For a company that can have its headquarters anywhere in the country, even the world, Victor von Schlegell chose Traverse City for his communications business.
"We’re very virtual as you can probably imagine, so our physical location is a lot less important than it might be for other people," he says. "We have a lot of people who work out of their homes across the company. But (Traverse City) is a wonderful place to live."
Von Schlegell is president of
Appia Communications, a company that assists other businesses in their communication needs. That can include anything from video conferencing to fax services, and all of it is done over the Internet. Von Schlegell started the company in 2001, convinced that services of this nature were in demand, and since then the company has seen 25 to 30 percent growth each year.
"I just became convinced of the power of IP to do just about anything," he says. "There were platforms that were pretty good, but we felt that the time was right to be able to market and sell services that can be done over IP."
Von Schlegell says the benefit of using IP services like those that Appia Communications can provide is eliminating the need to have a phone system or video instillation which requires maintenance from people within the company. This can be especially beneficial as some businesses struggle in a poor economy.
"Instead of having to own those things, they can have them hosted. (Businesses) don’t have to manage them which cuts down on capital costs and also cuts down on the support required," he says. "A lot of our customers are companies or organizations that have experienced downturn over the past couple of years, unfortunately, and part of the cost of these downturns has been reduction in IT staff, so these services allow them to employ their IT staff in a way that’s more efficient and critical to them rather than just managing equipment for communications."
Appia Communications isn’t just in Traverse City. In fact, the growth of the company has included acquiring offices in St. Louis and Indianapolis, reaching in every state, and even working with customers in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Switzerland.
Though von Schlegell says Appia Communications could be seen as a technology company, he likes to think of it as a service company.
"Really we’re a service company, that’s what we really think our value to our customers is: taking on things that they would rather not manage and doing it extremely well," he says.
After recently celebrating its 10-year anniversary, the company hopes to expand by helping larger businesses with their communications needs. Appia also is in the process of developing new products, many of which are the result of suggestions from their customers.
"Sometimes our customers say, 'We wish you could do this or we wish you could do that,' so we have a number of new products in the pipeline," von Schlegell says.
Lucy Hough is a freelance writer and the former editor in chief of Northern Michigan University's student newspaper, the North Wind.
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