What is the bottom dollar amount for your entire monthly communications spend? You should know this or you are burning some amount of money each month. This means the Telecom services, Internet, Leases, Support, subscriptions, renewals, all of it. If you cannot answer this, you have no way of knowing if one of your largest monthly spends is being spent wisely.

AIf you are hanging onto old technologies, do not know what you are spending and have no clue when the term is expired, what you are even paying for and getting, then you will most certainly be overpaying. Your MSP has an incentive to keep you on high priced solutions because they get mailbox money from it each month. The FCC has issued a mandate that carriers sunset the copper network in favor of fiber optics. For a small business with 6 POTs lines and a handful of phones, they could see ROI In two years by simply upgrading and going to SIP.

Internet and calling costs are plummeting and those legacy plans are in need of review to ensure that you are getting max savings and your money is well spent. Bridger has saved our clients $2 million dollars this last 18 months, and we are working on an additional $250,000 year savings as we speak. POTs lines are expected to peak at $250/month per line. If your solution partner was unaware of this mandate, what do you think they will say when the carrier turns it off on their scheduled day. Can your business afford to be unavailable via phone for 3, 7, 14 days while the numbers port and you wait for replacement hardware?

If your communications partner only pushes a single product, that means they might be selling what they sell, which is not necessarily what your business needs. The only thing worse than doing nothing is buying into a bad solution that is the wrong fit, then having to do it again.

What it means to communicate is more than voice. Voice is just one part of an overall strategy for communicating. For the first time in history, everyday users can produce near-production quality experiences that will allow those willing to embrace these new technologies an advantage over their competition. 

As younger professionals enter the workforce and become leaders they will expect these avenues of communication because they are comfortable with them, they are the second generation raised in social media and have engaged using video, chat, and collaboration with others over the internet down to a science. Smart businesses will give their team all the tools to win business, get things done, and make money. 

We live in a whole new world, there is no brand loyalty, and building strong relationships is the new "brand loyalty" and that means great leaders will become content creators, and engage their teams and customers more as humans. By the end of 2026, we will see new industries and organizational roles become the standard for business across all verticals. Enterprises have long realized that there is a benefit to engaging on social media and it is why they are quick to action when someone says something good or bad (employees posting about toxic work culture is bad for recruiting), It is direct customer engagement, reduces advertising costs, and allows meaningful interactions and a sense of "Being in the room", SMBs will fail to survive if they do not venture the same path. 

As the current generation retires, these will no longer be optional technologies, they will become critical infrastructure for business communications. SMS, Social Media, Voice, Chat, Video, Business Presentations, and Content Creation will all be ways businesses build that loyalty. It can be something as simple as a weekly podcast, a human-typed email (like this one), or a periodic 1:1 call to check on things from a higher-up. 

If that doesn't feel right for your business, maybe something like creating several how-to videos for YouTube or TikTok (which can be monetized), or something similar that becomes the difference between winning a customer or losing them.

What would happen if there were a disaster like flooding, a hurricane, wildfires, another stay at home order? These are not possibilities, they are things that happen. If you do not have a business continuity plan, or you have premise dependencies that require weird workarounds or is hacked together in haste, it will cost you more money than it should, and you will have a difficult time containing your remote strategy and if you do not have a remote strategy, then you are really missing out. COVID changed everything for everyone, and the trend towards remote workforce is the new norm, people dislike the commuting, time away from family, and have adapted to this work style. Savvy business will embrace it because it produces a larger talent pool to draw from. A CPA firm might never have found that kid in rural Kansas with OCD and a thing for numbers, who outperforms their top 3 accountants combined and because of the lower cost of living in rural Kansas, does not require a premium salary. Any industry which does not require the team to be in the room to manufacture something can benefit from a strong remote strategy. There are tools to validate and establish metrics which determines who is producing and who isn't. So the perceived loss of productivity has been squashed by nearly five years of data. Let us change your mind.

There have been massive consolidations in the industry since the onset of COVID. Manufacturers that relied on proprietary premise equipment have either gone the way of the buffalo or are slowly flatlining by failing to innovate. We see this with providers like ESI and Allworx and others. Once promising brands with a high value feature set, low barrier of entry and worked pretty good for what you got, but they haven't changed very much in the last twenty years. 

I am still aware of businesses using Nortel, Merlin, Panasonic, NEC, and Toshiba. These are liabilities if communications is critical to your business and while they provide a touch of nostalgia, they are land mines that one day will be stepped on. How many days can you be without a phone? How many clients would be potentially endangered by even the optics. I have had to answer this question on behalf of a client before while jumping on a sword for them. "If the company cannot be bothered to keep their means of communication open, why should we count on that business to take care of our business, knowing they will let their phone system fall off the wall" The last bit sounds funny, but the phone system actually fell off the wall after someone removed a door stop while stripping floors (We did not install the solution). 

