TnT: A Small Company Excels In Telecom Expense Management

By Kaaren Valenta

Michael Bodetti is looking for a few good men and women.

A Newtown resident for the past 20 years, Mr Bodetti launched his own business, TnT Partners in 1999. A business process outsourcer of telecommunications expense management services, the company has grown in less than six years to include 40 employees, many of whom work in Mr Bodetti’s building at 13 Berkshire Road, across from Newtown High School.

He expects to hire another 15 to 20 people in the coming months to work in the telecom expense management services areas of audit, invoice progressing and payment, wireless management, and contract negotiations.

The company recently won the 2005 Aberdeen Group “Best Practices” award for telecom total cost management for its client, Lehman Brothers. Other clients include such firms as General Electric, the Mohegan Sun, General Cologne Reinsurance (GenRe), and Imagistics.

Not bad for a company that started in Mr Bodetti’s home on Cemetery Road.

“The award is huge in our industry,” Mr Bodetti said. “When we heard, everyone here was very excited.”

Lehman Brothers, a leader in the global finance industry, had targeted telecommunications cost reductions as part of an overall strategy to reduce nonpersonnel expenses. The financial giant had hired TnT Partners in 2000 to negotiate its telecom contracts and opted, after a trial run, to hire the Newtown firm for its telecom bill processing. Six months later, Lehman Brothers asked TnT to provide an outsourced solution to centralize its provisioning process.

Then, on September 11, 2001, disaster struck. Lehman’s global headquarters in the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed in the terrorist attack. But two days later, with TnT’s help, Lehman was one of the first companies to resume fixed income trading.

“We had all their data in Newtown,” Mr Bodetti explained. “But there were 6,500 [Lehman] employees displaced, and we had to get them operational.”

Because Lehman Brothers was located on the 49th and 50th floors of the World Trade Center, almost all its employees managed to escape from the building. (The company had one fatality).

“We were instrumental in getting them recovered,” Mr Bodetti said. “They rented out two full Sheraton Hotels. Overnight we had to bring in help. We worked 24 hours a day to get everything going. As a result, they recovered quickly.”

Lehman responded by hiring TnT to take over more services such as processing market data invoices, and managing wireless functions including more than 8,000 users and devices (Blackberries, cell phones, pagers, and LAN cards).

According to the Best Practices Award, Lehman saved close to $34 million from bill processing alone from August 2000 through fiscal 2004 through the correction of invoice errors due to inventory and contract disputes.

“Telecommunications is the fifth largest expense that most companies have,” Mr Bodetti said. “It includes phone lines, data lines, internal circuits, maintenance, contracts, and now wireless. A normal phone bill for one of these companies used to be delivered to us in boxes, but now we get CDs or tapes with all the files on them. We load them into our database and start analyzing. We make sure they are accurate.”

More importantly, TnT has never lost a client. “Every one of our clients would give us a good reference,” Mr Bodetti said. “Most companies in this industry don’t have good reputations. When there are problems with vendors, they bring attorneys into the mix. We’ve never had an incidence where we had to use attorneys.

“We use the system we’ve developed to document everything for the client,” he explained. “Almost every one of our clients has come from our competitors.”

Mr Bodetti grew up in New York City, one of four siblings of parents who immigrated from Italy. “My dad worked in a factory; we never had a car,” he said.

Michael Bodetti went to a two-year technical school, then began working. He quickly realized that he needed more than an associate’s degree, however, so he earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing, and a master’s in finance, while working in positions that gave him experience in information technologies, computers, and telecommunications.

He was working for CUC International when it merged with HFS International to form Cendant Corporation in the late 1990s. “There was a lot of duplication of staff, so a lot of CUC management left. I stayed about a year, then left and set up my own business in a room in my house,” Mr Bodetti said.

Soon other members of his CUC group joined him including Roisin Black, TnT’s marketing director, whose degree is in engineering.

“Mike wrote a system for cost management that is an internally used product, not something available commercially,” she said. “The heart of what we do is based around it.”

The company does not employ a single sales person, nor does it advertise to sell its services. “All our business comes through word of mouth,” Mr Bodetti said. At first the employees worked in an office over the garage of Mr Bodetti’s house, which was completely wired for networking with the servers in the basement. In 2002 he found the site on Berkshire Road and also started to put staff in New York at client sites.

“We’re now at 40 employees and within the next few months expect to be at 50,” he said. “In the past few months we have signed four new significant clients that have the potential to double our business.”

Most of the staff hired by TnT have training in the technology or accounting areas, but the primary requirements are enthusiasm and a willingness to work hard, he said.

“We are focused on entry level staff — kids coming out of college so we can train them and not have to fix attitudes and habits they might have developed at other companies,” he said. “We will train you in what to do and how to do it. We need staff with people skills because they are working with clients.”

As if to reinforce this, a poster that hangs behind Michael Bodetti’s desk proclaims “Attitude.”

“The company has very little turnover, almost none,” Roison Black said. “We don’t have formal organizational charts. People here are very flexible and do whatever needs to be done. It’s a great team and Mike is a great person to work for.”

The father of three sons, two of whom work for his company, Michael Bodetti said it is important for the company to maintain the quality of life that attracts local people to work for the company.

“We really do like to hire local people,” he said. “It makes for a much more loyal employee, and for a better balance of work and family. We have a lot of people here with families or who are taking college classes, so we are flexible. It is good for us and good for the employee. Our dress is business casual, except for when clients are coming. Every month we do a birthday cake for the employees who have birthdays that month and in the summer we have barbecues.

“We are a small company but most of our clients are Fortune 50 or Fortune 100 companies, so we have to be professional,” he said.

TnT also employs trained telecom specialists for consulting projects that are handled as a service to clients for which the company also does billing, its core service. Most companies are spending a few million dollars a year, at least, on telecommunications before it employs TnT, but companies of any size use its services to set up lines, design networks, manage wireless services, and negotiate contracts.

A member of the Newtown Chamber of Commerce, Mr Bodetti also is a partner in La Strada, an Italian restaurant on Route 25 in Monroe. Although the Berkshire Road location is a great location for TnT Partners, right off Exit 11 of I-84, Mr Bodetti said he is looking for a larger piece of property in Newtown to build another building because he is outgrowing the current space.

Anyone who is interested in working at TnT should send a resume to TnT Partners, Attn: Eileen Fetchick, 13 Berkshire Road, Sandy Hook 06482 or email to fetchick@tntpartners.com. The company has a website at www.tntpartners.com.