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F. Scott Fitzgerald did not know William Robertshaw. Had the two men met, Fitzgerald might never have written his famous line about there being no second acts in American lives. At age 67, Robertshaw, a former building contractor, has embarked on a second career as chairman of ProCommunications, a telephone-answering services firm in Princeton that has seen revenues shoot up a stunning 5,900% in a little more than three years. In the process, he is also writing a second act for an industry that many people thought was dying.
In this age of voice-mail and smart answering machines, who needs the humble, local, phone-answering service? That was the prevailing wisdom when Robertshaw entered the business in 1992. He had just sold his interior construction business, Sweetwater Construction--a Top 40 winner in 1992--and decided to help his daughter Barbara revive a struggling phone-answering service in Maryland. Maybe because he was an outsider, Robertshaw saw the answering-service business differently than people who had been in it for years--he recognized that the industry wasn't dying, but changing direction.
In the past, an answering service just took messages for busy people, a function that voice-mail now performs more efficiently. But an answering service armed with the...