Industries Served

E-Commerce

As an internet entrepreneur, it's important to sound professional and be accessible to customers and website visitors. In today's world, a website without a phone number is disastrous to sales.

So whether you sell on eBay from home or run a 5-employee "dot com", GotVMail can be customized for your web-based company.

E-Commerce companies using GotVMail include:

• eBay sellers

• Online stores

• Web designers

• Hosting companies

Consultants

As a consultant, you're here, there, and everywhere all the time, yet clients expect you to be accessible at a moment's notice.

Our Call Forwarding feature uses advanced find-me/follow-me to ensure your clients can reach you on your home, office or mobile phone. A Custom Main Greeting and Multiple Extensions provide you with the competent, big-business image that puts potential clients at ease as soon as they call.

So whether you work alone from home or have a team of professionals on your staff, working from home, in an office, or always on the road, we designed GotVMail for entrepreneurial consultants like you.

Consultants using GotVMail include:

• Financial advisors

• Business strategists

• Interior designers

• Wedding planners

Real Estate

Thousands of real estate firms use GotVMail to enhance their image and help agents stay connected to buyers and sellers anywhere they are - at home, at the office, or on the road at a listing.

In fact, we are a Key Benefits Partner with the National Association of REALTORS.

A key GotVMail feature used by real estate professionals is Informational Extensions. With this feature, you can assign an extension to a few or all of your properties and provide 24/7 spoken descriptions and information about each property. Callers can also connect directly to your extension to arrange a showing or ask questions at any time during the message.

Another great feature is Call Routing Extensions, which can be used to distribute calls among agents when a new client calls. This feature allows your agents to focus entirely on sales instead of staying in the office to answer calls.

Real Estate professionals using GotVMail include:

• Traditional and next-generation brokers

• New web-based real estate companies

• Flat-fee commission firms

• Individual agents

Marketing/ Design

As a creative company, standing out is important. For your agency, use GotVMail's virtual phone system to sound more professional and stay connected, whether your employees are on location with a client or getting creative in the design room.

A client wants to start a new ad campaign? Creating a television commercial and need a new toll free number? Leverage GotVMail's virtual toll free and local numbers for new direct response and viral advertising campaigns.

Marketing/Design professionals using GotVMail include:

• Madison Ave firms for their clients

• Online marketing firms

• Free-lance artists

• Web design companies

And many more...

GotVMail serves tens of thousands of entrepreneurs in all industries.

From transportation, non-profits, churches, software companies, and hosting companies to the gaming industry, contractors and production companies.

The wide range of features included in all our plans means our Virtual Phone System can be configured for virtually any type of small business.

Customer Case Stuides

Territory Real Estate

Innovative real estate firm thrives with GotVMail

No-pressure and no hassle real estate

Not long after Terry Sanford and Marla Mullen began working as real estate agents, they realized that many homebuyers wanted to work with a real estate agent who only represents people on the buy-side of a transaction and would not pressure them into buying a home with amenities they didn't need, or was above their price range.

Seeking to eliminate what they saw as a conflict of interest for many real agents who represent both buyers and sellers - often in the same transaction - they founded Territory Real Estate, a Boston-based exclusive buyer agency catering to technology-savvy and do-it-yourself young professionals in Greater Boston.

"We're trying to provide a no-hassle, no-pressure atmosphere, and trying to avoid pushy sales tactics," says Sanford of his company, which was the first in Massachusetts to offer agent-level Multiple Listing Service access to buyers. "We do everything at your own speed, and we want to utilize technology as much as we can."

Rather than charge a commission based on a percentage of a home sale, Territory Real Estate charges buyers a flat fee, eliminating any potential for steering homebuyers toward buying higher-priced homes.

Cutting-edge tools for homebuyers

The company is primarily web-based, giving home-buyers the tools they need to search all properties for sale in Massachusetts at their leisure. Online tools include: advanced search criteria allowing users to search by square footage, year built and days on market, email notification of new properties coming to market and upcoming open houses, and automated estimates of market value.

Territory has three employees working in its Boston office, along with a fourth person, who manages the company Web site, working in Mississippi.

