SEO National
Shea Georgetti is the founder and CEO of Voiply, a telecommunications company he built from the ground up in 2012. What began as a vision to make reliable and affordable phone service accessible to everyone has grown into a company serving more than 40,000 customers across the country with home phone, business phone, hosted fax, and unlimited internet services.
For more than a decade, Shea has focused on doing things differently in the telecom industry. His philosophy is simple: if a process can be automated, it should be, and if customers can solve their own problems, they should have the tools to do so. That mindset has shaped Voiply’s approach to automation, customer service, and scalable technology.
Shea is also passionate about AI and its potential to transform small and midsized businesses. Under his leadership, Voiply has incorporated AI into customer support, internal workflows, and products such as its AI Receptionist and AI Assistant capabilities.
Outside of Voiply, Shea lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he and his family operate a small farm. Working outdoors and spending time with his family help keep him grounded and reinforce the importance of patience, hard work, and maintaining perspective
What inspired you to build “Voiply”?
I’ve always been wired to build things. From a young age, I was working on tractors, cars, and computers because I wanted to understand how things worked and figure out how to make them better.
Telecom was an industry that felt ripe for disruption. The big carriers weren’t innovating fast enough, customers were being underserved, and the technology existed to do things better. That combination was too difficult to ignore.
What continues to motivate me is seeing something I built from nothing actually work—helping customers get what they need, watching the team grow, and knowing we’re building something that can last.
What challenges did you overcome at the beginning of your journey?
The beginning was definitely not easy. One of our biggest challenges was customer onboarding. We didn’t have the systems in place to onboard customers smoothly at scale, so every new customer became a manual project.
As we grew, we also reached the limits of the open-source platforms we were using. We had to move between different platforms, and every transition came with costs, broken processes, and challenges for our support team and customers.
Those experiences taught us the importance of automation, reliability, and building systems that can scale. You don’t appreciate a strong foundation until you’ve experienced what it’s like to build on sand.
What is unique about your business?
I believe our biggest advantage is our ability to move quickly and automate.
We’re a relatively lean organization, but we serve tens of thousands of customers. I don’t believe you necessarily need a huge team to build something great. A small, focused, highly automated team can outperform a much larger organization when the right systems are in place.
We’re also using AI throughout the business, from customer support to products like our AI Receptionist. Our goal is to give customers the tools to solve problems themselves rather than making them wait for someone to help.
Is there anything you would have done differently when starting?
I don’t know that I would change much about the journey because the difficult experiences helped us become the company we are today.
The early platform problems, growing pains, and mistakes taught us lessons we probably wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
If I could tell my younger self anything, it would be to slow down, listen more, and take care of the people who trust you with their business. Everything else has a way of working itself out.
What advice would you give to someone trying to become an entrepreneur?
Learn to build systems instead of simply doing more work.
Every time you find yourself doing the same thing repeatedly, ask yourself how you can automate it or create a better process. Your job as an entrepreneur isn’t to personally handle everything. It’s to build something that can operate and grow without requiring you to touch every single task.
Also, get outside. Step away from the screen, spend time with people you care about, and give your mind room to breathe. A clear mind leads to better decisions.
What are the qualities of a good entrepreneur?
A good entrepreneur needs to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Building something from nothing isn’t a straight line, and there will be plenty of moments when you have to make decisions without having all the answers.
You need to be a good listener, resilient when things go wrong, and genuinely care about your customers, your team, and what you’re building.
Most importantly, you have to be willing to keep learning and improving.
How do you define success?
Success has very little to do with revenue or customer numbers for me.
I define success by looking at the people closest to me and knowing they’re taken care of. It’s having the freedom to be present with the people who matter most.
If your inner circle is doing well and you can be there for them, you’re doing something right.
What’s your favorite book or podcast, and why?
Two books that have had a major impact on me are Atomic Habits by James Clear and Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell.
Atomic Habits reinforced the idea that small, consistent improvements compound into major results over time. At Voiply, I try to apply that philosophy every day.
Buy Back Your Time also changed how I think about entrepreneurship. As a founder, your job isn’t to do everything yourself. Your job is to create systems, delegate, and buy back your time so you can focus on the things only you can do.
What strategies did you first use for marketing your business?
Automation has been one of the biggest strategies behind our growth.
We realized early that many of the questions customers were asking and many of the tasks involved in onboarding were repetitive. Once you recognize those patterns, you can either keep doing everything manually or build a system to handle it.
We chose to build.
Every time we find ourselves doing the same thing twice, we ask how we can make it automatic. Good systems become the foundation for everything else.
TL; DR by Georgetti
I believe a small, focused, highly automated team can accomplish more than a large organization with the right systems. The best ideas often come when you step away from the screen, listen to your customers, and give yourself room to think. For me, success isn’t measured by revenue or customer counts it’s being able to take care of the people closest to me while building something meaningful that lasts.
