Planning for Growth

No company stands still. Your business is either expanding or (I hope not) contracting. If your company is bursting at the seams, you need to begin chatting with both your hardware vendor and your carrier sales agent today. To service the new employees, new departments, and changing requirements of the company, you may need to upgrade your phone system, add more phone lines, install dedicated circuits, or possibly start over with a brand-new phone system (if your current system has no room left for expansion).

When you’re ready to make changes to your system, and after you’ve established a relationship with your carrier sales agent or independent sales rep, as well as with your hardware vendor, you need to bring everyone together at your office for a chat so that you can determine the best strategy for changing your phone service to respond to your business’s growth.

Having a conversation with your hardware vendor is very simple. Your questions are:

• How many more telephones can I install on my system as it is right now?

• How many more lines can my system handle from the carrier as it is right now?

• If I buy additional cards for my current phone system, how many phones for employees can I add before I max out the system?

• How long does it take to receive and install the new cards?

• How much do cards cost to buy and install? Are there any other fees I should know about?

• What are my options when I have no more capacity on the existing phone system?

 Remember  Getting answers to these questions gives you a sense for the system’s current limitations, a rough timeline for adding capacity to your system, and the general cost for the various upgrade options.

On the carrier side, the questions are even fewer. If you are adding individual phone lines, you need to contact your local carrier to find out the installation and monthly cost to add lines, as well as the standard interval to have the lines brought to your phone room and installed. If you’re adding dedicated service from your long-distance carrier, your questions are essentially the same. The basic information you need has to do with

• Timelines for installing new circuits.

• Charges, both monthly recurring charges (MRCs) and installation charges and other one-time costs (also known as nonrecurring charges — NRCs).

When you have all the information you need, you can plan accordingly so that expansion is methodical and planned, as opposed to being anxiety ridden and reactionary. The specific charges associated with dedicated circuits are covered in Chapter 2.