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Mary and Roy Osmon attended the 1982 ATSI (Associated Telemessaging Services International) conference in San Diego after being approached about an opportunity to purchase an answering service. Mary had previous experience working at the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company and Wisconsin Bell. So, Roy encouraged Mary to go to the exhibit hall to talk with people and learn about what they were offering, while he attended the meetings. That was when Mary first met Mr. Bill Curtin, II (aka Mr. C) and his wife, Eleanor (aka Mrs. C), co-founders of Amtelco.
“The exhibit hall was huge, and I didn’t know anyone,” says Mary. “I saw switchboards and all kinds of different equipment that no longer exist today. At some point, I noticed Amtelco’s booth, and saw the team was excited; they were energized.” Mr. C showed Mary the products Amtelco had on offer, including the Video III and a spinning carousel messaging system, which Mary thought looked dangerous. Mr. C realized that Mary was a forward-thinking person. She was looking for a system that impressed her. Mr. C introduced Mary to John Morley, the developer of Amtelco’s EVE software, who demonstrated a new paperless system using computers. The product was so new it didn’t even have a name yet, but Mary knew it was the one she wanted for their answering service.
“From the moment I met Mr. C, I knew that we would be in good hands,” reflects Mary. “He reminded me of my father, and immediately we just hugged. He showed me a better way to process calls, rather than a switchboard and pink slips flying around, and I thought, ‘OK, you know what, I think this can work out,’ as crazy as it sounds. I really felt that Amtelco had integrity, was honest, and they would make a difference. They were going to change the industry, whether it wanted to be changed or not.”
Mary and Roy excitedly talked about the experiences they had at ATSI, and the possibility of purchasing an answering service. Mary says, “Roy asked me, ‘Do you think we can pull this off?’ And I said, ‘What do we have to lose? We’re in a second marriage, live in a duplex, and drive 10-year-old cars. There’s nothing anyone can really take away from us. So, if we’re going to jump off the cliff, this is the time to do it, and Bill Curtin is the person to help us do it.’”
An Unconventional Name for a Bold New Business
In the early 1980s, traditional telephone answering services were still tied to manual, labor-intensive processes. The Osmons had a different vision. Mary wanted a modern, high-quality, paperless operation. They both wanted their business name to set them apart. Mary explains, “At that time, everybody was ‘Joe’s Answering Service’ or ‘ABC Answering Service,’ and I felt the name didn’t need to start with the letter ‘A’ just so we’re at the beginning of the Yellow Pages. I knew we were going to be more than an answering service with our new system. I didn’t want to be restrictive with our name.”
Mary continues, “Roy was driving us home to Milwaukee from Madison after a business meeting with Amtelco when I turned to him and said, ‘What we need to do is find a name that kind of covers the full spectrum.’ Roy about went off the road and said, ‘That’s it! Call the bank, we have a name!’” Spectrum Communication Services Incorporated opened its doors on May 22, 1983, the wedding anniversary date of co-founders Mary and Roy.
The early days required creative thinking and pure grit. Mary explains, “At first, we couldn’t afford a dedicated third shift person. We had a nun who worked overnight on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. She loved it because it was so quiet, and she would do her devotions and meditations.” Mary covered the holes in the demanding third shift herself. “I brought in an old lawn chaise lounge, a blanket, and a pillow. I would sleep next to the station.” Roy was at home with the kids, getting them off to school before going to work to relieve Mary. “Some mornings I would say to Roy, ‘Get here quick! I’m falling asleep!’ This schedule lasted for the first eight months of the business. Then, we found a really wonderful woman who ended up working third shifts for over thirty years. She is the most reliable person on the planet,” exclaims Mary.
We Don’t Have Anyone Here Named “Eve”
Spectrum became the very first company in the nation to purchase and install Amtelco’s nameless computer-telephony integration (CTI). “Everybody we knew was like, ‘You guys are insane. What are you doing, opening a new business with a completely unknown system?’ Everything was new to everyone,” says Mary. “The installers were troubleshooting during installation, and there were wires hanging all over. I saw two people pulling on the same cable back and forth, confused about why it was suddenly disappearing. I said, ‘I think you both are working on the same cable!’”
