Detroit Business Rings Up Woodmere

When Aaron Beals, founder and president of Ring Ring, sought a New York-area home for his Michigan-based vanity toll-free telephone number business, he eschewed the predictable Manhattan office tower or Brooklyn brownstone.

Instead, the 29-year-old’s push for the business-saturated New York market has since August, 2010, emanated from Woodmere, which offers the entrepreneur what he said is the right mix of a friendly atmosphere and proximity to the city.

“What’s nice about Woodmere is it’s a tightly-knit community," Beals said. "You can meet people. … Once you build a relationship … you have all these connections and a rapport. The relationships are going to be stronger.”

“You don’t have the hustle and bustle of the city but you’re close by to it,” Beals added. “You get the best of both worlds. A lot of people work in the city and live in the Five Towns.”

The principle underwriting Ring Ring is a simple one: To truly thrive, a company needs a memorable phone number. An ordinary 10 digits won’t cut it. Quick test: Which is easier to remember, 1-800-356-9377 or 1-800-FLOWERS?

“The common objection, which really doesn’t hold a lot of weight, is that companies will say, 'we’ve had the same phone number since the 1960s, when we started, and it’s been working just fine,'” Beals said. “My answer to them is, ‘That’s great’ … But if your average customer was 45 years old in 1960, how old are they now?”

In other words, in this age of information overload and countless daily ad impressions, companies must evolve and reconfigure things to stay afloat. Besides remembering vanity numbers better, customers are 30 percent more likely to respond favorably to whatever product is being sold when calling one, Beals told Long Island Business News.

Sign up with Ring Ring, and the company will find you the “hard-to-get vanity numbers” that can’t be easily acquired through a traditional phone company, Beals told Patch. It will monitor and offer reports detailing the date and time of the calls that come through the new number, let the business listen in to those calls and route vanity callers to the pre-existing phone number.  

“We fill that gap in the market,” Beals said. “There are not a lot of companies out there that [do what we do].”

If the effusive praise of Beals client/Brooklyn-based plumber Mitchell Markowitz (Metropolitan Plumbing and Heating Corp.) is any indication, local businesses will love what Ring Ring is selling.

"When I initially spoke with Aaron, I knew his company was what I needed,” Markowitz said. “He worked hard with our marketing team until we were all in agreement. Aaron never gave up. He was committed 'till the very end. I’m happy to say that our vanity number brought us new business.”