Company: New England in Touch
Owner: Sherri Ferretti
Number of employees: 20
Type of business: Answering Service
Year Founded: 1992
Revenues: WND
For Sherri Ferritti there isn’t an obstacle that she feels she can’t overcome. Sitting in a corner office off Main Street in East Greenwich, flowers on her desk, classical music softly playing in the background, with the afternoon sun streaming in through open blinds, there is little evidence of the frenetic pace usually associated with a busy 24-hour answering service. But Ferretti seems to find the time to enjoy things like music, flowers and the mid-autumn sun. It is something she’s learned to do. For too many years, it seemed to her, that all that mattered was making her business, New England in Touch, successful.
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First in 1994 and then two years later she was stricken with two unrelated cancers, the last with doctors giving her a 30 percent chance of survival.
“Anybody who tells you, you have a 30 percent chance of survival, obviously your fear is death. You fear that — if not for yourself — you fear that for your family,” she said. “I focused on this (the business), but this was not my priority. All of a sudden I had a whole new perspective on life. I learned to enjoy my business and not live for my business.”
And the joy, and pride, is evident. Now with 20 employees (half full-time), she makes sure that the atmosphere at the offices at 655 Main Street is comfortable and pleasant. The outer office, and her own, are spacious and bright, giving more the impression of a professional office than an answering service. In another room are the operators, busy answering calls for the hundreds of clients that range from two hot lines to tow services and doctors offices. On a lower level is a training room, a kitchen and a work-out room that Ferretti is building for employees.
These are different times for Ferretti, who was a young mother within a year after graduation from high school, divorced a year later and working at a bank and eventually a real estate office. It was after the real estate boom of the ’80s, she said, when the real estate firm she worked for “took all of the money they could out of the inventory with every bank they could, and then went bankrupt five years later.”
She had 30 days notice that she would be out of work.
“I knew I would have no job and we always had an answering service in the real estate business,” said Ferretti, 38. “I thought it could not be hard to do. To take a message and just be nice to people.”
In 1992 Ferretti opened New England in Touch. She was her only employee — “I was the answering service” — and her client list numbered two. With no money to advertise she relied on word of mouth and her networking with the area Chamber of Commerce and other groups.
“I had to learn everything from ground zero,” said Ferretti, who visited answering services in Connecticut to help her learn the business. “I learn fast,” she said. “I pick up and learn techniques fast. I think the quality that I had, is if you believe in something, I’m able to sell it. I think that helps me a lot.”
Her drive to succeed helped her as well. “I would go home and have a computer at home on my bureau in the bedroom,” she said. “Once I got there they would call forward to my computer at home. That was my life for quite a long time.”
Once she got into radio dispatching she no longer could work from home, often sleeping at the office, sometimes bringing her teenage son, Damien with her. Now 22, Damien is a student at the Community College of Rhode Island, where he is studying law enforcement.
These days it is much different. The business has expanded to several hundred clients, from the original two, and includes a number of non-profits (about 5 percent of her business) and manning the Rape Crisis Center and Domestic Violence hot lines. Training and experience are important to Ferretti, whose operators are trained by the state to handle the hot lines, and by her own staff to assure they meet her standards.
“This is not the type of work that just anybody can do,” Ferretti said. “It takes a special person to do this type of business. You have to be sympathetic to people, lend an ear to that person who was dogged all day by the company, who never got called back and then at 5:15 gets us. “You can’t just come in here and answer a phone,” she said. “You need to know a little bit, a little history of the people we answer for.”
Ferretti keeps reminding herself of how it is to deal with callers, still working as many as 25 hours a week on the telephone, the 7 a.m. person (with four others), and at times, the check out person at 5 o’clock.
“It’s important when you own and run a business, that you’ve got to work at the business too,” she said. And always at her side is Rosalie Provencher, her mother, who first got involved by hanging around the office trying to give her daughter some help and encouragement, and then winning a job as bookkeeper, receptionist, and always, mom. Never more important than as mom during her two health crises.
“My mother came through for me in the last crisis and she came through again,” Ferritti said.
And all the while, Ferretti kept a sense of humor. When she lost her hair as a result of chemotherapy, she would come to the office in different wigs, different colored hats.
“I really came up with some pretty good outfits. That’s the only way you can get through things like that, not focus on what’s bad about what’s happening to you. A lot of spiritual stuff. I believe the power of mind is a lot and you can overcome just about everything. Every obstacle you can overcome. I’ve proved that.”