Mary had maintained the connections she had as a former Bell employee and explains, “The telephone company didn’t like a lot of the answering services unless you rented their switchboards, but it was always kind of intrigued with us. They brought a whole group of guys over because they wanted to see how you could integrate a telephone into the great big, two-piece keyboards we had back then, and they were very impressed. The telephone company was really kind to us. We were even able to obtain blocks of 1,000 DID (Direct Inward Dialing) numbers, consecutive DID numbers, etc., so that as we converted the 350 accounts we purchased to Amtelco’s new system, we could give our clients easy-to-remember numbers. This was as unheard-of back then as it would be today. I think we had the Curtin guardian angel with us through the whole thing.”
After Spectrum’s system was up and running for a while, they began to receive calls inquiring about someone named Eve. Mary shares a fun interaction, “I got a call from a gentleman in Texas who wanted to speak with me about Eve, and he wanted me to be honest about her. I said, ‘Well, I think normally I am honest, so that’s not an issue, but we don’t have anyone here named Eve.’ I thought he was doing a reference check for one of our employees, but he again said, ‘No, Eve!’ And I said, ‘I heard you, you said Eve.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Eve.’”
It was still early days for the new Spectrum business, and Mary and Roy were unable to attend that year’s ATSI event due to finances. So, they were unaware that Amtelco had officially introduced its new ground-breaking Electronic Video Exchange platform, better known as EVE. The very same, unnamed system Spectrum had been using for months.
Decades of Developments
Through decades of system upgrades—transitioning from legacy hardware to the flagship Infinity platform—Spectrum and Amtelco grew up alongside one another. “It really was a family,” reflects Mary. “John Morley was the programmer. He was the Kevin Beale (Amtelco’s VP of Software and R&D) back in the day. He’d come by nearly every other week. We would meet for hours to discuss what was going well, whether there were any problems, and what we needed the system to do. Amtelco was always right there with us. When you bought into Amtelco, you weren’t just buying hardware or software; you were partnering with people who actually cared if your phones rang and your operators succeeded.”
As Amtelco software evolved, so did the community surrounding it. Mary and Roy were founding members of an independent user group called the National Association of EVE Owners (later renamed the National Amtelco Equipment Owners or NAEO) in 1984. This group established a dedicated user community to give call center leaders a collective voice, facilitate peer-to-peer training, and collaborate directly with Amtelco developers to suggest system enhancements.
Over the years, NAEO expanded to support a diverse mix of call center professionals including, owners, managers, IT specialists, and operators who use Amtelco’s platforms. Today, NAEO continues to partner with Amtelco via a collaborative feedback loop and conferences to gather member “Wish List” items, now known as “Innovation Machine” items, that guide future product features.
By the 1990s, Spectrum was receiving software updates every week. “We started making some of our staff into remote operators with dial-up modems,” explains Mary. “One of the triggers that made us go remote so early was the desire to keep employing our really strong agents who, for a variety of reasons, had to move away, go to school, or had other life changes. Finding good, skilled people was a challenge. So, we said, ‘Well, if you’re going to go away for school, how about you still work for us? Let’s figure this out.’ We used PC Anywhere, so they could log in and work remotely via Amtelco’s Infinity platform. And it worked! We kept some really good people on our staff because of it.” Mary and Roy embraced new technology and framed the changes in a way that made them exciting for their staff rather than daunting. Kelli says, “It really enhanced retention with our staff because every time we rolled out something new, we showed them how it was going to make things better, not scary. We reassured them that we weren’t trying to downsize staff. We’d say, ‘Who’s your least favorite client? Look at how this is going to make that client more satisfied.’ We’d emphasize how the tools and technologies would make the operator’s jobs easier and make them happier.”
Growing Up in the Business
While Mary and Roy were building the business, their daughter, Kelli Harrigan, was growing up alongside it. “I grew up in it. The office atmosphere felt like an extended family,” says Kelli. “In high school and through college, I was working shifts answering calls and helping out with odd jobs.”
