RingCentral Superfan Kurt Steele has been an entrepreneur for much of his life. His current venture, TruNorth Global, is focused on delivering value to an underserved market: small and medium-sized businesses.
But from its inception, TruNorth faced a unique challenge: the members of its team were (and are) scattered across the country. TruNorth has employees in California, Texas, Wisconsin and on the East Coast. Kurt himself is in Arizona.
Kurt and his business partners knew when they launched TruNorth that they’d need to coordinate plans and develop strategy across three time zones. Therefore, a phone system that could connect the company’s 10 employees was a must-have.
TruNorth, itself a cloud systems provider, recognized the value of hosted PBX phone technology. Kurt noted that RingCentral’s feature set was the most compelling reason for the company.
“RingCentral was a no-brainer for us. We took a look at other products, but they only did 25 percent of what we wanted to do,” he said.
Kurt and his employees also liked the fact that RingCentral’s culture aligned with the one that TruNorth was trying to cultivate. Both provide a cloud-based business service, and both are innovators within their respective sectors. In addition, both comapnies try to maintain a “start-up” mindset.
“We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously, and RingCentral is the same way,” Kurt indicated. “It was a great cultural fit for us.”
TruNorth plans to grow its footprint in the coming months. Thanks to RingCentral and other cloud-based tools, TruNorth can easily and effectively get things done – even with a fully virtual workforce.
That setup is serving TruNorth well, Kurt said. RingCentral and its mobile apps, in particular, make TruNorth’s remote-work arrangement possible.
“We’re still spread out, and we’re still running the business the way we started it,” Kurt enthused. “RingCentral is serving us great.”
Originally published Dec 10, 2012, updated Aug 07, 2020
