CEO Robert Garry discusses how The POTS Box helps businesses upgrade critical communication systems and seize new opportunities in telecom.
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Show Notes:
In this episode of Mission Matters, Adam Torres interviews Robert Garry, CEO of The POTS Box, about how his company is transforming telecom by replacing outdated copper phone lines with modern digital solutions. Garry explains the impact of the FCC’s copper phase-out, the benefits of POTS line replacement, and how The POTS Box’s partner program empowers businesses to expand their offerings and revenue.
About The POTS Box
The POTS Box delivers a turnkey, partner-ready solution that replaces legacy copper POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines with modern LTE, fiber, or Ethernet connectivity—without ripping out existing life-safety or specialty devices.
From fire alarm panels and elevator phones to fax machines, ATMs, and point-of-sale terminals, millions of endpoints still depend on analog dial tone. FCC Order 19-72A1 has deregulated copper, and major carriers plan full shutdowns in the next few years-driving prices up and reliability down.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on BR Guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is Robert Garry, and he’s the CEO over at the Pots box.
Robert, welcome to the show. Thanks a lot, Adam. Excited to be here. Alright, Robert. So lot to talk about here today. So I definitely wanna get into pots line replacement for business, specialty phone lines, what that means how, and also talk about your, your channel partner program as well and, you know, just the unique things that you’re offering.
But before we get into all let’s take it a step or two back and how’d you get started in business? Like, where did all this begin for you? So for me, I go all the way back. I’m really dating myself to the mid eighties. I got into the wireless business with Motorola selling the old two-way radios when only the, you know, the elite had cell phones, so all the blue collar, great collar, used radios.
And so really got into wireless through that, then morphed into tracking trucks you know, out on the road using GPS. And from that point, I was one of the first people to work with Verizon. They had something called the value added distributor program, which is, it was the precursor to their partner program today.
Mm-hmm. And so we found companies that were like they had tablets with sims in ’em. They had solutions around tablets and routers. And we would sign ’em up and we would provide them the Verizon connectivity and then we ended up selling that business to Ingram Micro, and I ran their mobility division.
So I got a much bigger much bigger education there with all the different products. Mm-hmm. All the different manufacturers. Mm-hmm. We had agreements with all the cellular carriers, so I really got an in depth. Picture there. And, you know, after like four and a half years, I started my own business again doing consulting and I ended up morphing it into, providing my own solutions again.
So. Mm-hmm. So I got into fleet tracking, got into selling Internet of things, applications. And that the thing that has in common with what we do at the POTS box is we let Partners White label their solution. Mm-hmm. And we did. Mm-hmm. The backend work for them, but to their customers, it looked like they were doing the work.
and then all the way in 2019, the ruling came down from the FCC that the carriers no longer had to support those copper underground lines, those pots lines. Mm-hmm. Plain old telephone service. And it got pushed back ’cause of COVID where it didn’t get implemented till actually 2022. Mm-hmm. So in 2019.
We, I made a decision to make this like one of our core offerings and in the last like year and a half, I really made it our primary offering. Wow. Can you go back into that, ruling and kind of like what the significance was of that for the industry? ’cause I find that highly interesting. Yeah. So in, so back in 2019, the FCC came out with the ruling that the, the carriers of the guys who own the, pots, lines the copper.
Yeah. Like a Verizon, like an at and t and many other companies. They were not gonna have to support those solutions forever. Mm-hmm. And it came down that they could, they could, they could get outta the business. They could shut down the lines with notice at the time, I think it was 180 days.
Mm-hmm. And so it, so all these guys want to get outta that business ’cause they got all these other technologies that are. Lower cost, much more profitable. You know, the, copper lines, it’s astronomical. You know, maintaining them. so they were very excited about it. And they, when different locations start having problems, yeah.
they’ll wanna shut ’em off, not go in and, and fix ’em up. So the ruling really had is people who had been. Happy with the pipeline. Their rates went up ’cause it was no longer regulated. Their service went down. Yeah. And their, and also the line started being shut off and they couldn’t do this until 2022 because the ruling got pushed back because of COVID and then.
And like this year they’ve moved it. So you, it was, you had to give 180 days notice. Mm-hmm. Now you only have to give 90 days notice. Wow. So it’s in everybody using it. if one of our partners goes in and ask them for the phone bill, sometimes they don’t even realize, especially big companies, like they’re paying, you know.
20 bucks for a line for business phone calls, but for their, for their fire alarm. Using the old pots lines. They’re paying $150. We’ve even had cases where it’s been a thousand dollars. Wow. There’s no cap on what can be charged now. Hmm. And they want encourage people to get off so they’re raising the pricing.
So this for, so for individuals that are working with your team, I mean, this is opportunity, right. It is and, what we found out is even when these, the replacement technology first came up, a lot of companies that sell business telephone systems mm-hmm. They didn’t want to touch.
The elevator emergency phones, the fire alarms even the fax machines, they were still using the, they like, yeah, just keep paying for your pots lines, because the technology they were selling for regular voice calls wasn’t effective for those type of lines because like a little bit of jitter or latency can create a false alarm in a fire alarm.
