Lawrence Hunt is CEO of Silverjet, the exclusively business class airline serving New York, London, and (from November) Dubai.  Silverjet was a sponsor of The 2007American Business Awards.

What book are you currently reading?
I’m not a great believer in business books, but one I’ve been coming back to again and again is Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by the Brazilian businessman Ricardo Semler. His handling of human resources was ingenious—and transformed his family business, SEMCO, into a multi-billion-dollar business empire. I find this book an inspiration.

David Erickson, founder and CEO of Free Conferencing Corporation of America, won a Stevie Award for Best Executive in the 2007 American Business Awards.  We look at the vision and strategic initiatives behind his successful company.

David Erickson gives new meaning to the phrase “chronic entrepreneurialism.” With more than a decade of telecommunications experience and an unparalleled market vision, he designed and implemented FreeConferenceCall.com from the ground up, including the current network infrastructure that offers conferencing facilities in twelve cities across the United States and in ten European countries.

At the same time, Erickson has instilled a strong sense of commitment throughout the organization by creating long-standing, value-based client and employee relationships. “It has been a true honor to be recognized for such a prestigious award as The Stevies,” said Erickson “but I share this accolade with the entire company as a total team effort in helping our global customers reap all the benefits of our conferencing solutions.”

A Telecom Industry Thought Leader
Unlike other competitive offerings from paid and non-paid audio conferencing services, FreeConferenceCall.com’s pioneering all-digital network is built on voice routers versus analog-based conference bridges that can be prone to static and other noise. Says Erickson: "Our mission is to redefine the one-to-many communications industry by providing high quality features, excellent customer service, and the best pricing models available."

As a telecom industry thought leader, Erickson forged relationships with local carriers to deliver a powerful PSTN (public switched telephone network). The PSTN is the concentration of the world's public circuit-switched telephone networks, and FreeConferenceCall.com uses it to deliver unparalleled, high-quality audio conferencing services. Originally a network of fixed-line analog telephone systems, the PSTN is now almost entirely digital—and includes mobile as well as fixed telephones. 

New Hassle-free Services
In 2006 the company unveiled several new services that provide customers with a multitude of options for their conferencing needs, including SimpleVoiceBox 2.0, the industry’s first free unlimited-length voice mailbox system; and the industry’s first free conference-recording service, which can be utilized for free unlimited dial-in playback, file download, web streaming, RSS, and Podcast conversion. In addition, the company announced the launch of SimpleVoiceCenter 2.0 (free voice-messaging system), SimpleEvent (supporting up to 1,000 participants on a single conference call), and an International Teleconferencing Service available in ten countries in Europe. David Erickson’s no-nonsense approach to conferencing has removed the hassles created by other providers.

An Essential Tool for Non Profit Organizations
FreeConferenceCall.com’s no-reservation system has opened the doors to new users, easily enabling them to optimize its services.  Among these, several non-profit organizations have benefited.

The Kidney Cancer Association (KCA) selected FreeConferenceCall.com as its primary conferencing service of record two years ago. Headquartered in Chicago, IL, KCA consists of 30,000 people throughout North America, the European Union, and 100 nations globally. It is a charitable organization made up of patients, family members, physicians, researchers, and other health professionals. It funds, promotes, and collaborates on research projects with the National Cancer Institute, the American Society for Clinical Oncology, the American Urologic Association, and other institutions. Additionally, KCA educates families and physicians and serves as an advocate on behalf of patients at state and federal levels.

Conference calling plays a pivotal role as an invaluable forum to share information related to this debilitating disease. “We hold conference calls with groups of patients throughout the world in need of medical information in a highly collaborative environment,” said William P. Bro, KCA’s chief executive officer. “In addition, we hold similar calls with medical advisory board members and our own board of directors.”

Before selecting FreeConferenceCall.com, KCA consumed up to 8,000 minutes per month on an array of paid conferencing services that caused a monetary drain. The charity required a cost-effective conferencing service, and this led KCA to select FreeConferenceCall.com as its conferencing provider in 2005. Since then, KCA has saved thousands of dollars annually—money that can now be applied to its core mission of education outreach, direct mail, and funding of research related to kidney cancer.

Bro has recently started using other FreeConferenceCall.com services such as free conference recording. Said Bro: “We are now taking conference recordings, converting them to Podcasts, and making them available on our website for members unable to attend a call.”

The Salvation Army has also selected FreeConferenceCall.com as its primary conferencing service. Over 31 million Americans receive assistance from The Salvation Army each year through an array of social services that range from providing food for the hungry, relief for disaster victims, assistance for the disabled, outreach to the elderly and ill, clothing and shelter to the homeless, and opportunities for underprivileged children.

“Audio conferencing plays an important part in the coordination of our business efforts, so we needed a solution that was scalable and easy to use,” stated Clarence White, chief information officer for The Salvation Army’s US Western Territory. “A ‘must-have’ of the selected solution was its capability to support conference calls with as few as three people on a call, as well as ones involving hundreds of individuals.”
 
