TTS honored Tactical TeleSolutions (TTS) was recently honored with a profile in the San Francisco Business Times. In addition, Tactical TeleSolutions just ranked 55th in the San Francisco Business Times "100 Largest Women-Owned Companies in the Bay Area" ( up from ranking # 61 the year previous! ) No foolin' April Fool's joke lands San Francisco telemarketing firm its biggest sales contract by Steven E. F. Brown Can an April Fool's prank grow your business? In Laura Hylton's case, it did. Hylton, the president and owner of Tactical TeleSolutions in San Francisco, a telemarketing firm, arrived in her office one April 1st and checked her voice mail. One message, ostensibly from Pacific Bell, promised a big sales contract. The person on the message asked to set up a meeting to hammer out the details, and began listing the names of Pac Bell honchos who would be there. For Hylton, who started her company in a 270-square-foot shoebox of an office in 1991 with no computer and with metal desks bought for $15 from the flea market, this contract was incredible. "When I started, I had nothing," Hylton says. The last name in the list of Pacific Bell executives was "April Fool." But that wasn't the end of the story. Kurt Stenzel, the employee who'd masterminded the prank, felt so badly about pulling it that he went out and got a real contract from Pacific Bell. The firm ended up doing 120 different projects for the telecommunications company. Hylton has gone from her microscopic office in the Flood Building at 5th and Market to 19,000 square feet on three floors of a building in the financial district. She has 140 employees and plenty of business. "It's been more than five years since we had to let someone go for lack of work," she says. Her first year she made $30,000. "I was in survival mode," she says. Last year, her revenue was $6.8 million. Despite the burgeoning of the Internet and the ubiquity of email, telemarketing is far from dead, Hylton says. Though she recently changed the name of her firm, which was originally Tactical Telemarketing Solutions, to reflect an evolution in the services she offers, Hylton still does most of her business with telephones. "Telemarketing is becoming less of a dirty word," she explains. "Telemarketing is the wave of the future, because people just don't have time to do things in person." Tactical TeleSolutions does 80 percent of its business with high-tech companies, handling their telemarketing and telesales. "We call a lot of IT managers," Hylton says. "We generate leads to pass on to our clients' outside salespeople in CRM (Customer Relationship Management)." Bob Braham, vice president of marketing for BackWeb Technologies in San Jose, has been Hylton's customer for a year and a half. "She's a great visionary," he says. "She's a great manager -- extremely savvy -- and she adds value beyond telemarketing." Besides working the phones, the company also helps its customers set up seminars and events, which draw people interested in hearing a speaker on a certain subject. "We manage the 800 number, set up the event, get people to go there, and generate leads," Hylton says. Her customers can learn a lot from the people who come to a seminar, and that information boosts their sales. Though Hylton has taken some risks to grow her company, she is conservative by temperament. "I would never do anything until I could afford it," she says. For her first six months in that tiny office with the drab desks, she didn't even have a computer. Eventually she borrowed a little money from her mother to pay for one. In this way, she expanded only when she needed to. "A job would come in and then a demand would come with it. This job would require ten people with computers. So we would get ten computers," Hylton says. She was so conservative that even the necessity of moving to new offices felt dangerous. When she signed a lease for the first 9,000 square feet at her present location, a space that had sat vacant for five years, the rent was an idyllic $15 per square foot. "But even that was a scary number to me!" Hylton says, laughing. "The bottom line is that everything rests on me," she says. Bearing ultimate responsibility for the company has given Hylton clarity of vision -- she stays focused on what is most important. "One thing I knew going into my business was that I had to go after sales," she says. "No matter what else was going on, I would always have someone generating leads. I can control certain costs, but you always have to pay rent. Gotta sell, gotta sell, gotta sell." She has entertained other ideas about how to grow and expand, but they haven't always worked out -- another reminder that the company needs to remain focused on its core business. Hylton talked to venture capitalists about licensing some of Tactical TeleSolutions' proprietary software and spinning off that section of the business as a new company. But the hairs on the back of her neck warned her against it. "I didn't really trust any of them," she says. "They didn't know how to build a business focused on revenue." And so she decided against the deal. Keeping the company true to its core values was important, not just to her, and to the bottom line, but to her customers, too. Boris Seibert, manager of sales development at Cybrant Corp. in Mountain View, appreciates Hylton's philosophy. "It was nice to be working with a company that wasn't just trying to take your money." Hylton has built her business on a strong foundation, and has no plans to change that. "I have to make the decisions and focus on what's right," she says. Steven E. F. Brown is a staff writer for the San Francisco Business Times. Click here to read the original San Francisco Business Times article. Tactical TeleSolutions 550 Kearny Street Suite # 210 San Francisco, CA, 94108 toll-free: (800) 700-7422 phone: (415) 788-8808 fax. (415) 788-8848 email: contact@tts-sf.com © 2006 - 2008 Tactical TeleSolutions Inc. All rights reserved.