JKL5Group. The transcription continues…

Michel Vaillancourt: The premise of the book is that everything that was written in the 1900s about business no longer applies because we’re now in the 21st century. One discovery is the concept that more and more businesses need to focus on what’s called the “Hedgehog Concept.” In another great book called Good to Great, the “Hedgehog Concept” runs along the lines of … it doesn’t matter how smart fox is trying to ambush the hedgehog, the hedgehog does one thing and one thing very well which is roll up into a ball of spikes. The fox always loses.

Companies need to start adopting the “Hedgehog Concept,” focusing on what it is they do best. If what you do is write software, what you do not well is run phone systems. If what you do really well is say… DID connectivity, what you don’t do really well is design phone systems, etc. etc. The idea was for me to figure out what it is that I do well that is worth selling as a service.

The concept Tom Peters talks about in Re-imagine is that idea that in the future, large companies won’t even have their own accounting departments anymore. It will all be outsourced because there is nothing more powerful than a group of employees who are passionate about what they do. People who don’t like doing accounting are the worst people to hire accountants or to require to do accounting tasks. People who don’t like doing phone systems, are the worst to hire as “phone people.”

But in a large company, what tends to happen is like … the 500 seat call manager with me as the Definity Administrator. He’s a Linux system administrator who has run a phone system along the way, so he’s going to be the choice… but what if I didn’t have a passion for telecom?

What if what I really loved to do was Linux admin? You would have had 1/2 of a phone administrator, not full, and you wouldn’t necessarily get the best bang for the buck.

The ideas from Re-imagine that I learned the most from (and I am in the process of reading it for third time now)… the company of the future does one thing, does it well, and loves to do it. They sell that love, that service to other companies who need that service who are doing THEIR OWN thing very well.

That’s such a simple concept. I’ve read the same in Good to Great.

Michel Vaillancourt: He starts at the beginning of the book mad as hell. He said he had promised he would never write another book, but now he’s writing another book because things have changed so much in business that no one has redefined the business book. He set out to redefine the business book.

That is what Re-imagine is to him. He talks about why so many concepts that we’ve chained ourselves to in business do not work anymore. The world around those concepts has changed. Folks haven’t.

Suzanne Bowen: In the past year, there has been much talk about an economic crisis, recession and business has changed. It’s difficult. There seem to be no jobs. We have to reinvent, re-imagine and we have to realize things are different. You mentioned social media in the one of the previous podcasts and its effect on business. You have to change.

I like the part you mentioned… focus on what you do well. Even within our company sometimes and many companies that I see,  we try to do everything. It can be a waste of time and the people we are serving. We all need to focus on what we are good at and that is worth selling.

Michel Vaillancourt: Even myself in business, I started out with the idea that if I wanted to be a businessman, I had to be able to do my own bookkeeping. I spent a ridiculous amount on a small business bookkeeping package. I realized three months into it; I despised doing my own bookkeeping.

Not only did I waste a lot of money, I will now have to do what I should have done to start with which is to find someone who loves accounting and get them to do a good job.

It’s so obvious when you see it in your own enterprise. Look at what you don’t like to do in the course of a day. What is it that you like to do? Focus on that.

Suzanne Bowen: I like the way this idea is effectively applied to individuals as well as the company as a whole.

We’ve been referring to the GROUP … JKL5 Group. I like your motto… “the Asterisk telephony service department you don’t have to put on salary.”

Tell us more about JKL5, its mission… love to hear about it.

Michel Vaillancourt: What stood out from my reading of Re-imagine was that Re-imagine and Good to Great, the two of them… Jennings and Peters… that were a lot of companies out there that really did need to re-evaluate their own telephony environment. One or two things were happening.

They either had someone who was entrenched internally, so like if you’ve got an Avaya guy on staff, I can guarantee you that he is not going to tell you that the best thing you can do is replace with a Cisco switch.

I can guarantee if the guy is Cisco, he will not refer you to use Asterisk even if that is the better business decision. A lot of us are terrified for our jobs in this environment. Suzanne, you said it yourself.

This is the exact instance when companies need to think: what is it we do? What is our core business? How much of everything else do we need to find someone who those items are their core business, and they can do for us?

My thirty second commercial: we work with small to medium sized enterprises like yours or the listeners to deliver exciting, innovative telephony solutions that suit the company’s needs. We very much believe that our customer success is our success. We believe we are your partner. If you hire JKL5, while we are there, we function as if we are part of your staff.

We tie ourselves very closely with our customers’ destinies. We prefer to call them partners, not customers. At the end of the day, when the project is delivered, and the system is working properly, anyone who knows telephony knows that being a telephony guy is kind of like being a firefighter.

You spend much of the day doing very little, hoping the alarm doesn’t go off. As I commented when I was running the 500 seat call center, we calculated the permanent downtime on that call center was over $1000 per minute. That meant in a half hour, I earned almost my annual salary. All I had to do was prove to them that somewhere over the course of a year, I had prevented 32 minutes of downtime, and I was cheaper.

But what if nothing happens? In the classic telephony system, nothing really ever does happen. Telephony invented five 9s. Less than five minutes per year … so other than this specter of a half hour down time, the reality is you are paying $35,000 to $40,000 a year to avoid $5000 worth of down time. That’s not a good investment.

What you would rather do is have someone that you trust, that holds your company’s success to their heart as theirs, available at the drop of a hat like a firefighter. When something goes wrong, you know you’re going to be okay. That’s what you need.

Firefighters spend a great deal of time waiting to help a customer. That’s the model that we have approached our professional and support services for JKL5. We have several companies who are on our support programs, so that when they need support, they contact us. We provide them with the best available support. This includes research on their VPN access.