GotVMail provides "Fortune 500 company" sound

The firm chose GotVMail's outsourced virtual phone service because it needed a system which was flexible and could accommodate its needs as it grew. Frequently on the road to show properties, Sanford and Mullen often take advantage of GotVMail's "find me/follow me" capability, where phone calls to Territory's main number are automatically forwarded to their mobile devices.

"GotVMail's set-up caters perfectly to our needs. Our company has a virtual infrastructure and is very tech-driven. Blackberries, cell phones, and laptops are our lifeblood. GotVMail fits perfectly in this mix. When a client calls our main number they feel like they are calling a Fortune 500 company and that's the way it should be."

GotVMail's simple, online interface, called myGotVMail, makes it easy for Territory to add an extension when a new person is hired.

Territory has set up an extension which is dedicated to allowing buyers to request to schedule a tour. There are also extensions set up to accommodate buyers' questions about a property listing, and for technical support.

Zerogravity

$100,000 bed maker can rest easy with GotVMail

No mattress too big

When four-time Super Bowl champion Terry Bradshaw needed a specially-made mattress, he turned to ZeroGravity, a high-end bed maker for professional athletes and high-profile celebrities.

The mattress they built for the Hall-of-Famer was 19 inches thick.

Indeed, no job is too big for ZeroGravity, originally founded in 2003 as an Internet company offering its ZeroGravity Bed to only celebrities and professional athletes, and now available to anyone, directly shipped.

Clients include NBA star Shaquille O'Neal and former baseball star Davey Johnson.

"For our clients, the material we use is super-luxurious, and you're not going to find it in any bedding store," says John Baxter, CEO of ZeroGravity, based in Orlando, FL. "It's pain-alleviating foam material, perfect for athletes."

Each bed customizable

Baxter co-founded ZeroGravity with Kevin Kemp, the company's president. What differentiates ZeroGravity from most bedding manufacturers is flexibility. Each mattress is changeable and customizable, and offers a range of memory-foam, custom air support, natural latex, and adjustable beds in every size.

The company's flagship model, the Malibu mattress with adjustable power base, is priced anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000, though ZeroGravity has built mattresses for clients that can have ranged up to more than $100,000.

ZeroGravity's five-employee main headquarters is attached to its warehouse, and they recently started other manufacturing plants in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and California.

With GotVMail, a "reputable" appearance

Baxter says that GotVMail's Virtual Phone System for entrepreneurs is the ideal communications solution because it allows his small business to sound more professional to its clients. GotVMail allows the company to advertise a single toll-free number where callers can be directed to the sales, manufacturing and distribution departments of the business.

"I chose GotVMail because I wanted the company to look bigger," says Baxter. "People tend to buy products from you if you appear to be bigger and more reputable. This is especially true for company's selling products over the Internet, where you never know who you are dealing with on the other side."

Baxter has configured GotVMail to continue forwarding callers to separate destination numbers in the main office, so that if one person is not reachable, the system will keep forwarding to other extensions rather than being sent to voicemail.

"As the owner of the company, you are its best salesman. We can't afford to miss any phone calls, and GotVMail helps us stay in touch with our clients and prospects," says Baxter.

GoCar

GoCar hits high gear with help of GotVMail

"The Cure for the Common Tour"

Imagine sitting in a small scooter-like car, yellow with black racing stripes, whizzing along through the impossibly steep hills of San Francisco, as the storytelling car tells you the history of the Golden Gate Bridge or why the famous zigzagging Lombard Street was built so crookedly.

This unusual tourism experience, which puts the tourist — literaly — in the driver's seat, is called GoCar. The company's tagline is, "The Cure For The Common Tour."

The concept of the little talking cars, weighing just 400 pounds and seven-and-a-half feet long, was originated by Nathan Withrington, a native of Brighton, England who is a mechanical engineer and motorcycle buff, and who moved to San Francisco in 1998. Withrington and friend Alasdair Clements, a native of Scotland who has a background in finance, real estate and business operations, co-founded GoCar Rentals in 2004.

"I looked at the tourism business in San Francisco and came up with a new concept of an interactive experience, in which the tour can be as long or as short as you want it," says Withrington, the company's Chief Executive Officer.

