TeleTrend Communications Development Project

TeleTrend Communications was a reseller of long distance services started by Linley White and the President of Western Equities Corporation. TeleTrend was a project of Western Equities Corporation and Mr. White functioned as the CFO/COO of the company.

The tasks involved in starting and building the company were to negotiate contracts with vendors, AT&T initially and later Wiltel, develop and execute an agent program, and build or select and implement the systems to provide customer support, billing, financial accounting, and interface to the phone networks for provisioning. Mr. White participated in the negotiation of contracts and establishment of the agent network, but was responsible for systems development and implementation, as well as hiring and management of most of the staff of the organization.

To conserve cash at startup, Mr. White personally developed a database application to function as a customer management and provisioning system, while outsourcing the billing function. As volume grew, in order to prepare for a significant scaling of volume, a project was conducted to identify and convert to a billing vendor that would also be able to support the customer relationship management, and provisioning functions.

In support of the marketing function, Mr. White conceived and developed a software tool called the "Calling Pattern Analysis" which allowed agents selling the company's services to enter data from a prospects phone bill, and then easily and quickly demonstrate the value of the appropriate rate plan for the prospect. This software provided material support for the growth of the company. The company was sold for $4.5 million in cash when it reached approximately $10,000,000 in revenue, providing a meaningful return on capital to investors.