Today we’d like to introduce you to Kyle Burt.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Kyle. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I was a corporate soldier. I spent 10 years climbing the ladder with AT&T and that is exactly how I found my way to Dallas (AT&T’s Global HQ).
Then something remarkable happened, a series of events unfolded to create the perfect storm in 2015.
My daughter was born, my wife almost didn’t make it, the left side of my body was temporarily paralyzed for 6 months from a vaccination fluke, and my boss called threatening to take away a sale I had previously worked hard for.
The way that AT&T undervalues its employees still baffles me to this day. It doesn’t matter if you make Diamond Club (Top 2% of sales people globally) or hit your sales quotas consistently for years. All that matters is what you did this morning.
So I did what had to be done. I quit. I made other plans.
I had a vision for something more, something different. I grew tired of being told what to “sell” to my customers and frankly, they started to get tired of the weekly account manager sales pitch.
I charted my own path and rather than “sell” my customers cloud & telecom services, I turned the tables (literally) and became their biggest advocate in the space.
Rather than sit across from customers and pitch them the new service of the week, I built relationships and formed communities.
Now instead of my customers sitting through 3 separate meetings with account managers from 3 separate companies, all they need is 1 meeting with my team and I. We ethically pit 300+ companies against one another to earn a customer’s business for commercial internet service, business phone systems, managed cloud services, and cybersecurity advancements.
It is game changing for anyone that has previously dealt with the revolving door of sales people in and out of an organization. We eliminate elongated sales cycles and catch the right solutions for the right customers, in half the time.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Year one in business was phenomenal, surprisingly. Everything was trending upwards, customers were happy, our partnerships were thriving, but then, just like the movies, the emperor strikes back.
Enter AT&T again. When I left AT&T I did not completely sever the relationship. I embraced the opportunity to partner with them and partake in a sell with model (partner with AT&T account managers to better serve customers).
This model worked incredibly well in 2016 and continues to work today, however Jan 2017 brought in some big changes.
Our revenue came to a complete standstill.
Despite all of the hard work my team put in for 2016; we earned the rookie of the year award for Mobility, we were trending just under 7 figures on paper, and had grown our account base 10x that year.
AT&T changed the process and procedures, and back dated it. They charged us back (took away money) for the previous year based on these new changes and they claim to this day that they are in the right.
That’s right. They cut off all the money they were paying us, seemingly suddenly.
There are many more details, but the macro is this; what they did was wrong no doubt, but it was my fault for going all in on AT&T.
This event could have shut us down, it probably should have. Fortunately I was wise enough to start diversifying a few months earlier and I am so thankful for that.
The lesson learned is to build in multiple streams of income and not to rely on any one person or any one company entirely.
I’m not mad at AT&T, it’s just business, although they could learn a thing or two about kindness and empathy.
Please tell us about Catch Solutions.
Business is war. Perception is reality.
We help companies dominate technology in very crucial areas of their business; internet access, phone systems, cloud services, and cybersecurity.
We do this by ethically pitting the top companies in the world against each other, as well as laser focused disrupters that you maybe have never ever heard of before. We pit them against each other to earn the customer’s business, trust, and the right solution to achieve the desired results.
The ultimate goal, is digital transformation. With unemployment at an all-time low, attracting and retaining both millennials and gen Z’ers requires a company to have attractive, simple to use technology and benefits such as work from anywhere. It’s all centered around user experience for customers and employees.
With remote workers, how do you ensure that productivity is up and your employees are actually utilizing the technology tools that you’ve spent money on?
This is where we fit best by leveraging an integrated approach. Your company’s productivity tools such as G Suite (Google partner) should talk to your CRM (Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho) and be fully integrated into your phone system (RingCentral, 8×8, Vonage) followed closely by encouraging utilization of these tools by leveraging machine learning and big data.
All together, the macro of the situation is that companies can hire faster, grow bigger, and disrupt the market in lieu of facing disruption themselves.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I would have put more focus on what I now call the with factor. Ever since becoming my own marketer, I had been going solo and I saw mediocre results.
The second that I started collaborating with others, my business and influence in the market exploded.
The with factor is about teaming up with potential partners, helping competitors, and collaborating with entrepreneurs and creators.
Once I started doing this, (I.E. #CoffeeWithKyles) everything changed, for the better.
Contact Info:
- Address: 7700 Windrose Ave. Ste. G300
Plano, TX 75024 - Website: http://www.catchcloud.com/
- Phone: 214-614-0074
- Email: kyle@catchcloud.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/catch.kyle
- Facebook: facebook.com/catchkyle
- Twitter: twitter.com/catchkyle
- Other: www.CoffeeWithKyles.com
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
