EDMONDS – When the owner of DialPro Northwest asked Dennis Tyler if he wanted to buy the business, Tyler “blew off the idea.”

Tyler had a successful sales career in telecommunications. DialPro NW was a nearly 20-year-old company dealing almost exclusively in the not-so-glamorous world of voicemail systems.

Now, having completed his first year as the owner, Tyler now actually invokes the word “fun” to describe an experience he first resisted.

“I can’t believe it’s been a year. It’s been amazing what we accomplished,” the 49-year-old said from his business in downtown Edmonds. His office walls are decorated with posters and photos of Porsche cars, reflecting his passion for racing his own Porsche 911.

DialPro has established itself over the years, recruiting 200 clients worldwide, including Starbucks, the city of Everett, Washington State University and Pemco Insurance. As a new owner versed in the latest technology, Tyler’s mission is to keep his established customers happy and updated with new equipment while recruiting new ones.

“I’m very fortunate I didn’t have to start from zero,” Tyler said, adding the average customer has been with DialPro NW for more than 10 years. “We had many very good customers when I arrived.”

He also evangelizes about how new telecommunications systems can do much more than automatically take messages. Systems offered, maintained and monitored by DialPro NW can handle tasks such as automatically alerting clients when something’s wrong at remote locations or quickly notifying many people in event of an emergency.

“We try to help companies communicate and work better. We sell solutions that work with phones, just not the phones themselves,” Tyler said.

As an example, he tells of a Starbucks location in Chicago where the DialPro-maintained system relayed an excessive heat alert from the store. It turned out an air conditioning unit had gone down in one of the coffee retailer’s computer server rooms. The alert prevented further damage.

His small staff constantly keeps up on its customers’ systems, often fixing problems remotely. “A lot of times, we fix problems while our customers sleep,” Tyler said.

For years, the big telecommunications providers – Verizon, Sprint and Qwest, for example – marketed to businesses bells and whistles they could offer along with their basic telephone service. As the technology becomes more specialized, however, the trend is now favoring smaller companies such as DialPro, which typically can offer more personal service and technical expertise, Tyler explained. Businesses no longer feel they have to get all their telephone system features from just one company, which helps his firm and the half-dozen or so others like his around the nation.

“We have one piece of the pie, but we’re a really good slice,” he said.

A U.S. Coast Guard veteran, Tyler returned to civilian life in the mid-1980s, just as deregulation of telecommunications created new opportunities in that industry.

“I went from my nice, cushy military job with a place to sleep and eat to living on 100 percent commissioned sales,” he said.

But he enjoyed selling phone systems and stuck with it. In 1992, as the first new voice messaging technology hit the market, he switched to selling that.

When DialPro NW’s founders were ready to retire last year, they asked Tyler, who was a vendor to their business. He didn’t feel confident enough about the financial expertise needed to run a small business to consider himself a good candidate. But after colleagues and the bank expressed confidence in the business’ future, he took it over.

At the time, co-founder Marilyn Knutson praised Tyler’s credentials and said he would help the firm “migrate into the future with the best possible solutions.”

Which has been one of his goals. While DialPro NW maintains aging voicemail systems for longtime customers, Tyler said he and his staff also try to show those customers what’s possible with the newer technology. Some customers are reluctant, he admitted, but others embrace the new “unified communications” systems DialPro NW can offer, which allow companies to offer more responsive customer service.

“I’m a pretty technical guy, so I enjoy the technology, but I also enjoy the interaction with customers,” he said.

With the company’s new ownership and new growth, DialPro is on track to increase its sales force and technical staff within the next year, Tyler said. The company has continued a long track record of being profitable, though he said he’s investing much of that back into the firm at this stage.

He’s also having fun, he repeated, showing off his latest marketing tool: a jack-in-the-box he sends customers along with information about DialPro’s systems. The point of sending this particular child’s toy? To emphasize that his firm’s solutions are “out of the box.”

Tyler said coming up with new solutions to his customers’ problems is easier since he doesn’t have to check with a boss anymore, one of the best perks of having become an owner.

“I enjoy most the freedom to implement good ideas,” he said.

Reporter Eric Fetters: 425-339-3453 or fetters@heraldnet.com.