Over the years, Kelli worked in nearly every operational role: dispatching, account setup, operator scheduling, client management, and eventually high-level operational leadership. Kelli was instrumental in managing team workflows during Spectrum’s upgrade from legacy systems to Amtelco’s Infinity platform. Following Mary’s lead, Kelli went on to serve on the NAEO board for 12 years in many roles, including presenting at conferences and serving as president of the association.
Mary worked with other industry leaders in both NAEO and ATSI on education initiation initiatives. She worked with a team, including Amtelco customer Dee Hawkins, to develop a three-tier certification book for mid-level leadership for ATSI. Mary also served on the NAEO board for nine years, worked with NAEO board members and Amtelco users on educational initiatives and presented at both NAEO and other leadership seminars.
Spectrum expanded from a lean team of eight to a major regional operation with 40 stations and employing as many as 125 staff members during peak seasonal rushes. Mary says, “I was at the point where I had delegated a lot of my duties because I wanted to do other things. When I left, Kelli was the person who really took over the business.” Mary went to school to become a chaplain and performed those duties for a palliative care unit in a major hospital. So far, she has also written a couple of novels and prayer books. Kelli quips, “She doesn’t really know how to retire!”
When offers started coming in to purchase Spectrum, the interested parties insisted that Kelli stay on for her expertise. It was a family decision to sell Spectrum in 2014. Kelli stayed with the new owners, continuing to support staff, lead large-scale call center operations, and manage complex technology conversions for major organizations. “I was very devoted to my Spectrum team who moved to the new company,” says Kelli. “I had a strong, protective mother hen-like attitude over that team. In the end, I was managing a team of about 200 people. Today, we still talk to around 25 of our former staff, as well as business associates that we had. Some of our industry friends became lifelong friends.”
Full Circle at Amtelco
By 2021, the company had changed hands again, and Kelli wanted a change. “I needed to figure out what my next step was going to be, but I didn’t know what that looked like,” explains Kelli. “I had built up a lot of knowledge with the work that I’d done, but I didn’t know what to do with it. By this time, I had been out of the industry associations for seven years. I reached out to Mike Friedel (Senior VP of Sales at Amtelco), because the last time I saw him, he was very involved with the NAEO group. So, I figured he would know what was going on with the industry.”
Mike and Kelli met for lunch. After talking, Mike asked Kelli if she would ever want to work for Amtelco. Kelli was interested, but no one was sure what her position would be. A little while later, Greg Beale (Amtelco’s retired VP of Customer Operations) reached out to Kelli while she was vacationing with her family. Kelli says, “I told Greg about all of the conversion projects that I had been through. The details were loose, but he proposed a project manager position.” Mary continues, “Kelli came out of the room where she had been privately speaking to Greg, and she had a big smile on her face, and said, ‘I think I have a new job.’”
“That kind of position totally made sense to me,” says Kelli. “I can talk to customers who are going through what I’d been through on conversions. I know their business. I know the equipment that they’re coming from. So, I thought that could work.”
Kelli continues, “The first week I started with Amtelco was really different for me. I had been working 70 to 80 hours a week, but my first day with Amtelco ended at 4:00 p.m., and I’m like, wait, what do people do at four in the afternoon if you’re not working? It took weeks for my brain to readjust to a mere 40-hour work week. I hadn’t ever done that!”
“I think working for Amtelco came at the right time,” explains Kelli. “I was driving to work one day shortly after accepting the position, and I thought, ‘Why didn’t I do this sooner?’ And a voice as clear as day in my head said, ‘Because it wasn’t the right time. This is the right time.’ I had that much more experience to gain before coming to Amtelco. Now is the right time and place, and I’m making the most of it. So, here I am.” As Amtelco marks its 50th anniversary, Spectrum’s history serves as a testament to the power of authentic relationships in business. For Mary, watching her daughter bring decades of family expertise back to Amtelco gives her a profound sense of pride and closure. “I’m a very proud mom,” reflects Mary. “It’s been a good transition. Amtelco still has Bill Curtin’s spirit. Much of the foundation he built many, many years ago is still there. I just knew my daughter was going to be exactly where she needed to be.”