The concept of tourism transformed

It has been nothing short of a tourism sensation. Between its 36 car fleet in San Francisco and its 20 car fleet in its GoCar franchise in San Diego, GoCar has to date served some 50,000 customers, with plans to open another franchise in Miami. Time Magazine chose GoCar as "One of The Most Amazing Inventions of 2004."

"It appeals to people who wouldn't normally take a tour because they have the freedom to be on their own. Just like a tour guide, it will crack jokes and recommend restaurants," Withrington says. "The software is what really drives the customer experience."

GotVMail helps GoCar grow

With a busy rental garage near San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf and another at Union Square, and with its San Diego franchise, the company needed a phone system that was highly adaptable and custom built, just like the GoCar itself.

With GotVMail's virtual phone system for small businesses and entrepreneurs, which comes in handy when calls to the shop are overwhelming, Withrington and Clements are assured of never missing a call from an inquiring vacationer.

"The GotVMail system handles the fact that we're growing," says Clements, GoCar's Chief Financial Officer. "We have seven to eight employees in the San Francisco shop, and everyone is multitasking. We don't have a point person to answer the phone. When the shop is very busy, and the calls reach a peak, we can intervene and re-route calls using the GotVMail system."

With GotVMail, callers hear recorded messages giving basic information about GoCar while they are on hold. "The majority of our incoming calls are about pricing. When people call our GotVMail number, they hear a message, and by the time one of our employees picks up the phone, they have gotten our pitch. We also use it to monitor our franchises in San Diego and Miami, to see how many calls they get and how quickly they pick up," Clements says.

Brand Marketers

GotVMail assists Tech-Savvy marketing firm to create buzz

A new kind of guerilla marketing

In July 2004, at the peak of the summer blockbuster movie season, moviegoers and shoppers in ten U.S. cities were awestruck by a new kind of mobile advertising.

Hundreds of young people wearing T-shirts embedded with 11-inch LCD video screens showing continuous trailers of the movie "I, Robot," fanned out to movie theaters, shopping malls, beaches and other public places across the country.

The video T-shirts, which weighed five-and-a-half pounds and had four audio speakers embedded in them, were the creation of Brand Marketers, a New York-based marketing firm for whom technological innovation has become an essential ingredient to success.

A cluttered advertising world

Brand Marketers is located in Times Square, a magnet for tourists who are flooded with advertising messages.

"If you walk outside of our offices, you see 10 billboards," says the company's creative director, Adam Hollander. "You are not targeting an audience, but just putting something up on a billboard and hoping people see it. But it doesn't talk to you."

Hollander adds, "Traditional advertising like print, TV and radio, we believe these are a passive, shotgun approach to marketing. It's highly unlikely that people are going to remember your advertising messages. What we do cuts through the clutter because we are unique and different."

What made the TV T-shirt campaign successful, Hollander says, wasn't just that the TV screens were eye-catching, but that passersby walked over to the people wearing the T-shirts to ask what they were about.

"We want to get people to interact and be engaged. It's a much richer experience we have," Hollander says.

GotVMail keeps communications seamless

With offices in New York and California, it's critical for Brand Marketers to have a phone system where inbound calls can be seamlessly transferred between employees. GotVMail allows the employees to stay connected with each other, along with keeping in touch with some of the 20,000 independent contractors — who the company calls "brand ambassadors" — across the U.S. who help with each marketing campaign.

"We started in California and moved to New York City. GotVMail made the transition seamless to our customers because we kept the California phone line and local telephone number. No one ever knew that we moved. People don't know where they are calling," Hollander says.

The employees all use Smartphones, and with GotVMail, calls can be easily transferred between the office in San Francisco and the New York office. When he is out of the office, Hollander uses GotVMail's Voicemail and Fax Delivery feature to have voicemail messages sent to his email address as an mp3 attachment. Hollander adds that he finds the myGotVMail intuitive Web management tool useful in adding extensions whenever a new intern is brought on board.

College Hunks Hauling Junk

GotVMail a hit with young, junk-hauling entrepreneurs

From cubicle to cargo van

In the summer of 2004, just months out of college, Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman were bored, toiling away in corporate office jobs in the Washington, D.C. area. They wanted a job that got them outside, required physical labor, and one where they would be their own boss.

They remembered a business plan for a junk-hauling business that Soliman had drafted while attending the University of Miami, and had won the university's $10,000 Rothschild Entrepreneurship Competition. Friedman and Soliman, friends since childhood, decided to give it a shot.

