Do you wonder about the men and women behind the scenes for your VoIP service provider? Let’s meet #TEAMIPITIMI. Each week, we will do a quick interview and feature one special employee on our blog to celebrate our diversity in this tight-knit community. This week, we would like to feature our CEO, Greg Nielsen.
Q: Recently, IPitimi has been highlighting women in the workplace and highlighting the statistic that 62% of your employees are in fact women, why is this important to you?
“Well, first, it wasn’t intentional that we hired so many women, we always searched for and found the right person for the job, it just so happened that after the fact, we recognized that so many of them were women. As for women in the workforce, yes it is very important to me personally and professionally. Strong women in the workforce and entrepreneurship has played a very important role in lifting my own family out of devastation and poverty. While in Denmark, during the Nazi occupation, my grandfather was captured for smuggling Jews from place to place during the night in his brother’s bread truck. This resulted in him spending nearly a year in a German World War II prison camp until the war ended abruptly. The family didn’t have much to begin with, he was a common laborer and waiter to begin with. My grandmother, Rosa Pederson never one to sit by idly, used entrepreneurship and hard work to lift the family out of certain poverty. While he was imprisoned, to survive, started cooking for others and doing their laundry. When the war suddenly ended and he was released, she sold what little they had and bought boat tickets for the family, including my teenage mother, to come to America. My grandmother started cooking and selling meals at the hospital and had to go search for my grandfather every payday at the local pub so that he didn’t drink away his meager paycheck. She would hide any money that she could and worked three different jobs until someone gave her an almost no win opportunity to buy a gas station that she lived across the street from. She did it and became quite popular, not for her strong work ethic, but the fresh Danish pastry that she started selling at the gas station.”
Q: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself?
Greg Nielsen
“I’ve been involved in telecom almost my entire career. I started selling cellular phones in 1995 and then I was later recruited into the enterprise network space by a headhunter with the telecom act of 1996. I’ve started another successful VoIP company several years ago selling it and brokering the sale of a few others before starting IPitimi with two of my other partners.”
Q: What brought you to IPitimi?
“Two of my trusted partners were looking for something new to augment and enhance their current business. We started and spun off IPitimi as a new facilities based carrier. Now we are an international company with a majority of our revenue coming from users in countries outside of the USA.”
Q: What is your role in IPitimi?
“CEO. I help with strategy, vision and selecting the best people on the planet to join the team to support our customers and make it a reality.”
Q: What is IPitimi’s greatest strength in your opinion?
“Big enough to serve anyone, small enough to care and make a difference for our customers. We’ve developed a niche for customized installations. We’ve also been able to innovate several key applications in the contact center space that result in better sales metrics and customer handling time for our clients.”
Q: Where do you see VOIP/IPitimi going in the next 5-10 years?
“Everything is now application driven. We’ve stopped trying to integrate other applications into our solution, and instead, we are integrating our technology solutions into our customers. We’ve also recently launched an enterprise SMS and messaging platform that will make a huge impact for contact centers and other businesses who are changing the way they communicate with their customers.”
Q: Do you have a favorite work experience?
“Visiting with a prospective customer in the morning and discussing the strength of our open API’s. Sharing some of the details with one of their software developers in the office and then going to a quick lunch with my contact. By the time we returned from lunch, the software developer had already written our service into their main enterprise software that enabled them to use our service within their existing infrastructure and increase their employee productivity. That helped close the sale when they saw it working so easily.”
Q: I’m going ask some fun questions! What are some of the top things on your bucket list?
A:
- Climb to Mount Everest Base Camp
- Complete the build of a custom car
- To see IPitimi recognized for the value it brings to the marketplace, our employees lives and the operations of our customers
Q: If you were stuck on an island, what are three things you wish to have?
A:
- I would wish to have an IPitimi Video phone so I can communicate with everyone in the rest of the world with high definition quality, it will be like I never left
- Sunscreen
- My wife
Q: Do you have any hobbies/interests outside of work?
“I have a passion for old Land Rovers and currently restoring several of them. It’s starting to be a fun hobby that I hope my kids are enjoying just as much. I have a 1962 Series II that I can’t wait to get on (or off) the road. I just restored my old 1995 Classic Long Wheel Base and have a few Defender 110’s in the shop, or in my driveway.”
