Recently, I was able to sit down and chat with one of LeafTech’s longest standing vendors. Scott Eastman is a really cool guy, but I’ll let him tell you about himself. If you have a chance, go tell Scott he is awesome on his LinkedIn Profile HERE. I think he would really get a kick out of it!

But on to the interview:

Thank you for participating in this interview Scott! We are so happy to have you, and Talkdesk, represented on our new website.

I’m humbled to have been asked to do the interview!  How’s my hair? Seriously… I do appreciate the opportunity to continue to grow our partnership with LeafTech.

You look better than you need to for a written interview, Scott! Would you mind briefly explaining who you are and what you do?

I’m a native of Northern Colorado.  I started my telecommunications career selling cell phones when they were still 3 watt bag phones and HUGE hand held phones.

From there I worked with a privately held Internet Service Provider (ISP), Front Range Internet, Inc (FRII) for 7 years. This is where I began to start my career in “channel / indirect” sales and started meeting a lot of IT vendors throughout the Front Range of Colorado. Believe it or not, back in those early days I sold a TON of dialup services for businesses that were just starting to use the Internet at their business. Email wasn’t used much at all in those days… if anything we’d provide a “free” BusinessName@frii.com email address and no one would use it.  

Fast forward another 10 – 12 years I have had the great pleasure of running a number of successful channel organizations throughout the Mountain and Central Regions of the US. Today, I run the Indirect Channel for the Mountain Region of Talkdesk.  Talkdesk it the fastest growing CCaaS provider on the globe (literally…). Talkdesk has approximately 1500 global customers and was built on a modern cloud architecture called microservices (not old school rack and stack server cluster technology).  Because of this, we are the first and only provider in the space to offer a 100% uptime SLA in writing for our clients. (Check out Talkdesk HERE!)

Wow Scott, that sounds like a full and exciting career! I hear you ‘go way back’ with LeafTech too! Would you mind explaining when your relationship with the company began?

Yip.  Probably close to 10 years ago, going back to my days with ADVODA, a regional channel master agency still located here in Greenwood Village.

DSL was all the rage.  UC was in its infancy. VoIP was a 4 letter word for most customers because the Internet just wasn’t where it is today. Customers wanted all the cool features and functionality but hated the reliability and the call quality.

We’ve come a long way as an industry where today 100M fiber or coax seems like an entry level starting point for Internet and UCaaS and CCaaS are in almost every business discussion.

Any good stories about Chris and Rick from the golden days?

Happy to say… Chris, Rick and I have been “all business” throughout the years!  So no, I don’t have any good “you wouldn’t believe what those guys did when XYZ happened”!

Haha, no worries Scott. Working with many different businesses, you must get to see quite a variety of company cultures. I personally feel something is different at LeafTech than other places I have worked; with your perspective can you help me define what is different about LeafTech than other companies you work with?

LeafTech does business with Integrity.  It’s “customer first” and they treat their customers as if they are part of their family (the family you like, right?).  

This is a big deal.  LeafTech will never oversell.  They never sell to a “spiff” or an “incentive”.  I know of a number of cases where they’ve walked from business because it wasn’t good for LeafTech or the end customer.  That is HARD TO DO. But they’ve chosen to build their business the right way. Methodically. Plan the work, work the plan.  Old school, right? Building a successful business doesn’t happen overnight and these guys knew that.

Another thing I’d state is they never stop learning.  They have always been willing to learn and get better.  They’ve surrounded themselves with industry professionals that fill the gaps where they aren’t the subject matter experts.  

Definitely a family I’m happy to be a part of! LeafTech is going through some growth right now- any advice for the company as a whole or our new team members?

Trust the LeafTech system.  Plug in to the system and know that it works!  I’m not saying that new team members won’t bring new insight on how to do things better and more efficiently.  They will / should do so. Rick and Chris will absolutely take this feedback for sure.

However, the foundation has been built and that foundation is what makes them successful.  Any additional advice?  Be flexible when it comes to software.  Become an “expert generalist”. The world of software is advancing and changing so rapidly that what we look at as the norm today will likely be old and outdated in 2 – 3 years.

Thank you for sharing your advice and time with us today Scott! We appreciate you and hope that our long relationship continues to flourish!

I have no doubt that our partnership will continue to thrive for the foreseeable future.  Thanks so much for allowing me to work with your team!

Interview by Alia Davis