They borrowed a beat-up cargo van owned by Soliman's mother, who ran her own furniture store, and by June of 2005, they were advertising a junk-hauling business: "College Hunks Hauling Junk."

An idea takes off

The response from residents wanting to get rid of piles of old appliances and unwanted furniture in their garages or basements was overwhelming.

"Coming out of an office job, it was refreshing to be out in the fresh air," says Friedman, who at 25 is the company's president, while 24-year-old Soliman is the CEO. "But it was physically grueling."

Friedman remembers one memorable afternoon in the summer of 2005, when he and Soliman were cleaning out one client's attic in a row house.

"The house had probably been lived in since the 1960's. There was no air conditioning, it was dusty, and it was probably well over 100 degrees that day. The clutter was piled up to my shoulder," Friedman says.

Their diligence and entreprenurial spirit paid off. College Hunks Hauling Junk grossed $1.1 million in revenue in just its second year of operation. The company has eight trucks and a staff of 25 (mostly college students) in Washington D.C., and two franchises now operating in Orlando, FL, and San Francisco.

In 2007, the company won three American Marketing Association awards, recognizing their company brand, Web site, and marketing campaign.

"Clean-cut" junk-haulers

True to the company's name, each of the company's "truck captains," "wingmen," and "customer loyalty representatives" are expected to maintain a neat appearance.

"We're not expecting employees to be Mr. Universe. We just want them to know that our customers expect a friendly, polished, collegiate image. We have a dress code. Polo shirts need to be tucked in. The idea is that we're bringing a clean-cut appearance to an unglamorous industry," Friedman says.

GotVMail offers flexibility, professionalism

"Even before we opened our first franchise in Orlando, we knew we needed some sort of call center infrastructure, but didn't want to shell out money for expensive phone equipment," Friedman says.

GotVMail's outsourced Virtual Phone System provides a centralized point of contact where calls to the company's primary number, 1-800-JUNK-USA, can be easily managed. With GotVMail, calls from prospective clients looking to book a junk-removal job can be forwarded to a "Junk Removal Services" extension.

Friedman and Soliman run the operation out of a second-floor suite in a building located inside an industrial park in Kensington, MD. They can monitor incoming calls to the main Washington operation and the two franchises using GotVMail's Web-based administration tool, myGotVMail.

In fact, GotVMail's streamlined call management features were a strong selling point when the company sold its San Francisco franchise to a group of seasoned business executives.

"This business is all about customer service, and GotVMail has made a world of difference. It gives us a much-needed touch of professionalism," Friedman says.

New England Home

GotVMail: A winning blueprint for New England Home magazine

A classic old cottage on a promontory along the Maine coastline. A stately brownstone on Boston's Beacon Hill. A charming, historic farmhouse in southern Rhode Island.

These homes and many more are featured twice monthly in New England Home, billed as New England's "premiere magazine for show-casing the region's most luxurious, historical and stylish homes."

"High-end, luxury homeowner"

Catering to luxury homeowners, New England Home offers stunning photographs of such homes and fashionable decor, including city lofts, suburban estates, and oceanfront mansions, along with summer cottages and classic Colonials. There are features on home renovations and historic restorations, interviews with homeowners and designers, and introductory profiles of the area's most creative architects and interior designers.

"Our audience is the very high-end, luxury homeowner, a very affluent demographic, with the majority living in Greater Boston," says Katie W. Dammann, New England Home's marketing director. "These are people who are looking for architects and interior designers to help them resdesign their home."

Published bi-monthly from offices west of Boston in Newton, Massachusetts, New England Home also publishes an annual, "Gold Guide," which profiles top resources for homeowners, including custom builders as well as lists of antique purveyors. An Online Design Center is also available to connect homeowners with designers and builders, along with The New England Design Hall of Fame, honoring people who have made a substantial impact on home design.

A virtual company

What distinguishes New England Home from most print publications is that the company is almost completely virtual. Though the magazine has a central office housing some of the staff, most of the publication's 20 employees - including editors and writers, advertising sales, production, circulation and management - work remotely. The magazine's editor, Dan Kaplan - who also founded Anchor Communications and Lowermybills.com - is based in New Hampshire.

