By Haley Steinhauser, Director of Public Relations and Social Media
Hello, hello! As I landed in the airport yesterday morning, I heard a fellow passenger tell her friend, “Everything in New Orleans is a good idea.” Ain’t that the truth! The atmosphere is electric, the people are gracious, the food is out of this world and the music is lively. The perfect city for a conference!
FreeConferenceCall.com CEO David Erickson and I are thrilled to be in New Orleans for the fifth annual Collision Conference, the fastest growing tech conference in America with over 25,000 attendees.
Dave is honored to be speaking on the Growth Summit stage to discuss how FreeConferenceCall.com continues to grow — even after 17 years in business. The panel is moderated by Vini Letteri, managing director of TMT Growth, and Keith Valory, CEO of Plex, will be seated alongside Dave for the discussion.
Early in the conversation, Dave lovingly refers to his business as a recipe he created beginning with the purchase of a $10 URL — FreeConferenceCall.com. In his recipe, our company name is the binding agent that holds everything together. It plays a monumental role in our growth, reflects our brand and perfectly sums up what we provide to consumers. Those 21 letters in the address bar started a viral movement (long before “going viral” was even a thing), leading us into 60 consecutive quarters of growth. It was clear that our secret sauce was virality.
Companies dream of going viral, but Dave says this momentum came with hiccups he wasn’t expecting. He credits his relationships with phone carriers, at home and abroad, as what got him through the hard times. He worked tirelessly to ensure that every conference line was being used on a network that would hold up.
That dedication was certainly there from inception, but now that our company has scaled to what it is today, Dave says that growing within our means has been what sets us apart. We see what solidifies in the market, listen to the feature sets our customers are asking for and then develop a robust platform that performs at the highest level. Simply put — that’s how we expand year by year.
Although we’ve had many proud milestones at FreeConferenceCall.com, we’ve had a number of misses too. No one enjoys failure, but Dave believes in fostering a team that thinks laterally and he says that comes from studying the losses. We have had many valuable lessons learned within the walls of our office and many times, those lessons jolted us onto new paths of innovation.
The wins have not only helped us evolve but they led us to understand the importance of word-of-mouth marketing and that has been the key to our company’s success. Word-of-mouth is everything. So go ahead and create buzz about your own company by talking it up with friends, sharing stories with neighbors and get people spreading the word!
Be sure to catch the entire panel discussion on Collision’s Facebook channel.