Telephone answering service doubles company, boosts profit after acquisition
In its early days, Telelink, a telephone answering service company headquartered in St. John’s NL, operated out of her family home.
“My father started the business in 1965. At one point, the switchboards were in our living room. It really was the ladies in curls smoking cigarettes and crossing cords to connect callers. I learned by osmosis… and a formal education that my father insisted on,” she says.
Today, the company is cloud-based and most team members work from home using modern, digital infrastructure.
Co-CEO Cindy Roma joined in 1996, bringing expertisein staffing call centres that served companies like Purolator and UPS.
Year by year, they’re growing the company by playing to their individual strengths. Ryan is the sales, marketing and future-focused visionary, while Roma runs operations, including HR and staffing.
As Telelink approaches its 60th anniversary, it’s still governed by its original ethos of providing stellar call-answering service—with a decidedly more modern approach. Technology has ushered in opportunities that allow them to provide business process outsourcing, including serving as front-end communications for over a thousand companies across North America.
“We think of the business as a very old startup. When Sydney and I got together, magic started to happen. She brings the vision, and I execute on it,” says Roma.
Ryan agrees. “I’m on entrepreneurial steroids with sales and revenue generation while Cindy’s attention to detail puts the process behind the growth. It’s the perfect synergy.”
We have an exceptional sales team, and our organic growth is commendable. For us, an acquisition means you can grow as fast as 300 customers overnight.
Sydney Ryan
Co-CEO, Telelink
Acquiring another business to speed growth
Over the 25 years they’ve worked together, Ryan and Roma have grown the business from 12 employees in their St. John’s office to 150 people across two provinces. Many staff work in the Calgary office that once belonged to Big Sky Call Centers. In 2022, Telelinkacquiredthat company and began folding it into their existing operations.
The decision to embark on a large acquisition was a strategic one.
“We were at that inflection point of revenue and growth. We have an exceptional sales team, and our organic growth is commendable. For us, an acquisition means you can grow as fast as 300 customers overnight,” says Ryan.
As they considered an acquisition, Roma and Ryan set their sights on Alberta. “We’re big in the oil and gas and energy sector in Newfoundlandand we also have clients in Alberta. We wanted to acquire a business in Alberta to serve those customers and grow that business,” says Roma.
They chose Big Sky because it had similar clients. “They’d been operating for 30 years and had antiquated technology but a really good group of people. They were knowledgeable and had a good reputation locally, a good lifetime value with customers and low churn. This was everything we were looking for,” says Ryan.
She adds that though they had done small acquisitions before, this was their first big one that required a loan. Big Sky had 25 employees and needed new technology, processes and updating.
An established company with an in-house team takes a long time to integrate.
Cindy Roma
Co-CEO, Telelink
Lessons learned from the acquisition process
Ryan and Roma say they learned a lot from the acquisition process, much of it relating to time.
It takes time to transition
“It was always our vision that we would be one company and operate in similar ways [after the acquisition]. One of the biggest lessons we took away was underestimating the time it would take us to get there. We intentionally left 6 months where we let [Big Sky] exist as it was so we could learn how they operated and how we could integrate it into Telelink,” said Roma.
“Earning that trust and creating that bond from an employee perspective took time, and it’s still ongoing. An established company with an in-house team takes a long time to integrate.”
Customer relationships require trust-building
Employees aren’t the only ones who need time to get used to an acquisition.
“We also underestimated the time it would take to earn the trust of Big Sky’s customers. I think they were saying, ‘Who are these two women from Newfoundland?’ There are cultural differences between companies and provinces and people’s expectations differ,” said Ryan.
“We’ll go into future acquisitions expecting that customers might react to the change and have realistic churn numbers. Overall, it was much less than the one-third we were told to expect, but it’s important to be aware of the disruption an acquisition can cause customers.”
Centralizing work takes time
One of the ultimate benefits of an acquisition is eliminating redundancies. Roma and Ryan say that didn’t happen until two years into the integration with Big Sky—and that was an intentional choice.
“Some companies slash and burn right away, but that’s not the way we wanted to do things. We earned less money than we could have in the first couple of years, but you can’t rush becoming one culture, one process, one technology,” says Ryan.
“We’ll be faster on our next acquisition, but with the first one, we wanted to take our time for the sake of our team and customers.”
Transferring knowledge is a challenge
Acquiring a new business with new employees requires learning about it. And a lot of that knowledge is housed in the minds of employees.
“The new team had a lot of information about processes and customers in their heads. In the absence of documentation, it was hard for us to learn what we needed to know to service them,” says Roma.
“It took time to get that knowledge into systems that would allow us to build on it, not to lose it via natural attrition.”
An acquisition can take a toll on existing staff
Throughout the acquisition process, Telelink’s core administrative team, comprising finance, IT, customer support and operations staff, were drafted from their daily responsibilities. Ryan says they underestimated the ask.
“We pushed them to the limit. They were hands up, yelling ‘uncle’ towards the end. Our team is innovative and forwardthinking. They understood the importance of the acquisition and were commited to growth. We’revery fortunate that we didn’t lose any of themas a result of it
“After the integration, they said give us a break for a year to fix the processes, document what we need to do and then we can think about another acquisition. That was fair.”
This is growth we couldn’t have achieved without an acquisition.
Cindy Roma
Co-CEO, Telelink
Benefits of the acquisition
While it took time for the benefits of the Big Sky acquisition to drop to the bottom line, Roma and Ryan say 2024 was their strongest year yet in revenue and profit.
“Big Sky brought us from 500 to 800 clients, and we’ve doubled in size. This is growth we couldn’t have achieved without an acquisition,” says Roma.
“And in the years since, we’ve grow to over 1,000 customers, effectively doubling in size since 2022.”
Other advantages include deepening their knowledge of specific verticals. With more volume in one type of business, they can better understand what those customers value the most.
They’ve also found synergies in customer service by consolidating and centralizing that function. “It forces you to get more efficient and put better systems in place,” says Ryan.
“We have much more robust service now because we were doing it one way, and [Big Sky] was doing it another and we had to figure out a way that was the most efficient for everybody. We took the best from both and consolidated them so there’s one stream.”
And with account managers located in Calgary, Telelink is better positioned to sell and service throughout Alberta in a way they couldn’t from Newfoundland.
“We’vedefinitely increased our footprint. We’ve earned business we otherwise would not have. Having a physical presence has made a big difference,” says Roma.
Since acquiring Big Sky in 2022, Telelink has bought a smaller call centre in Edmonton. After taking 2024 to regroup, they’re ready to bring in more businesses.
“Our team has told us that they’re ready for more acquisitions now. We’re beginning to rekindle some relationships we put on ice last year and we’re excited to keep growing,” says Ryan.