The virtual nature of the business is the primary reason why New England Home sought out GotVMail's virtual phone service, according to Marketing Director Dammann, who said the publisher wanted to be able to allow callers to dial a single toll-free number and reach any of the company's employees simply by dialing their extension, while appearing as though everyone was at one physical location.

Call-forwarding a key feature

"GotVMail's call-forwarding features are very good for our sales people who work in other locations, but can put our main toll-free number on their business card," says Dammann. "We have a very lean team, and GotVMail has been a huge help in allowing us to all stay connected."

Most of the magazine's remote employees have their GotVMail calls forwarded to their cellphones. Callers who reach New England Home's main greeting can either dial zero to reach a live operator, or dial among 26 different extensions to reach a specific employee or department, such as customer service or to RSVP to the magazine's annual Design Hall of Fame event.

Babysitters.com

GotVMail helps Babysitters.com Deliver Parental Peace of Mind

For every parent with young children, finding a dependable and capable babysitter can be a trying and frustrating experience, leaving them with many questions: Does the babysitter have experience? Will they show up on time? Can I trust them with my children for an evening?

That's why an increasing legion of parents relies on Babysitters.com, an online babysitter search service that connects parents with experienced babysitters.

The fast-growing Virginia-based company allows babysitters to market their services, while providing parents the tools to search for the right candidate using a simple, intuitive search feature.

Empowering Parents

"We believe we are truly empowering parents," says Michael Cravens, CEO of Babysitters.com. "Every parent has their own babysitter criteria and they have to make their own decision. We want to allow parents to find a babysitter who will take good care of their children, and give them peace of mind. The parents can have whatever level of service they desire."

Parents begin by searching for their zip code on Babysitters.com. Typically, this initial search yields dozens of personalized profiles of babysitters living in their area. Each profile includes the sitter's first name and hometown, preferences on their hourly rate and ages they work with, experience, personal information including their age, personality description, and typical availability in a given week. The profile also includes a report card providing feedback from other parents who have employed the sitter previously.

For access to Babysitters.com, parents pay a subscription fee of about $9.99 per month. In addition, they can also request a criminal background check on a babysitter, with that sitter's permission.

The Web site also allows parents to post babysitting jobs, notifying sitters of possible local area work opportunities.

Prior to posting, each babysitter profile must be approved by the Babysitters.com editorial team, which reviews them for spelling, grammar, and even takes steps to verify that the babysitter's IP address matches their hometown, ensuring they live where they say they do.

The convenience, ease-of-use, and recommendations of an increasing number of satisfied clients have led to steady growth and media exposure for Babysitters.com. The company has been featured in Oprah Magazine, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, and NBC-4 in Washington, D.C.

GotVMail Connects Babysitters.com with Babysitters, Parents

Babysitters.com is based in Cravens' home office in Leesburg, VA just outside of the nation's capitol. Currently, Craven employs 14 contract personnel who work for the company in their own home offices throughout the country.

Cravens said his company sought out GotVMail's Virtual Phone Service for entrepreneurs because it needed one centralized phone system and nationwide toll-free number where calls from customers could be easily managed and monitored.

Through the company's main GotVMail number, callers can reach any employee or department - including sales, customer support, corporate programs, affiliate programs, and even Cravens himself - despite the fact that employees are in different home office locations.

"It really saves us a ton of money for folks inside the business because they don't have to set up their own phone answering systems," Cravens says. "Plus, if I had to pinpoint one thing, I would say that it makes us sound more professional."

Cravens finds GotVMail's Web interface, myGotVMail, useful in keeping track of customer inquiries regarding billing or other matters. At the same time, GotVMail allows Babysitters.com to avoid having to assign someone to answer incoming phone calls.

"We have email customer support, but we don't offer our customers phone support. We make sure our email is covered, but we don't man the phones 24/7," Cravens says. "What's nice is that GotVMail allows us to serve our customers more efficiently. We can just go on and peek at our voicemails, and process those requests, either calling the customers back or sending them an email."

The B Spot Chicago

GotVMail helps sculpt success for Chicago's "eyebrow guru"

Chicago's brow headquarters

From the private confines of her studio in Chicago's trendy Wicker Park neighborhood, Rashida B. Adebiyi (known professionally as "Rashida B."), designs and sculpts eyebrows for everyone from celebrities, to brides-to-be, to Chicago's fashionable elite.

