An Advocate for Wireless TEM

Tim Wise and Scott Fogle co-founded Advocate Networks seven years ago as a telecom agency, but today count wireless telecom expense management as the fastest-growing segment of their business.

These two Eagle Scouts launched the carrier services agency in July 2001, but realized a couple of months into it that the time-to-revenue was longer than was sustainable for the fledgling business and evolved it into a consultancy. The formula was familiar to the partners; Wise’s background is as a lawyer and Fogle’s is in professional services. “It’s called survival,” Wise said about Advocate’s accelerated path toward a new business model — one that was hastened further by the market impacts of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Advocate’s further evolution brought on a formalized managed services offering in 2003. “It’s really where our customers pushed us,” said Wise. “The managed services offering for us was effectively operationalizing our consulting business, or creating a recurring model around our consulting business.”

Today, the 32-employee, Atlanta-based agency is in the Inc. 5000 and will do approximately $7 million in revenue this year via two divisions: 65 percent consulting and 35 percent managed services, powered by the Rivermine TEM software application. Specifically, the mobile management offering makes up about 40 percent of revenue, or about 15 percent of Advocate’s overall revenue.

Advocate currently has about 15,000 devices under management; and although that number might be small in comparison to other TEM providers, this Southeast regional agent deems wireless TEM its fastest-growing revenue stream and Wise said that’s where he sees the most demand in the marketplace. “Wireless continues to expand and has historically not been centrally managed by IT,” explained Wise, saying that since wireless spend now exceeds wireline spend, this has become a pain point for IT departments.

After evaluating several TEM platforms, Advocate chose to partner with Rivermine because they felt the way Rivermine was positioned in the marketplace aligned with Advocate’s goals — Advocate could provide the midmarket solution while Rivermine was focused predominantly on the Fortune 500. Advocate targets the midmarket, companies with $1 million to $20 million in annual telecom spend. The software solution allows Advocate to execute inventory management, bill management, order management, change management and vendor management, charging a fee for the services and sometimes leveraging the carrier piece of that to subsidize that cost or reduce that cost. The company also operates a wireless help desk, which provides activation and user support, technical support and migration support.

Advocate attributes its success in the expense management arena to a truly customer-centric product. Even though Wise and Fogle didn’t build it themselves (and Wise suggests partnering with an expert TEM platform provider opposed to taking on the huge task of building it yourself), they chose a partner, built their offering and go into each engagement with the goal to provide solutions very specific to each unique client.

“Where we’re successful is where we go in on a consulting engagement, help clients understand first their current state, help them map out their business and then it’s easy to position an ongoing mobile program,” said Wise. He explained that the consulting business is the perfect lead-in to selling TEM, and once he can show the client the need for it, he lays out the options for a solution. They can deploy internal resources and manage it themselves, they can even look to other players in the TEM market, or they can, of course, partner with someone they already work with and trust, Advocate.

Wise said Advocate has a different perspective than most of its competitors. He said the way in which Advocate formed its offering, and continues to evolve it, is much more focused on the customer and its business requirements versus the model of creating a service and then finding a market after the fact. Wise advised that agents talk with their customers first and truly understand their requirements before running out and partnering with any TEM provider. Agents must understand their customer segments before assuming there’s a blanket solution for everyone, he said. Playing a consultant role