David Ruck and the full 0199 Directory Assistance story

The sales system came first

My call-centre career did not begin with 0199. Hotel Dynamics Group taught me scripting, qualification and objection handling, but the most valuable lesson was the close.

That was the HDG discipline I carried forward. The close was not a polite question saved for the end. It was a diagnostic tool that exposed what was actually stopping the sale, one objection at a time.

I then took that framework into TelstraClear and proved to myself that an entrenched sales-channel assumption could be wrong. A properly designed telephone process could sell products the organisation believed required expensive face-to-face selling.

Full TelstraClear story →

One Number: my mother proved the concept before I saw the scale

At almost the same time I was establishing my career at TelstraClear, my mother, Pauline Ruck, was running a small operation called One Number from a tiny home office.

She did not come from the high-performance call-centre and sales environments I did. She contracted an outside call centre to answer inbound calls, had a very small website, ran some radio advertising and sold the service to local tradespeople for about $1,500. I even voiced some of the radio ads for her.

A lot of the sale was Pauline herself. The tradespeople liked and trusted her. She had already proved that businesses would pay serious money for the concept, but she was not building the kind of industrial sales machine I was learning to build.

By the time it clicked for me, Pauline had already sold One Number

Pauline had already taken the concept onto national television on Dragons’ Den. The Dragons did not invest, but the appearance matters historically because it predates my later involvement with the Christchurch directory venture.

Watch Pauline Ruck present her directory concept on Dragons’ Den ↗

By the time I properly grasped the scale of the opportunity, she had already sold One Number for about $50,000 to a business acquisitions manager acting for an investor.

Later, while I was looking for backing for my own version of the idea, I happened to meet that investor. As I explained the concept he stopped me and asked, “What’s your name again? I feel like I’ve heard this somewhere before.” I said, “David Ruck.” He replied, “Oh wow, Pauline Ruck?” I said, “Yes, that’s my mother.”

I remember the conversation clearly. He told me his business acquisitions manager had laughed about how he had ripped Pauline off on the deal. He told me he fired him for it, saying, “We don’t treat people like that around here,” and sent him packing back to England.

He then told me to write the idea up as a formal proposal for him.

Christchurch: useful commercial testing ground, not the origin of 0199

Before I completed that investor proposal, I ended up in front of Andrew Beaven and Larry Springer and became involved with their Christchurch online-directory venture, which was fronted publicly by Simon Barnett. I was contracted to handle marketing and sales.

Online business directories were commonplace by then. Their product was an online-only directory: businesses paid to appear in a web database. There was no memorable free-calling number, no inbound telephone directory-assistance service and no national call-centre operation connecting callers to businesses.

That is the distinction that matters. I was not trying to invent another website full of business listings. One Number had already shown me the telephone side of the opportunity, and my own sales career had shown me how to build the acquisition engine around it. What I saw was something far more ambitious: a New Zealand-owned telephone directory-assistance service built to take Yellow 018 head on, backed by business data, a high-performance outbound sales team and live inbound operators.

The Christchurch venture became a useful commercial testing ground for me because I could apply the sales systems I had developed to prospecting, scripts, pricing, close rates, invoicing and recurring business relationships. But it was not the source of the telephone-directory model that became 0199.

Then the Christchurch earthquakes changed the economics

The earthquake period shattered the environment in which that operation was working. Christchurch businesses were themselves under enormous pressure. Beaven and Springer decided to halt operations.

I could not afford to stop. The revenue base I had expected disappeared at the same time the central-city environment around which much of my Christchurch life had revolved was torn apart.

I left Christchurch and went to Wellington because I needed to keep moving.

My Christchurch earthquake footage, 2011 ↗

The number almost killed 0199 before launch

The four-digit number has its own story. For roughly ten months I was trying to secure a free-to-caller shortcode through Telecom. I kept being told it was being worked on, so I kept moving. The launch was being built around that number. My sales team was already selling a pre-launch offer and taking card payments.

The mission mattered to us. Yellow’s 018 and 0172 directory-assistance work had been shifted offshore to Manila, and I wanted 0199 to be a New Zealand-owned free-calling directory challenger with the call centre here.

