Alan Hopgood (Zebra Connections Ltd)

We provide a PERSONALISED telephone answering service. Our clients NEVER miss a call and we ensure no business opportunities are lost. Who do you think your clients would prefer to talk to? A person or a machine?

We allocate just 2 or 3 named PA's who get to know our client's callers and their business. We act as a receptionist for companies with staff varying from 5 to 100 staff without any difficulty. By outsourcing the receptionist activity to Zebra, a company can re-allocate staff to revenue earning or administrative activities or they can decide simply not to replace the staff ensuring a significant saving in the reception costs. Our team will act exactly as you would expect any receptionist to operate. They will take all incoming calls and transfer them through to the department or member of staff sought. If these individuals are not available, they can give callers the option to leave a voicemail or simply take a message to send on later. This they will do immediately by text or email with an end of day email being sent as well.

My career so far has been rich in variety and diversity, but I'm still a long way from actually being rich! 

I left school at 18, joined the RAF as an Assistant Air Traffic Controller and spent most of my time in Flight Planning at Brize Norton seeing VC10 aircraft flying off all over the world. We weren't fighting any real wars at the time and the whole experience was remarkably stress-free, apart from a day a month when we practiced for the Russkis coming in under the radar. Fortunately, they never did. Not in the way we expected anyway. We never had a contingency plan to fend off oligarchs from taking over football clubs! Some surreal experiences of that time were typing with rubber gloves and a gas mask on while listening to Radio 1, defending the Air Terminal from the SAS whilst armed with nothing more than a pick axe handle, and guarding the base during an alert of possible IRA attack with a rifle that didn't have any ammunition in it. Even in those days the RAF was very health and safety conscious!

After leaving the RAF I travelled around America for a few months, and spent £1000 in the process. Wow, that was a lot of money then. After that there followed a series of sales jobs, selling bonds and pension plans door-to-door. When was that banned? I much preferred my next job; working in a pub, doing everything from minding the bar to being the chef in the restaurant. 

I was then lucky enough to be offered a place to study Law at Cardiff University, where learnt the meaning of mens rea (no it's not a disease peculiar to blokes), ratio decidendi (not something that had got lost on its way to the maths department), and inter alia (not an Italian airline). There followed another year at Chester Law School where I learnt more about accounts than legal phrases, which has proven to be very useful. Upon graduation I worked in a solicitor's office, dealing with ne'er do wells, shoplifters and other mostly petty criminals. All a bit sordid really. A much more uplifting career beckoned.

Picture framing! Yep, a real "hands on" job. Mitre, mount and glass cutting, these were all skills I put to good use in a shop. Examples of my work still decorate my home and office walls today. The internet was in its infancy in those days and I tried to set up a mail order picture framing business using the old methods of catalogues and magazine adverts. But thinking I was being clever I also bought the domains www.panoply.com, and www.panoply.com with the hazy intention of having some sort of online department store. Others did a much better job of using much catchier names and today nobody else thinks that using the name "panoply" in their domain is a good idea! So after eight years in retail I decided to do something else.