Rashida B.'s studio, called The B Spot Chicago, is available by appointment only, with each client receiving highly personalized attention during 20-minute grooming sessions.

The B Spot Chicago has been Chicago's brow headquarters for some 2-1/2 years, garnering features in prominent fashion-minded magazines like Vogue, Lucky, and Allure.

Rashida B., who holds a diploma in Esthetics from world-renowned Pivot Point International Beauty School in Chicago, and a Hairstyling and Makeup Artistry Certificates from Fred Segal Beauty in Los Angeles, launched her studio after deciding that brows were many women's number one beauty concern.

Business has been so good that Rashida B. is opening a second studio in the same building, while hiring three new beauty technicians.

GotVMail offers "huge business" sound

Rashida B. explored different phone answering options before settling on GotVMail's virtual phone service for small businesses and mobile entrepreneurs.

"I'm a one-woman show, but with GotVMail, it seems like I have a huge business," says Rashida B.

At one point, Rashida B. considered hiring a customer service person to answer calls from prospective clients and regulars, but that option didn't allow her to control exactly the message she wanted to send.

GotVMail's informational extension feature allowed Rashida B. to give callers recorded messages providing information about the studio, including what kinds of services are offered, hours of operation, directions, how to set up an appointment, and payment policies.

An affordable way to stay connected

"Nobody can sell your business like you do. With GotVMail, the callers hear exactly what I want them to hear," says Rashida B.

With GotVMail, Rashida B. can also collect information on who is contacting her studio. Callers are prompted to answer whether they would like to set up an appointment, whether they have been referred by another customer, and what their email address is.

GotVMail's "follow-me" calling feature allows Rashida B. to have calls forwarded to her mobile phone when she is out of the office. "I'm always out of the office, so my extension rings to my cellphone. The service has been incredible for my business," Rashida B. says.

Time for Sports

GotVMail helps craft success for woodworking prodigy

When he was 13, Richard Foster created a wooden clock designed like a tennis racket, as a gift for his tennis coach. When other members at the tennis club saw Foster's handywork, they were impressed, and Foster received 40 more orders for the tennis racket clock.

Foster's interest in woodworking and construction — he was building custom furniture at age 7 and remodeled his family's den at age 14 — was becoming more than just a weekend hobby.

While his friends' birthday wish lists likely included video games, Foster wanted the latest woodcrafts tools.

A woodworking whiz

Soon, TIME for SPORTS, personalized clocks carved out of pine in several sports designs, had been launched.

In 2003, as a high school freshman, Foster was the youngest woodworking competitor to ever appear on the Do-It-Yourself television network's Warehouse Warriors program.

In June 2005, when Foster was 16, The New York Times featured him in an article about young entrepreneurs launching successful businesses.

Today, TIME for SPORTS is a growing enterprise. Based in New Hyde Park, NY, the business consists of Foster (the company president), four part-time employees who help take orders and perform construction tasks, and a busy office with adjoining manufacturing facility. His company even co-sponsored major sporting events such as the Nasdaq-100 Tennis Open in 2005 and 2006.

Due to his young age, he was the only vendor at the tournament whose mother had to sign the sponsorship contract.

"I thought I would pursue a career in construction, but I never imagined that the company would go in this direction," Foster says.

GotVMail helps respond to customer orders

With so many orders and customer inquiries to handle, Foster turned to GotVMail's Virtual Phone System for entrepreneurs to help manage the incoming calls.

Not only does GotVMail help present a professional appearance to callers, but Foster uses the system to help monitor and sort calls so that they can be directed to the right person.

Each of the company's part-time employees are based in New York. GotVMail's call-forwarding capabilities especially come in handy when TIME for SPORTS is sponsoring an event in another part of the country, where the company's wares are on display at a booth.

Foster adds that using GotVMail's Web interface, called myGotVMail, he can view incoming calls to the company's main phone line and see any missed calls where the person did not leave a voicemail.

"This allows me to constantly see who called, if calls were missed, and has in turn brought in many more sales that might typically have been lost," Foster says. "For a business like ours, responding promptly to each customer's call is very important, and GotVMail helps us do that."

