A champion for the business cause

<p>Two and a half years ago, my fiancé and I faced the biggest decision of our lives. The company that she worked for was about to close their Benoni office and she was going to be without a job.</p> <p><br />After speaking to the owners, we agreed to buy out the Benoni branch and looked forward to running our new business.</p> <p><br />After only a few weeks of running this new business, we got a telephone bill in excess of fifty thousand rand, from our previous provider. All was not well anymore. Our telephone bill wouldn’t allow us to be profitable. When we queried the bill, we were told that since we were not part of the larger company anymore, we could not qualify for the call rates that they received as telecoms was a volume business. Back to “We were desperate”. We had spent all our savings, as well as taken out additional loans to finance our new business. And our telephone bill would not allow us to be profitable anymore. It seemed that we had made the biggest mistake of our lives.</p> <p><br />A few more months went on and the sustainability of our company hung in the balance. The odds were not looking good. We had borrowed money from just about everybody we knew and couldn’t pay them back. Tensions ran extremely high. My fiancé and I fought everyday, we could barely afford to keep our kids in school, we had cut our lifestyle down to bare necessities and still, we couldn’t afford to live. We needed a miracle.</p> <p><br />Enter the miracle! A few days later, we got a call from Clinton at SA-Telecoms. While I was on the telephone with him, I googled his company and was shocked to see the reviews on Hello Peter. I asked him about them, and he told me that they had many clients, and some of them needed their telephone to do things that telephones just couldn’t do. Still he tried, but telephones could not manage employees as well as actual managers. This did not make me feel any better. For as much as I was desperate for better rates, I did not want to jump out of the pot and into the fire.</p> <p><br />Our next bill came, only bigger and scarier than the last. Desperate and alone, we did not know what to do. Our telephone usage had not changed, our rates remained the same. But our bill was almost double the amount that it normally was. If only I could understand my phone bill. We had 10 employees, to whom the telephone was their only way of selling our product. It was time to throw in the towel. My fiancé and I started discussing how we were going to tell the staff that we were closing down, and couldn’t afford to pay them.</p> <p><br />The phone rang again. It was Clint. I almost told him to ****** off and leave us alone, and just as I was about to… I had a thought. He was a telecoms guy. He could decipher our telephone bill. “Yes, and could you take a look at our bill and tell us if we could save money?” He obliged and asked if he could see us that Thursday.</p> <p><br />When Clint arrived on Thursday, he was friendly and helpful, not anything like the reviews that I had read on Hello Peter, and most of all, he found huge discrepancies on my bill hidden inside the itemized billing. He pointed out a number of calls made to satellite telephones which we were getting billed for, even though our lines could not make international calls. Tens of thousands were being syphoned of our bill every month. He also offered us better rates on our service, and in spite of my reluctance to use his services, offered me a trail of his service, which he tailored to our specific business needs, gave us all the benefits that were previously enjoyed only by larger businesses.</p> <p><br />I immediately got on the phone with my previous provider and queried my invoices. They put it down to a glitch in the system.</p> <p><br />After using Clint’s system for a few weeks, he had worked out all the teething issues, as well as designed our telephone system according to the very special needs of our business. Their service was fast, friendly and efficient, and best of all, I was paying less than a third of what my previous provider was charging me. <br />It has been two years now, and there have been just a handful of problems, some of which I haven’t even noticed, until their support department contacted me to let me know that all was sorted. Our business has been profitable, our telephone bill has been stable, and our company has grown.</p> <p><br />I would like to thank Ronaldo, Nishta, Clint, Thandile, Mugeshni, Nevashni, and the rest of the SA-Telecoms team for all the work they put in, as well as always being there to provide the much needed support that we required. In a time when business is really difficult, it is comforting to know that there are still companies like yours.</p> <p><br />When other ************ companies seem to exploit small businesses, you are truly champions for the cause. Both, my fiancé and I look forward to working with you guys for many years to come.</p> <p> </p> <p>Keep up the good work!</p>