Today’s leadership culture strives to identify and exhibit great leaders. This leader takes complete responsibility of their failures and takes little credit for their own success, showing their respect towards work and colleagues.
In an interview with CIOLook, Raymond J. Pasquale, the CEO of Unified Office, Inc shares his fruitful journey which has nurtured his unique and proficient leadership skills.
Following are the highlights of the interview conducted between Raymond and CIOLook:
Kindly take us through your journey to becoming a leader.
It was one of those things that came naturally to me at a young age. I suppose it had to. Growing up as the oldest of three children in a single parent household I had a lot of responsibility at an early age. My younger brothers looked up to me for leadership whether it was helping them with their school work or making sure they got up in time for school. At the age of 9 I cooked dinner for the family after school, during the week to help my Mom, who worked long hours as a legal secretary. When she got home, I had dinner waiting. At the age of 11 I purchased a newspaper route of about 175 customers. I delivered the newspaper everyday through good weather and bad. I then began to offer my customers other products and services. I offered them stationary, greeting cards, gifts of all types and services such as shoveling during snow storms and so on. I would use that extra money to help my mom to support our household. I have learned some very valuable lessons that continue to guide me today such as being reliable, doing everything it took to make sure my customers were happy, and offering them the things they needed and wanted. I sold my paper route at the age of 13 at a profit.
How do you diversify your organization’s offerings to appeal the target audience?
Just as I did with my paper route, I listened to my customers and brought them the goods and services they needed. We are constantly developing additional services and solutions that complement our core communications offering that in turn help our customers maintain their relevance as well as helping them to increase their revenues and profitability. We are relentless innovators by design as well as necessity.
What are the crucial traits which every CEO must possess?
This is a hard one to answer. There are so many things that a CEO has to do, that is also dependent on the market you’re serving and the company you’re in. However, I would say that every CEO must demonstrate constancy of purpose, be willing to pivot when necessary, relentlessly focus on execution, be willing to listen to your customers but also your employees, and also know that you’re not always right and seek advice, take ownership and above all, be a leader.
What are your intakes on roles of transformational leadership and organizational factors on product innovation and performance?
You cannot lead a company today without being innovative. It’s an overused word but one that should be taken to heart. As I alluded to earlier in this interview, the world we live is undergoing change so fast it is dizzying. The successful CEO and by extension their company has to not only adapt but also sense the market and get out in front of it and lead it. Your customers count on you to do this for them. All one has to do to appreciate the rate and velocity of change is to look at Amazon and the Internet and how they have fundamentally changed our lives.
How do you strategize your game plans to tackle the competition in the market?
Honestly, we don’t worry about competition. There is always going to be competition. Stay true to your vision, stay close to your customer and always do those things that benefit your customer and make their lives better. The rest will take care of itself. We are the only ones who are able to offer high quality, reliable VoIP service without the need for expensive legacy T1 or MPLS network infrastructure. No one else offers the range of customized features and vertical market applications that we can rapidly deploy for customers.
As a global health technology company, what is your most vital contribution in health-care sector?
Let’s take the dental industry for example. This is a market that has been underserved by technology for years. The innovations we have brought and continue to bring to this market have had a profound effect on their P&L and business performance. For example, we never allow them to miss a phone call. Our system is always up, utilizing a combination of techniques such as cellular failover when broadband performance problems or outages occur. Missing a call in today’s world can result in a lost patient opportunity which means lost revenue and of course decreased patient satisfaction. Providing them with the essential tools to automatically notify and confirm upcoming appointments with their patients is a necessary part of doing business today, as well as integration with leading practice management systems so all of their patient information can be viewed together. By the way the same is true for our other customers within the veterinary, physical therapy and other healthcare provider segments. We take the same approach to our other vertical markets such as, quick serve restaurants and full-service restaurants, high tech companies, property management firms, and many others.
We developed Total Connect Now Dental Management Suite SM (TCNDMSSM ) to help dental practices adapt to the rapidly changing consumer landscape so that dental practices never miss a patient opportunity by never missing a call. This helps them to better service and retain today’s demanding and impatient customer. As with all of our customers TCNDMSSM is delivered to dental practices in the form of a managed service, where Unified Office takes responsibility for all of their services 24×7. We adapted our Total Connect Now SM (TCNSM) offering to each of these markets by layering industry specific applications on top of our easy to use managed business communications service that integrates voice and video communications, messaging, service-level monitoring, business continuity, and business analytics tools into a seamless, high quality, reliable communications service offering that can be configured to meet the unique needs of any business.
What are your future endeavors/objectives and where do you see yourself in the near future?
I see myself continuing to build what I believe to be one of the best companies in the market today. There is no end in sight for what we can accomplish. The time has never been better for a company like Unified Office. About Raymond J. Pasquale Ray has extensive sales and customer engineering experience along with proven management team leadership in dynamic, emerging technology companies. Ray was a founding member of Sonus’s services organization, recruiting many of its most senior members. He has held senior technical, sales and management positions in industry leading companies including Cascade, Ascend, Lucent and Digital Equipment Corp.