Ringing up business

The Journal Sentinel staff

When freight carrier Schneider National Inc. recently wanted to trim its monthly phone bill, it turned to gravelly voiced Tim Koxlien, a onetime actor, pop singer and Republican campaign worker who now fashions phone plans.

"Our long-distance company told us about him," recalls Dan Reising, the Green Bay trucking company's manager of telecommunications. "And his company came up with some ideas we liked."

Though Schneider's sister company, Schneider Communications, sells long-distance service, the trucking giant needed somebody with expertise in local service as well as long distance.

So it hired Koxlien's consulting firm TheKoxlien Group to redesign the wiring pattern for local calls from various offices to the long-distance carrier. Spaghetti-like strands on a blueprint revealed Koxlien's recommendations:

m Install a nice, fat DS3 line the equivalent of 28 smaller lines from the long-distance company to the local switching station.

m Then lump 14 separate local service lines into one heavy- duty T1 access line, which can carry as many as 24 individual voice lines at a time.

The result? Instead of paying for myriad local lines, Schneider pays for just one or two.

"Their design saves us $4,000 a month," Reising says. "Most of us don't have the time to figure out the phone tariffs and what's new and what you can do to save money. So, it's nice to have someone do it for us." Finding His Niche

Koxlien, 32, is one of several Wisconsin consultants who have found a niche designing telephone packages for businesses. Armed with up-to-the-minute tariff data, Koxlien was able to build a thriving business in just a few years after starting with little more than a desk, a phone and a stack of business cards.

Today, some four years after starting his firm, Koxlien is an Ameritech distributor and ready to branch out further.

Last month the state Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, certified Koxlien as a "phone company." He now can resell long-distance, cellular, paging and other services through his new venture, Network Recovery Services. As part of a recent PSC ruling, Koxlien also can resell CENTREX a phone company service that lets people within the same company call each other or outsiders directly.

"Right now, there are about 200 phone resellers in business in Wisconsin," says Peter Jahn, a telecommunications rate analyst with the PSC. "Reselling works out real well as long as you can find enough people to use it."

Resellers usually buy a large block of service, say several million dollars worth of long- distance calls a year. Buying in volume pulls their per-minute calling rates way down. They then sell the service to others at a profit, but still below the rates the phone company would charge lower-volume customers.

Resellers routinely bundle their basic service with other options, such as call waiting, to make their offerings more attractive. Koxlien plans to provide a gateway to the Internet global computer network with his CENTREX service.

He's aiming squarely for small and medium-sized businesses that have too few phone lines to qualify for volume discounts. Koxlien will lump these businesses together with a block of other companies to receive bulk-buying rates.

"Because we can package the local service with long distance, we have an opportunity to be very competitive," Koxlien says. "We're packaging volume. As a package, we can get favorable margins. And we can hit it in such a way that there's no way our customer could get this rate on his own."

Koxlien says he knows the business well; he worked as an account manager, selling local phone service for five years in Minneapolis for U S West. A Natural Salesman

Perhaps his biggest asset, though, is his ability to sell. Earnest, polite and quick with a smile, the slightly built Koxlien never stops pitching. And, like an actor pushing cars on TV, he promises to beat any price anywhere in his territory.

"We can reduce costs by 30% to 50% for many companies," he said.

Salesmanship and showmanship come naturally to Koxlien. The son of a heating and ventilating contractor, Koxlien was born in Black River Falls and raised in Whitehall. His mother was a community artist, singer and songwriter.

In high school, Koxlien was one of the singing students on Gov. Lee S. Dreyfus' famous campaign bus. Then Koxlien campaigned for Steve Gunderson, the Republican from Osseo, in his bid for Congress. When Gunderson won, Koxlien, barely out of high school, went with him to Washington, D.C., as a legislative aide, the youngest full-time staffer on Capitol Hill.

In the Washington area, he attended Northern Virginia College, moonlighted in dinner theater musicals and eventually abandoned college, as well as Gunderson's office, for the stage.

In 1984, at 21 and with just a few hundred dollars in his pocket, he drove his blue Pinto cross- country to Los Angeles the actors' mecca. Parts in beer commercials and local stage productions followed. He got a steady job as assistant personnel director at the Long Beach Hyatt Regency to pay the bills.