Partner Channel - U S Telebrokers Celebrates 10th Anniversary

By Tara Seals

Posted: 09/2001

Partner Channel

U S Telebrokers Celebrates 10th Anniversary
By Tara Seals

US Telebrokers Inc., a subsidiary of PlanetOne Communications Inc., this month celebrates its first decade in business. The master agency has seen the Internet, increased carrier awareness and technological advances fundamentally change the landscape, and it has capitalized accordingly.

In 1990, president and CEO Ted Schuman was regional manager for AllNet
Communications, assigned to work with independent representatives in the Phoenix, Ariz., area that called themselves “agents.”

“While I was unfamiliar with the term at the time, I became very familiar with the amount of money they were making,” says Schuman.

Schuman soon left corporate America to work on his own as an agent. Two-thirds of his AllNet office followed, giving Schuman an instant direct sales force. Several months later, self-financed U S Telebrokers eschewed the costly direct sales model in favor of recruiting subagents.

“I was unfamiliar at the time with the term ‘master agent,’ too,” says Schuman. “But I was effectively doing what a master agent does–going out and signing large carrier agreements and having subs who are uncomfortable making those commitments sign up below me.”

Schuman prides his company on its constancy. “If there’s one thing on a personal level I’m most proud of, it’s that we continue to derive 90-plus percent of our revenue from agents,” says Schuman. “Many are the same agents that we started with; we continue to send out checks with the very first agent agreement we put on the street; and we have continued to pay agents the same time of the month for 10 years.”

The agency has benefited from changes in the industry. For instance, U S Telebrokers in the mid 1990s was ahead of the telecom curve in offloading expensive administrative support to the web. Its website did the work of four clerical people, eliminated mailings for program information and commission reports, and made it easier to sign up subagents.

“I remember when we first did this with Cable & Wireless [USA] and Qwest
[Communications International Inc.]–they almost had a heart attack that we were putting our signup forms out on a public website,”
says Schuman.

“But it’s been a natural process with people seeing the value the Internet brings to alternate channel sales,” he adds. “Today that’s still the foundation of how we communicate with our customers and agents.”

Another change is greater alternate channel awareness by carriers, says Schuman. In the early 1990s, the agent sector was niche-oriented, and only a few long-distance program options were available. Agents since have evolved to a mainstream distribution model.

U S Telebrokers now focuses mainly on Tier-1 contracts, something that would have been impossible in 1991.

“Now it’s unbelievable–you have multibillion-dollar companies like Qwest that report 50 percent of their annual revenue is generated by alternate channels,” says Schuman.

Schuman partially credits his success to keeping abreast of the surge of convergent and telecom options, an important differentiator for a master agency.

“The ultimate challenge for any master agent is to bring value to its subagents, by giving them better compensation than they would earn on their own and services they wouldn’t be able to have access to otherwise,” says Schuman.

In January, Schuman launched PlanetOne, a reseller focused on leading-edge technologies that appeal to the mass business market.U S Telebrokers is its marketing arm. The PlanetOne portfolio includes BlackBerry (Research In Motion Ltd.) devices, Ricochet (Metricom Inc.) broadband wireless service and unified messaging products.