Business Spotlight: Tritels's growth requires move to larger quarters

It's late Friday afternoon, and Scott Gibbons is moving furniture ... again. Gibbons, who co-owns Tritel Communications with his wife, Vera, is trying to create more room to accommodate the company's growing staff.

"We're moving to a new location in three months and adding 6,000 more square feet of office space," Gibbons said. "We don't have enough room right now for all of our employees."

After only 11 years in business, Tritel Communications has grown from a small mom-and-pop business with $15,000 in annual revenue to a thriving company with 14 employees and $5 million in annual revenue.

When the company was first founded, most of its business centered around its exclusive contract with Sprint. As a Sprint Elite Partner, Tritel Communications sold Sprint service to mid- to large-size businesses in and around the 417 area code that needed voice and data communication solutions.

"Our relationship with Sprint is kind of unique," Scott Gibbons said. "You would think since we're an authorized sales agent that we would emphasize sales. With Sprint, though, the emphasis is on customer retention. We don't make a big one-time commission when we sell a customer. We make our money by retaining them."

Emphasizing customer retention early on helped the Gibbonses expand their business. As the company's business customers began to grow, they looked to Tritel Communications for help with their changing information technology needs and to provide them with a wide range of Internet services.

Tritel Communications responded by branching out and hiring experienced employees who had skills in many different areas. In fact, the average employee has a bachelor's degree in computer science and at least 15 years of experience, according to Scott Gibbons.

This experience is reflected in the wide range of services that Tritel Communications offers, which include application development, AS/400 midrange operations, desktop management and application service provision (ASP), which allows a company to reduce its overhead by renting the software applications it needs to run its business.

The company also offers ASP hosting services to software vendors who want to deliver their own software applications and services to customers. In the mid-1990s, the Gib-bonses expanded their business after the World Wide Web took hold and became an important business and communications tool. Tritel Communications began offering a wide variety of Internet services, such as Internet security auditing, providing high-speed Internet access for area businesses and developing and hosting secure e-commerce Web sites.

Still, staying competitive in the telecommunications and technology industries has proved to be a challenge in recent years. To keep a step ahead of the competition, Tritel formed a number of partnerships with industry leaders such as IBM, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Adtran, Internet Security Systems, J.D. Edwards, Allaire, Visual Networks, Gauss Partners, Symantec and Check Point Software Technologies. Tritel Communications also serves as an authorized sales agent for Southwestern Bell.

According to Scott Gibbons, forming alliances with industry leaders has allowed Tritel to provide leading-edge technology and world-class service to companies in the area, while still providing those businesses with a local point of contact. Having partnerships with many different companies also gives Tritel Communications the freedom to pick the best hardware and software solutions for a company, rather than just push one company's product line.

"I think Tritel Communications' real strength lies in the fact that we're able to bring all the pieces together for a company, whether it's developing an e-commerce site or customizing a software application so it will do what you want it to," said Eric Gravett, vice president of operations. "We don't just come in and tell you what we can sell you. We listen to what you want."