ANDOVER — A local company infused with nearly $9 million in new venture capital is planning to hire up to 300 people over the next couple of years to fill positions in a call center that caters to the restaurant industry.
Joe Gagnon, CEO of Exit41 at 3 Dundee Park, said that when the firm's expansion is complete, it will be one of the largest call centers in the region as well as one of the "bigger employers in Andover."
"We could have hundreds of people working here," he said yesterday, standing in the spacious, three-story, 50,000-square-foot converted mill off Dundee Road.
Right now, the company employs about 40 people, mostly computer programmers, and another 20 people in a fledgling call center in the basement.
By this summer, Gagnon expects to have another 50 people working in the call center, as the company is about to announce agreements with two major national restaurant chains that will require more "agents" fielding requests from people needing catering services or looking for takeout or delivery orders.
The firm, founded in 1999, has evolved from strictly writing software for the fast-food industry into a software, call-center and computer server company — all under one roof.
In this economy, an aggressive expansion schedule could be viewed as an unusual approach, to say the least.
But Gagnon and his team of software and restaurant experts say they have figured out a way to help restaurants beef up their businesses by increasing their takeout, delivery and catering capacity, while at the same time honoring their commitments to their more traditional, sit-down customers.
Gagnon, in charge since 2006, said the company is trying to help its clients grow by offering catering services to weddings, graduation parties or business gatherings.
For years, the company was focused on creating ordering software for fast-food restaurants like Wendy's, still one of its clients. The way the Exit41 ordering program works is that when a customer pulls up to a drive-through microphone to place an order, they are actually talking to someone in a call center miles away, or even in another state.
The person on the other end of the phone, perhaps in a place like Wilmington, Del., types in the order, which then flashes up on the screen of the local Wendy's. The restaurant employees no longer have to fuss with poorly functioning headsets or garbled messages from customers.
The software proved so successful that restaurants got more business than they could handle, Gagnon said. It worked too well, he said, and in some cases the restaurants were overwhelmed.
One of Exit41's clients in Canada, Cara, which owns the Swiss Chalet chain of restaurants, figured out that if it shrunk the seating size of the restaurant and increased kitchen capacity, it could handle the business. It also found it could make more in sales from other sources: Rather than focusing all of the attention on customers ordering $5 or $6 meals, they began focusing on seeking $200 to $300 catering orders.
"We tell our customers, they need to build bigger kitchens and smaller dining rooms," Gagnon said, noting that as fewer people go out to dinner, more people order takeout or delivery.
The jobs aren't minimum wage, he said, and generally start at $10 or $12 an hour. They are looking for people who speak English clearly, who are educated and who care about both the customer on the other end of the phone and the customer making the food — the restaurants.
The $8.8 million in funding comes from Devonshire Investors, Humphrey Enterprises and JAO Investments.