We have reached a point in technology where buying expensive, proprietary hardware with square feature sets is not attractive as an investment. Even the per user model is ugly and in need of refinement because it doesn't make sense for how people communicate. Not putting a phone in a workroom for the receptionist to use while she spends half a day running back and forth to catch the phone because the bean counters didn't want to spend XX a month to put a phone there. The cost of hosting resources and buying them is about parity and in many cases cheaper, so by carefully choosing technologies, applying them correctly and to specifications will be an investment of reward. Panic buying might as well be called buying twice, or the bitter clinger tax. 

We have replaced two solutions which were panic bought by customers that have come to us to plan and get them the right solution, because they were either sold what their vendor knew, or what their vendor partnered with. These are not always the right answer. Partnering with someone like Bridger who knows each of these products, how/where they are best applied (if at all), and by being solution agnostic, having no products requiring annual minimums, we are able to do stuff like this and ensure that clients get what they need, not just what we sell. 

Trying to navigate the never ending array of hosted products can be a headache (or two) especially when you find out that the contract is iron clad, and they are harvesting your call data, selling it to whoever asks for it with the money. We have several designs which allow all the perks of an owned system and all the convenience of a hosted solution and they work, will save you money and enable your team. If you are using an Allworx system someone is hosting in a datacenter, that is not a hosted platform. That is a liability and we would bet money its unreliable. If you are using Dialpad, ring central, or any of the other hosted products that have a mediocre feature set, sprawling costs, and a support team that is "Sparse" at best. Lets talk about the possibilities. 

I have known companies that every 10 years they write a great big check to rip and replace the infrastructure and god bless them, while its great to get the boost, it is painful to watch them write that check. They live and die by the run it into the ground mindset and believe me, I get it. We all seek the best possible deal and to spend our money towards the best value for our money. 

There is another way, and for many businesses it is a much more sane, practical and achievable manner of being proactive rather than reactive, or even knee-jerk reactive. We work with our clients to achieve a technology roadmap, blueprint or whatever you want to call it. We help figure out what is a solution that will enable you, that you can afford, is obtainable, not necessarily the most exotic or bland, but with the right boxes check, and works better than advertised, and is easy to use. Then set aside some amount each year, work towards that goal. This is by no means fool proof, stuff fails, priorities change, etc.. What it does do is offset your risks by continually and cyclically being proactive which is proven to actually reduce risks. 

There is a reason people sell things for $9.99. It has been proven at increasing sales by advertising it for a penny less than $10.00. Imagine selling a big 10 year technology spend over 3-5 years in increments. This is healthy, manageable, avoids panic or over a barrel buying and gives the organization flexibility to prioritize other stacks, because technology and the cost of communications is just one of them that needs maintenance. 

If you do not have something like this in place. We can help you get there. Our approach and commitment to technology is that we are always in seek of new technologies which solve problems for our customers. We are looking for products that have strong feature sets, are affordable, available, and work better than advertised providing real value (not to be confused with cheap). We believe people want to use the technology available and will only do so if they understand its value so we also seek things that are not Rubes Goldberg machines, are not so exotic they are unobtainable, but have also been through our rigorous and often masochistic abuse to determine if they are something we will stand behind, because we will not sell any product we do not or have not used ourselves. We also keep at least one of everything we sell and support on hand in case you need some button by button assistance. 

If you think AI is going to take over the world, you haven't been paying attention the last couple of years, because it already has. Genrative AI is the most disruptive technology in any of our lifetimes and just because the technology is all over the place right now, doesnt mean it hasnt already been in use and the technology better realized. This is something that will affect every facet of our lives from how food is grown, to how soil is fertilized to how businesses harvest opportunities or identify clients due to be sold, or even determine when they are most likely to sign a document. I disagree with the positions of OpenAI and others who have made themselves the moral police and dumb down the usefulness of it which I fully believe is part of the reason people think it is a toy, or the rise of the machines. If you are one of those, let's talk and I will win you on the idea. We do not sell anything AI, but we do have integrations and hooks to get it into solutions, and we have some methods we have developed, a model we have trained which produces some very valuable business intelligence for those open to it.

If you google a lot of stuff, use a search engine for anything. Sign up for ChatGPT, Gemini, or one of the other wrappers for an engine and set it for your homepage. Use that instead of Google for a month, you will be sold. Our business was designed with AI as part of our core strategy, and we have found ways to keep our team of subject matter experts and specialists fighting the good fight by eliminating the needs of managing low level tasks, monitoring, and by containerizing and orchestrating our automation. 