Mm-hmm. So what we did is we, built a solution where we clean up those calls before they get to the, central station. Mm-hmm. And so now we’ve got an easy solution for these guys to sell. So now they’re starting to sell it because we made it easy for ’em. so talk to me about like the channel partner program you have and really the, the business opportunity here.
Yeah, it’s a really great opportunity and it, really goes through a spectrum that I’ll explain to you. So like somebody say they’re selling cellular solutions around routers and tablets and they sell like all sorts of different stuff. Mm-hmm. But they’re not in the telephone business.
Like they don’t sell. Business telephone systems, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, we can look at them. If we see they have a really good customer base, we can put them in the pots line replacement business. We can literally, we can white label it so it says their name, but we do the work, we can do the installations, we can do the site surveys.
we give them all the collateral that they can put their name and logo on. Mm-hmm. We can do the billing for them, because one of the things that comes up, if you’re not in that business. you’re not set up to collect the taxes and fees Yeah. That come out from the state, local, and federal government.
So we can do that for them and we’ll, we’ll collect all the fees. We’ll be responsible for paying them, and we just give them their share, you know, for their service. And um, wow. wow. So we can, do that for ’em, right? And then we even offer outbound marketing. But again, this, this stuff, it’s all for a fee.
we’ll go, we’ll do outbound telemarketing to help you get customers. We’ll do LinkedIn marketing. So we offer a lot to somebody who’s starting out as long as we see the customer base is right. And then on the other end, you get a, company already in the telecom world that can do their own, they can do their own billing.
Mm-hmm. They have a relationship with a cellular carrier so they can do their own cellular activation. they have their own install and site survey teams so they can do everything That we can do for them, except for the hardware, the platform to manage the lines and the actual lines themselves.
Mm-hmm. And the, the lines that we provide them are different than the lines they sell because they’re handled special in a special manner. for fire alarms and elevator phones and even fax machines, so, mm-hmm. So those are lines they traditionally stayed away from. Now they can sell ’em and they have all the ancillary stuff around it already to support ’em.
So we can do it all or just do what you need. you mentioned something I want to go a little bit further into that you mentioned, um, if they have the correct customer base, a lot, a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to that, listen to this program, nationwide or worldwide, but nationwide for the context of this call, what would that right customer base look like?
Because at the end of this interview, I’m gonna give you the opportunity to leave, you know, some contact information. Yeah. I wanna make sure the right individuals follow up, with you and your team. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, when you’re looking at your customer base, you know, it’s awesome if you have, like property management companies that, manage buildings.
’cause those buildings mm-hmm. Will all have fire alarms, burglar alarms, fax machines. although the, customers themselves may have the fax machines, but burglar and fire alarms, elevator phones, for emergencies when you’re in an elevator. So those are good. And then if you’re end user.
The easy stuff is if you have end users that own their own buildings where they’re gonna have the fire alarm, they’re gonna have, they’re gonna be responsible for the types of lines that are traditional pots lines that most people haven’t replaced yet. so if you have customers that own their buildings, that’s really good.
Now we also give, partners the opportunity to create their own channels. ’cause there’s enough margin in it. And I’ll give you an example of that. So we have a large telecom company that sells their, you know, their PBX and their dial tone. Everything goes out to their resellers, and then their resellers sell to the end customer.
Mm-hmm. We go to that big telecom company and we let them white label our solution and they sell the licenses like they do their regular PBX licenses. Mm-hmm. Through their channel. Mm-hmm. And so if you have a customer who’s an elevator company, you could set up Your elevator company customer to sell pots replacement lines because they’re out, putting in new elevators, maintaining elevators.
Yeah. They can ask their customers, Hey, what do you, you know, they’ll know. They’ll see it’s an old copper line, and they can offer their customer. Better, you know, better price, much better technology. and then they can also, this is what the ambitious ones do, right? You’re an elevator company, but you’re looking at it and you’re like, Hey, what other PX lines do you have?
Well, I got my firearm burglar alarm, and I got my fax machine. I wanna replace all of them. The elevator company, even though it’s outside their, you know, their expertise per se. That one box can handle all those lines and we can help ’em, you know, we can help guide ’em through doing it. and so elevator companies are really good fire and burglar alarm alarm companies if you have them as customers.
but if you’re talking about just, the masses, again, it’s anybody who owns a building is a great, great prospect. That’s awesome. Robert, this has been, uh, a lot of fun having you on the show today and getting to know a little bit more about what you’re doing. what’s the best way for people to reach out, to connect and to, and to follow up well to just learn about our company?
It’s, the pots box.com, just like it sounds. And they can reach out to me directly by, emailing me at Robert dot Gary, GARR [email protected]. Fantastic for everybody listening. Just so you know, we’ll definitely put some links in the show notes, so you can just click on ’em and head right on over and check out the pots box.
speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Gary, Matt, it really has been a pleasure. Thanks again for coming on the show. Thanks for the opportunity, Adam. Really appreciate it.