Contemporary NZ Herald report on Yellow directory-assistance jobs moving to Manila ↗

2degrees laughed. Compass understood it.

I called 2degrees. They laughed at the idea. Then I called Compass Communications and reached Jo, the national sales manager, while she was driving.

I gave her the pitch for about five minutes. She got it.

A few days later, two Compass engineers arrived in Wellington from Auckland carrying the VOIP equipment for the call centre. Within about three days they had the system installed and running.

That was how 0199 became both the brand and the live service.

Looking back, I came to think Jo may have seen more commercial potential in the traffic than even I did at the time. The calls were reverse-charged, effectively the same basic idea as an 0800 or 0508 number: free to the caller, with the receiving business paying for the call. Telcos competed hard for free-calling business accounts. A national directory designed to generate call volume was not just a quirky shortcode. It was potentially a valuable stream of telecommunications traffic.

Wellington: 0199 becomes its own system

With the number secured and the VOIP platform live, Wellington is where I took those lessons and built my own operation around 0199. It combined directory assistance, a VOIP call centre, business data, outbound sales and inbound customer contact.

That mattered enormously to a growing operation. Organised business data fed prospects into the call centre, scripts converted them, training improved the team, and credit-card closes could turn successful calls directly into working capital for the next round of growth.

The model was not built around one brilliant caller. The value came from turning sales ability into infrastructure: data feeding prospects into the call centre, scripts converting prospects into customers, training creating more capable salespeople, and the directory creating an ongoing commercial relationship.

Competing with Yellow

I had become increasingly critical of the traditional Yellow-style directory and advertising model. From my perspective, many small businesses were paying far too much for products they did not fully understand while digital alternatives were becoming cheaper, faster and easier to measure.

My sales approach became deliberately educational. What was the business actually paying for? Where did enquiries come from? What did a domain really cost? What did hosting cost? What could a website do? Could the result be measured?

Once business owners understood those questions, the old pricing structure became much harder to defend. 0199 could compete by combining a lower-cost directory proposition with direct communication and increasingly useful digital services.

The directory became a technology business

Customers began asking us for websites, business email and hosting. I expanded development capability and personally signed the first website customer. That sale changed the trajectory again.

I also learned that business data was infrastructure. Names, categories, locations, phone numbers, websites and relationships were not just fields in a directory. Properly organised, they could power discovery, outbound sales, customer service, websites and new products.

Years later, back in Christchurch

Many years later, after I had returned to Christchurch, I ran into Andrew Beaven at church. I tentatively suggested that perhaps we should give the idea another go.

My view has always been that the concepts were materially different. Online directories were commonplace. The distinctive idea behind 0199 was the telephone service. My mother’s One Number had already shown me inbound directory assistance before I knew Beaven or Springer. What I built in Wellington was a free-to-caller phone directory, a shortcode, a New Zealand call centre, business data and a sales operation designed to challenge Yellow 018 directly.

That chronology is why the conversation stayed with me. The Christchurch online directory was part of the journey, but it was not the origin of the 0199 concept.

Why I am putting this history on the record

That encounter also reinforced something else. In Christchurch, established people can have strong networks and longstanding relationships. When one version of a story starts circulating through those circles, it can acquire weight simply because of who said it first and who already knows them.

From my perspective, Beaven already had standing in influential Christchurch business and church circles. I did not have an equivalent network through which to correct a version of events I fundamentally disagreed with.

The distinction is concrete: One Number predates my Christchurch involvement; online directories were already everywhere; the Christchurch venture was an online listings business; and 0199 was a free-to-caller telephone directory-assistance service built around a shortcode, a New Zealand call centre, business data and a sales operation designed to challenge Yellow 018.

That is why this website matters to me. It gives me somewhere permanent to document the work, the chronology and my own account instead of leaving my history to be defined by whichever version travelled furthest through somebody else’s network.

Why 0199 matters to GRID EATER

GRID EATER is not a random new direction. In many respects it is the modern continuation of the same problem I had been working on for years: understand how people find businesses, remove unnecessary friction and cost, organise the data, build the sales system and own more of the infrastructure.

See what I am building now →