Over the next month or so he managed to land a few customers. Then, shortly before he was to visit the United States for a month, a job seeker--a fellow young American in semidrift mode--landed in front of his desk. There were no openings at Amex, but Glickman could relate to him and made him an offer: while Glickman was out of the country, he could work from Glickman's apartment and try to sell the callback service.
Glickman didn't have high expectations. His hire was a 22-year-old Brown liberal-arts graduate with no experience in business; he had tried to support himself in Argentina as a waiter but couldn't get a restaurant to hire him. He spoke just about the worst Spanish Glickman had ever heard. The morning that Glickman was leaving, the guy showed up in shorts, a tank top, and sandals, with his one suit slung over his shoulder. Glickman wished him luck and took off.
When Glickman returned to Argentina, his man reported that he had signed more than 20 corporate customers, including a few large banks. Each one had paid from $250 to $700 as an up-front connection charge and was paying a $250 monthly fee for one line--in addition to the per-call charges, which averaged $2,000 a customer a month. Glickman was running a real business. Adios, American Express.
Glickman's new colleague, Leon Richter, continued to sell the service left and right. Apparently, his conservative suit and atrocious, heavily accented Spanish were taken as signs of legitimacy and often quickly landed him in the president's office of whatever company he cold-called. "Once he was there, the president would immediately beg him to stop speaking Spanish," explains Glickman. "It offended them to hear their language butchered." In English, Richter would give this simple pitch: The service would hack off roughly two-thirds of the company's international phone bill. And here were sample bills from other multinationals to prove it.
As customers signed on in a steady stream, Glickman got his first lesson in what would be a series of principles for success, Justice-style, in global telecommunications. That lesson: Pay attention to the vagaries of doing business in a foreign culture. It turned out, for example, that impressive as the savings detailed call by call on the bills were, some customers were horrified that the calls were detailed at all--a standard feature of U.S. phone bills but a novelty in Argentina. Nonplussed that customers would complain about having their calls broken out, Glickman learned that many Argentine businesspeople keep Swiss bank accounts that they'd just as soon not advertise to the government via phone bills that list calls to Switzerland. Others expressed concern about their wives' discovering multiple calls to certain numbers. And one oddly secretive company wasn't pleased to see its bills detailing the fact that 90% of its calls went to Iran and Nicaragua, two countries that had little in common other than that they were of great interest to the American intelligence community. "We could have made a lot of money charging people to not have call detail on their bills," says Glickman.
Money was pouring in from customers such as UPS, British Airways, and the Danish embassy, but Glickman was getting to keep only 25% of the line charge. The rest was going to the callback provider, for which Glickman was merely acting as an agent. Why not start his own service and outsource the actual phone switching? he thought. Glickman went back to the United States and visited every callback provider he could find, pumping each for more and more information. Finally, he was able to point his finger confidently at the outfit that seemed to offer the best service at the lowest cost--a company called IDB Worldcom. He begged for an appointment with the president and was finally told he could have an hour at the end of the day, at which point the president was flying out of town. Glickman flew into New York City for the meeting and made a case for why IDB should handle Glickman's switching business for a mere 50% of gross profits. The president was intrigued but had to leave to catch his flight. Glickman asked him where he was flying to. Washington, D.C., said the man. What a coincidence, said Glickman, piling into the limo with him. Glickman stuck by him all the way to Washington, by which time the president was sold on the idea. (The final agreement was that IDB Worldcom would keep 60% of gross profits.)
Now Glickman and Richter were bringing new customers into their own full-fledged callback company and began gradually converting all their old customers to IDB. They were less than a year into the business, and monthly revenues were climbing above $200,000. Sure, they had plenty of competition from other callback services, but the market was still wide-open, and--more important--no one could undercut them on price, thanks to the deal Glickman had wrangled out of IDB. Lesson number two: Being the lowest-cost provider covers a lot of sins.
Then one day, out of the blue, disaster seemed to strike: the service simply stopped working. When a customer got the U.S. dial tone and started dialing, the line would go dead. For every customer. Every time. Finally, Glickman and Richter realized that the state-run telephone company had programmed its switches to listen for the sound of touch-tone dialing on calls that had come into the country. When the tones were detected, the switch would automatically disconnect the call. The phone company was more or less within its rights; callback was technically illegal in Argentina at the time, as it was in many other countries, though it wasn't really prosecutable because the service's operations were in the United States.
Oh, said Richter. They want to play. Richter contacted an engineer and told him he wanted a device that could be attached to the customer's phone that would intercept the number being dialed, sending it out to the U.S. switch not as touch-tones but as computer data. The device worked perfectly, and Richter and Glickman were back in business. Then the phone company realized that all of Glickman's customers' calls went to the same area code and "exchange"--the three-digit number that leads off the seven-digit phone number. So the phone company simply blocked all calls from Argentina to that exchange. "What did they care if they occasionally blocked off a call to that exchange that wasn't even to our switch?" says Glickman.
