When Atse Onuwaje launched nationwide auto transport & engineering management company Fortecho LLC in 2017, he didn’t just have a dream. He had a plan in place to actualize it. A plan to create a business his customers and team would be equally enthusiastic about.
As someone who admits to being motivated by critical thinking, Atse is achieving his goal of improving quality while reducing operational cost through clear thinking, apt management, and timely digital services.
These attributes gave Fortecho a head start in the highly competitive logistics industry and allowed his company to survive the throes of the pandemic. Today, Fortecho is a growing business that does car shipping, facilities management, and truck load shipment across the country.
In our customer spotlight, Fortecho Founder Atse Onuwaje shares insights that propelled his business from the first months on, and explains how MightyCall proved a vital solution for Fortecho well ahead of the 2020 work at home revolution.
“Working from home is easy on the team and cuts costs”
The first years after launch are ground-setting for a business. According to Investopedia, 20 percent of new businesses shut down in their first 12 months. The top reasons remain ineffective business planning and management.
Launching with clear business goals can become a safeguard against starting your business off the wrong foot, Atse explains.
“Fortecho is a company in the transportation and facilities management industry so there’s an engineering side and a logistics side.
“The transportation side is a big side of our business. [That’s why] one of our immediate challenges was to reduce our costs of operations so we can give our clients a [very] reduced price in doing business with us.”
Several years before the COVID pandemic shut down offices across the globe, Atse understood that the fastest way to cut costs was to ensure remote work for his nationally-distributed employees.
“Working from home is much easier for the team, and the cost of operations becomes more reduced. With digital infrastructure in place, my staff werewas already working from home when the pandemic hit, so we didn’t have to cope with the new idea of remote work.”
Regardless of outside circumstances, remote work is proven to cut about $4,000 per year for workers and from $11,000 for businesses that let employees work from home even part-time. And that’s not even mentioning office rental costs which amount to thousands of dollars per year.
“MightyCall has really improved the costs of doing business”
For a transportation company to properly function, every detail of every day must be synced between clients, managers, and drivers down to the minute. Nowhere is timing as critical as with logistics.
With the greater part of operations and service done via phone, one of the pillars of a transportation company is a business phone system with advanced features that brings the whole team “under one roof”.
“Since we’re a logistics company, it was very important that we have the call recording feature as default. When you look at the price range, most companies don’t offer the call recording feature by default. That was very important for us because we need to have our calls documented. What is also very impressive about MightyCall is the long time that the call recordings stay on the server. We found that very useful.”
For Atse and his team, MightyCall VoIP with its dozens of small business features also made it easy to work remotely. And not just across town, but across the globe.
“With the VoIP phone system from MightyCall, we were ahead of the game when the pandemic started. With call transfer to any team member anywhere, I can take my business calls from home and I can transfer calls to someone else in another country. Likewise, a team member in another country can take calls and transfer them to me.”
“You’re always involved in quality”
Every aspiring business owner wants to provide standout quality for their clients. But not every business knows how to connect the dots between team care and client care.
“[From the beginning] you have to present yourself as a very competitive company. One of the major influences in offering a very competitive price is lowering your own cost of operations while maintaining quality standards.
“As soon as possible, if you can develop ideas to reduce operational costs, that is the best start for a growing business.”
Atse recommends a business to brainstorm savings while still in the preparatory or earliest stages of launching. For example, you can easily save up on staffing with outsourcing, skip office rent with a virtual office environment, and let go of hardware thanks to mobile technologies.
“There are various digital services that can help you reduce the cost of operations. Use them to make your business competitive. The rest is endurance and patience.”
“I’m motivated when I think about overcoming a task”
Like every small business in the nation, Atse’s business has suffered the scar of COVID-19, including a troubling spring quarter in terms of finances. But his entrepreneurial spirit remains unshakeable.
This is what Atse owes to his “ability to take on new tasks” with curiosity and critical thinking.
“I pride myself as someone who likes to think. I would say I draw inspiration a lot from the things around me. If I’m involved in something where I need to think, to pull out resources from my brain, I get motivation from that.”
With the same quantity of “water”, i.e., business resources, seeing the glass as half-full or half-empty depends only on the business owner’s mindset.
In the end, the difference between the business owners who close shop in those first few challenging 12 months and those who stick around for the next 20 years is seeing challenges as opportunities. Even better, transforming each challenge into an opportunity.
As Atse sums up,
“In everything I do, when I’m struggling with it, I always see that as something to make my life interesting. And as long as life is interesting, I think life is good.”
Learn more about MightyCall
For all small business owners out there, we’ve created an out-of-this-world fast, mobile, and budget-friendly business phone system. We’ll help your team talk anytime, anywhere, and about anything, at a stunning price.
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