“The Salvation Army is a large organization that requires an enterprise-level implementation of our free conference call service,” added David Erickson. “Through the FreeConferenceCall Enterprise Edition, we are able to provide them with their own custom phone number that is unique to the organization, as well as individual conference dial-in numbers and access codes for each employee.”

Additional features such as the free conference recording and playback functionality help Salvation Army employees significantly.   Says White: “If an employee is traveling, he or she can simply download the recording to a PC and retrieve it with the click of a mouse.”
 
Since deploying FreeConferenceCall.com in May 2006, The Salvation Army has recognized numerous benefits, the most important being cost savings. According to White, the company is saving significant amounts on conference calls—sometimes up to $10,000 in a given month.

Helping the Legal Industry
Free Conferencing Corporation helps many law firms save time, money and resources. With collaborative communications playing a pivotal role for attorneys, Free Conferencing Corp. has consistently provided these legal eagles with a trusted and reliable audio-conferencing platform to conduct business.

“We rely upon audio conferencing as a vital communications tool for our firm—specifically our field sales force,” explained Steven Bratcher, regional vice president of marketing for Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. “With FreeConferenceCall.com, we have increased our use of audio conferencing ten-fold. Comparing this to our previous provider … our annual conferencing costs would top $50,000 per year. With FreeConferenceCall.com, this number is now zero.”

“Law firms are perfect consumers of our service since much of their business focuses on tele-collaboration—at any given moment of the day,” stated Erickson.  Additional services provide users with the ability to play back important meetings and conference calls. Many law firms utilize free conference recording for sales meetings, training and leadership development, and mentoring programs. It provides an interactive platform to communicate a message and give employees the opportunity to listen to it at a more convenient time.

So What Makes It Viable?
By sending users to specific switches, FreeConferenceCall.com drives traffic to underutilized telephone company networks and receives a small marketing fee for creating that traffic.  The real “free” here is the use of FreeConferenceCall.com’s all-digital conferencing equipment.  Essentially, FreeConferenceCall.com provides its customers with the free lunch—they just need to get to the restaurant.  Additionally, the company now serves over five million users monthly, and many of those users utilize other FreeConferenceCall.com pay-for-use services.

FreeConferenceCall.com has built a series of value-added telecom services around this model, and with the pervasiveness of "virtually free" calling plans associated with traditional-, Internet (VoIP)-, and cell-phone-based calling plans, the cost of making long-distance calls to these switches is minimal. It is a misconception that, in order to conduct a teleconference, you need to have an expensive phone system to host and manage it, or sign up to costly "per drink" services.  FreeConferenceCall.com offers the best of both worlds: quality connections and an easy-to-use Web interface and reporting, free of charge.

About David Erickson
David Erickson is founder and CEO of Free Conferencing Corporation of America, the leading provider of free collaborative communications solutions.
Prior to founding FreeConferenceCall.com in 2001, Mr. Erickson owned and operated over a dozen emerging companies within the construction, financial services, and technology sectors.   He served as president of ThePacketCenter.com from 1998 to 2006, where he and two engineers from Bell Labs developed and marketed a firewall-friendly version of Microsoft’s NetMeeting. In 1995, Mr. Erickson began a three-year stint as president and founder of vDesk Corporation, where he created a call transfer and switching system for Voice Video and Data over the ISDN network.  At vDesk, he was responsible for operations in the USA, the United Kingdom, and Holland.

Erickson is married with two children and resides in Long Beach, CA, He enjoys surfing the California coast, duck hunting, and traveling abroad.  Erickson is also a community activist with his support of “Children with Homeless Mothers” in his hometown.

About Free Conferencing Corporation of America©
Free Conferencing Corporation of America, with headquarters in Long Beach, California, is the industry pioneer and leading provider of free collaborative-communications solutions. With more than five million users per month and more joining daily, the company’s FreeConferenceCall.com flagship solution offers a high-quality, reservation-less conferencing service that is extremely easy to use. More than 100 Fortune 500 companies are presently optimizing FreeConferenceCall.com, including public sector agencies. Unlike other competitive offerings from paid and non-paid audio-conferencing services, FreeConferenceCall.com’s pioneering all-digital network is built on voice routers versus analog-based conference bridges that can be prone to static and other noise. FreeConferenceCall.com uses the PSTN (public switched telephone network) to deliver unparalleled, high-quality audio conferencing.  For more information, visit www.freeconferencecall.com or call 877.482.5838.

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

Fast Lane : The official General Motors blog, with their views on the US motor industry, strikes, etc.
Digital Rules/The Blog : Online comments from Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes.
Innovative on Purpose : Blogs, newsletters, surveys on innovation from marketer Jeffrey Phillips.
The New York Times : Now entirely free, including fascinating early archives from 1851 when the paper first started.