A customer happiness business that happnes to sell telecommunicatiopns| SBBM

Keen to build a customer happiness business? Today’s guest founded a telecommunications company. A business that competes with the likes of Telstra, Optus, Vodafone. You know … bloody big organisations with marketing budgets equal to the GDP of small countries! And guess what? Five years on and he’s absolutely nailing it. It’s a lets-take-on-the-big-boys episode 517 of The (11 year-old, award-winning) Small Business Big Marketing podcast.

A Big Episode 517

Telco founder Mark Fazio shares how and he and his identical twin brother have created a customer happiness business that just so happens to sell telecommunications! It’s called Mate.

This week’s motivated listener is (in her words) leaps and bounds ahead of where she was a few weeks ago thanks to an idea she picked up on episode 508.

And I let you in on next week’s guest who’s 30 location restaurant business is booming during COVID-19.

As per usual team, there’s marketing GOLD dripping from the ceiling over here at Small Business Big Marketing’s HQ … so let’s get stuck, right in!

A little more about Mate’s Mark Fazio

As you’ve probs picked up by now, I’m in awe of business owners. No matter what your business, I think you’re amazing how you put everything on the line to create a business and life you love.

I’m even more in awe of business owners that launch into highly competitive categories where the competition is spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to attract and retain customers.

Mark Fazio is one of those guys.

He and his identical twin brother David launched Mate Telecommunications in 2015 from the backyard of their aunty’s home in Western Sydney.

Five years on they have 66 staff, over 35,000 clients, a swag of industry awards and revenue in excess of $40 million.

Yes this is a story of David V Goliath, but what’s especially interesting is this is a story of a business laser-focussed on creating customer happiness, which just happens to sell mobile and Internet data plans.

I started off by asking Mark if starting a telco is infinitely more complicated than starting say a trade or consulting business.

Timbo’s Top 3 Attention Grabbers

I love how he says Mate is a customer-happiness business that just so happens to sell telecommunications.
On top of that, I love how he empowers the customer by giving them every reason to not stick with them. This seems counter-intuitive, but once a customer decides to stay, it would appear they’re a Mate for life.
And I love how the brand has its own language. This is such a point-of-difference in this world of sameness in which we find ourselves.