We have almost 100 servers in 12 US datacenters, two different stacks and a whole bunch of other surrounding technologies and we manage it efficiently, more often, and it works splendidly thanks to tools that AI has helped us to build. Artificial Intelligence has allowed us to compete with larger MSPs, and win business because we do not have a bunch of low-level people to pay because we automate all of that stuff. This is also a cost savings tool for us, because we own the machines, it pays for itself routinely. 

The only places we have not integrated AI into our business processes to some degree is in our relationships, and how we contact our clients and communicate with them. We hate the AI posts and emails, and we know everyone else does too. 

Savvy companies that recognize this amazing technology are going to dominate while others catch up. If you are a business that has been in business for a long time, have tons of data, information, etc.. You are in a unique position to leverage the power of AI to give you a competitive advantage and we can help you with that. We can also help you make sound investments into the technology and which you will be able to see measurable results. 

We built the communications company we always wanted to work for and that our clients always wanted to exist. Fixed fee only projects, the best hourly rate in the industry, easy terms, and a relentless pursuit to find and bring to market technology solutions to that are affordable, exist, and that solve client problems. Sold, serviced and supported by people who do things others say is impossible, they cannot do, or do not even know is possible. We are part of the solution and stand for something other than the model of greed. 

· 100% client retention since opening our doors for business

· 100 % project completeness (all deliverables, all tasks, all budgets and deadlines)

· 100% debt free, no lines of credit, and no solutions which require we sell an annual minimum.

· We own 100% of our solution stack, all infrastructure, tooling, and automations.

· 91% of our clients are 501.c3, Education, and Government. For profit clients are call centers, Retail, Grocery and mixed vertical SMB.

· 0% white label products.

· Nearly $2 Million in technology in 12 US datacenters to support our clients and provide our services. All the perks of local, all the benefits of cloud and you do not become the product.

· We built our own nationwide voice network and became the most competitive carrier overnight; our network is rock solid. An all tier 1 build, with all of the features, premium features like Caller ID Branding, Labeling, SPAM fixup, full chain attestation, and we built our own eFax that just works, as well as our own out of band solution that is so ridiculously capable, we will buy you lunch if you produce something we cannot accommodate. Not that you would ever need it anyway, because our service is so reliable, and we are the only carrier in this universe that can offer 1ms latency with no NAT between PBX and PSTN network. We can also do things other carriers cannot or will not and we are flexible.

Learn what it means to be loved more than a friend when we invest in your business by providing what is often high barrier to entry solutions, products and subscriptions at cost or for free when able, we do this for password managers, RMM, etc.. because we care and we want to enable you. We are in the business of relationships, understand the value of opportunities and know that they are not endless. We take great care to deliver, give you your moneys worth, without a bunch of ego and do nothing fancy titles that talk at you, over you and all around you. We talk human as a first language, put in the effort to troubleshoot, and listen for those little details. If its important to you, its important to us. You will never have to worry about a “B-Team” because we don’t have one. We also understand what it means to trust our business with taking care of your business and that is something we take very seriously.

We built Bridger to be low overhead by design, drought resistant, and we carry no dead weight, we do not tech for the sake of tech or because that’s what other people are doing. We believe in being true technology partners, and that means all products and staff must zero sum or ideally yield a profit and we will save you money, get more work done faster with fewer resources which will also save you money, because we are a company of technologists, subject matter experts, and specialists. Everyone gets dirty and everyone is technical (except our accountant), and you can be certain that you will be a priority, get taken care of, and never have to hide your purse or wallet because someone might be showing up around budget time to fish around in it because you have money, telling bad hair jokes and beating you to death with cost of living increases when they don’t get enough from you. 

We also have the best rate in the industry and have no sales team, no advertising. All organic growth and we are growing. We use commissions and other residuals to offset our operational costs to keep our rate low, and we are committed to getting our hourly rate even lower and keeping it there, because if you use us, no one else will work for you, and we can do a lot for you.

Carrier and ISP services (We are the carrier, and we are direct internet reseller)

Networking, Firewalls, Cybersecurity Readiness and Audits

Low Voltage and Wireless Infrastructure

Voice and Communications solutions (PBX, Hosten, Premise, Private Cloud, Comms Platforms)

Meetings and conferencing solutions

Public address and media distribution

Digital signage and Custom LED panels

CCTV and Video Management solutions

IPTV, Podcast, Broadcast solutions

Data Management (DMS, Backups, Processes), Virtualization Support and Cloud first strategies

+ More.