FANTASTIC 50: Unitel Corp.

Unitel Makes the Right Calls
by Mike Ashley

SERVICE WINNER

For the past eight years, Douglas Palley has been out to change the way people think about telemarketing. And his best case in point is his own company, Unitel Corp.

McLean-based Unitel is an outsource provider of sales and service support via telephone lines and the Internet.

Palley believes he and partner Tien Wong are succeeding at telemarketing because they apply business principles learned in a completely different industry -- commercial real estate. Palley and Wong were both commercial real estate agents in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area in the late '80s, and both longed for the freedom of starting and owning their own business.

So in 1991, Palley and Wong combined their personal savings -- along with their strengths in canvassing potential clients, making effective presentations and exploiting market research. They then hired other former real estate brokers to help beat the bushes for business-to-business sales opportunities.

Palley and Wong with nice-looking Unitel knit shirts
Douglas Palley (left) and Tien Wong (right) apply the business principles of the commercial real estate business to telecommunications.

From five employees in 1991, Unitel has grown to over 750 employees at two sites -- the McLean headquarters and another call center in Frostburg, Md. A third center is scheduled to open this month in Lakeland, Fla., bringing the company's total work force up to 1,000 people. Last year, Unitel grossed $15 million, and projections for fiscal 1999 indicate revenues could be as high as $28 million.

Unitel clients include Kaiser-Permanente and Land Rover Northern America. But 65 percent of its customers are telecom-related: Bell Atlantic, GTE, Nextel, Cable & Wireless, Quest, Southwestern Bell, Pacific Bell and Ameritech. Palley says he and his team of real estate refugees began by simply "dialing for dollars," cold-calling companies trying to sell themselves to other businesses.

"We really didn't know about the telemarketing business, but we knew there wasn't a lot of professionalism," says the 33-year-old Palley.

Unitel President Palley and CEO Wong changed all that. Unitel set up an office in McLean, created a good working environment and paid employees well. They got their first big break early in 1992, when the company landed a customer-support contract from Potomac Electric Power. The power company was administering a program to encourage customers to use more efficient light bulbs, and Unitel helped spread the word to 600,000 people.

Today, Unitel can handle up to 100,000 inbound calls per hour at centers that operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Business applications include order processing, customer service, technical support, interactive voice response, direct response, sales and lead generation, and mail and Internet fulfillment services.

Unitel also provides customized reports that are tailored to their client's marketing and analysis needs. It's all part of a very simple philosophy: "Over-deliver and under-promise is the simple truth in business," says Palley. "We kind of live by that here."

In addition to winning the service category in the Fantastic 50, Unitel was awarded a fifth consecutive "MVP Gold Quality Award" from Telemarketing magazine this fall. The company also ranks 53rd on Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the country.

"In our industry there have been a lot of mediocre players, and a lot of them have gone public in the last three to five years," explains Palley. "They've been faced with a lot of pressures from Wall Street to perform and cut costs, and those factors are hurting them and their customer service.

"We're not in that position. We can offer a real value-added service to our customers."