Foster also uses GotVMail's Voicemail Delivery feature to have voicemails emailed to him as MP3 attachments, which he can listen to on his Blackberry, and be instantly alerted when a call comes in using GotVMail's notification feature.

"As our needs change while we are traveling to an event, or when we bring in new employees, it's very easy to go into the GotVMail system and change settings on the fly," Foster says.

Modern Mom

GotVMail offers Momcentric online magazine productivity, flexibility, enhancement

A focus on the work-life balance

When Lolita Carrico was pregnant with her first child, she was surprised by the lack of fun and informative resources for moms-to-be who work long hours and want to maximize their time with their children and spouse. At the time, she was a public relations executive working 80 hours per week, looking for advice on the latest stylish tot hip-carrier, or reviews of mom-friendly sport-utility vehicle, or advice on how to transition back into a career after having children.

"Most of the other motherhood-related sites are focused more on raising children and taking care of yourself during pregnancy," Carrico notes. "What I thought was missing was a focus on the woman, and how she can balance 'mom-hood' with a career and spouse."

So Carrico launched a business to provide the very service she was looking for, an online magazine and networking community for mothers, called ModernMom.com.

"Our focus really is more on the mother. We offer things that moms are most interested in and find the most popular, such as beauty, fashion, and parenting," says Carrico, now a mother of two boys.

A must-visit for moms

Carrico founded the business in 2002, and while it started out as a side project, it has grown to a thriving destination point for mothers of every age and career focus, brimming with entertaining and helpful advice and reviews of all types of mom-friendly products.

Sections include "Modern Mom TV," a series of video segments including one with a celebrity makeup artist; "Must Haves," a series of product reviews on everything from bamboo platters to gadgets to stay organized; "Ask The Experts," providing interviews with well-known pediatricians; and even a news section which has articles, for instance, on infant products being recalled for safety reasons.

A Modern Mom subscription also includes the Modern Mom Minute, a daily newsletter sent via email to 115,000 moms, and access to message boards where moms can trade stories and advice with each other.

Modern Mom has been featured in Entrepreneur magazine, ABC News, Redbook, the Fox Morning Show, and CNBC. The modernmom.com site gets about 500,000 unique visits per month.

GotVMail connects Modern Mom callers to anyone, anywhere

Based on the iconic Sunset Strip of West Hollywood, CA, Carrico's business comprises a main office with five members of its executive management team, along with some 30 freelancers and advertising sales representatives who are based throughout the U.S.

"Because we're an online magazine that's all about working moms and flexibility, we allow our sales people and freelancers to work from home all over the country," Carrico says.

GotVMail's virtual phone service offers Modern Mom the flexibility to hire staff who can work in distributed locations, while allowing callers to reach anyone in the company through the firm's main toll-free number to be connected to any of them.

"What we were looking for in a phone system was something that would give us continuity," says Carrico. "Rather than having our writers and freelancers use their own phone numbers, it makes it easy to have one central number where they can be reached. It gives us a professional presence, and it's easy to monitor company activity."

Carrico adds, "Our freelancers and writers are thrilled when we explain the system, that we can give out a single 800-number where they can be reached."

Carrico has a busy travel schedule, and she finds GotVMail's "follow-me" call-forwarding capability very helpful to allow people to reach her on her cellphone.

"I don't have to give out my cellphone number for when I am on the road. It's so easy to route calls wherever you are, whether you just need the calls to go to your office, or cellphone," Carrico says.

The GotVMail system also allows Modern Mom's executive staff to work from home about half the time and never miss an important call from advertisers, partners or writers.

Small Cellars

GotVMail helps uncork growth for wine cellar builder

Small Cellars, a national franchisor based in Birmingham, AL, specializes in creating small wine cellars in new and existing homes. The company focuses its efforts on a few key areas — low cost, fast installation, and simple beauty. GotVMail provides Small Cellars with a nationwide toll-free number, along with a feature-rich system that allows potential customers calling for sales information to be transferred to the nearest franchised installer.

Small Cellars was recently featured in PC Magazine as part of its Small Business Boot Camp article, "Virtual Phone Systems for Better Customer Support."

Click here to read the article