Sonic is growing faster than ever.
“We’ve always been growing,” says co-founder and CEO Dane Jasper, “but we’ve never been growing this fast.”
Why the success? The company has made customer service the core of its business. In an industry rife with poor customer interaction, it’s nimble and able to provide service much faster than its competitors. And it has a proven history of building and delivering innovative products for both consumers and businesses over a very strong network. (Not to mention the fact that when you call Sonic, a live person actually answers the phone and directs your call.)
A look back
As Sonic comes of age, it’s rewarding to look back and reflect on the “little company that could.”
Jasper and his co-founder, Sonic CIO Scott Doty, worked together in the computing services department at Santa Rosa Junior College in the early 1990s, when the Internet was basically in its infancy. SRJC was the first community college in California to provide Internet access to its students. An audit of student accounts, however, revealed that there were a lot of nonstudents who were buying accounts on the black market.
It was an epiphany for Jasper and Doty: Why not take it one step further and start their own Internet services company?
In 1994, they founded Sonoma Interconnect with about $9,000 in cash. Their office was the sun room in Jasper’s mother’s home on Spring Street in Santa Rosa. Business was good. One year later, they were forced to move to an office in downtown Santa Rosa because the phone company refused to install more than 17 phone lines at a residence.
It was a fortuitous move, letting them expand their customer base. Eager clients loved getting 56k dialup (remember that?) Internet connections for $12 per month with a $50 set-up fee. At first, they only served Sonoma County. When they started branching into other communities, the duo decided to change the company’s name to Sonic.net, paying homage to its roots while not limiting its reach. (In December 2014, it officially rebranded as simply Sonic.)
Initially, Sonic was a reseller, using AT&T’s network to provide services to customers. One critical decision it made fairly early on was to build its own network and provide its own customer service team—one of the hallmarks of its success.
Today, Sonic has more than 200 employees, most of whom are at its headquarters on Apollo Way in southwest Santa Rosa. According to Jasper, they could use some additional help. “We have about 15 to 20 open positions we’re still seeking to fill,” he says, especially in installation and repair, network construction and customer service.
Sonic currently offers services in 125 California cities, including Sacramento, the Greater Bay Area—from Watsonville to Fort Bragg—and has about 75 points of presence in Los Angeles, Anaheim and throughout Orange County.
New bells and whistles
Sometime this month, Sonic will finish a major fiber optic network construction project in Petaluma. “When that’s complete, Sonic’s fiber network will pass by about 400 commercial buildings in major business parks: Northpoint Corporate Center in Santa Rosa, the Airport Business Center in Sonoma County and the town of Windsor and a conglomerate of business parks along McDowell Boulevard in Petaluma,” Jasper explains. In these 400 buildings, there are about 1,200 businesses, Jasper estimates, which will then be able to subscribe to Sonic’s state-of-the-art FlexLink service, which will provide hosted PBX cloud phone service and Internet to desktops at significantly reduced prices.
“What’s really exciting is that, historically, businesses have had to buy megabits of data service at set rates from providers. Generally, a small business needs 25 megabits for 10 employees and a medium-sized business needs 100 to 150 megabits for employees to share. Because we’re bringing fiber into every business, rather than sell the historical model of 25, 50 or 250, we’ll deliver hosted PBX phone service to the desktop plus a gigabit of data service at a price of just $40 per employee per month. When a company looks at what it currently spends for Internet service—its phone system, phone lines, maintenance—it will want to move to this platform, which will save lots of money and let it get ridiculous Internet speed. One gigabit is 1,000 megabits!” Jasper says.
There are a couple of caveats. “The example configuration is for 10 employees or $400 per month minimum. You could have eight employees and a conference room and kitchen break room, each with a phone set-up. For smaller offices, say with three employees, we really don’t have a way to scale it down below the $200 level,” Jasper says. There will be a variety of hardware, so customers can opt for what they prefer, based on need. Software phone aps will run in trays on the desktop, making the system quite mobile.
“You can have the scenario where an employee needs to take paternity leave to be home for a month, but wants to work from home. All he’s going to need to do is unplug the device, put it in his satchel, take it home and connect it to his home Internet system. Everything is in the cloud. It’s really nice for a sales rep who works out of his or her home,” Jasper says.
The system also has applications for smartphones, enabling employees to access the business phone system without using their own cellphone service.
“When you consider gigabit fiber Internet, you just have to sign up for it,” says Sonic’s marketing director, Tara Sharp. With the savings Sonic is able to offer, she believes businesses will pounce on it.
Gigabit for all!
Businesses aren’t the only reason Sonic has continued to grow exponentially. It also has a dedicated consumer following and can deliver up to 1 gigabit of Internet service, plus unlimited phone service, to residents for $40 per month. The service is called Fusion. Internet speed depends on residential locations. Currently, Sonic has gigabit fiber in Sebastopol and the East Bay with plans to expand its network to San Francisco and Novato. To help get gigabit fiber Internet in more places, it’s conducting a grassroots-style marketing campaign to get more consumers to sign up for Sonic’s residential services, as demand fuels build-out. “Fusion Fiber is the fastest and least expensive Internet service in America,” says Jasper.
Sharp notes that most independent Internet and telecommunications service providers focus solely on business clients because “that’s where the money is.” But, Sonic’s customer profile, says Sharp, is “anyone who uses the Internet. Most consumers who have Sonic are savvy enough to know it’s less expensive and usually as good as the incumbents [AT&T, Comcast and such]. Lots of times, they’ll opt for us because of price alone. We’re usually about half the price of Comcast, for example.”
It’s all about service
Sharp says cost savings and personalized, helpful customer service are the primary reasons most of its customers choose Sonic. This personal approach is something the company takes very seriously, not only because it’s a great selling point, but because it’s also good practice. And the fact that a live person answers the phone when you call the company is just the beginning.
“Customer service is a priority for us,” Jasper says. “I think, for many companies, particularly those not in a competitive field, customer service is a cost to be avoided. And there’s no incentive to provide good customer service if the other guy isn’t. They just send the calls to Manila at one-fifth the cost [of providing customer service in the United States.] Sonic is a rare competitive alternative. It’s a huge way for us to delight our customers! We answer, we’re patient, we deliver; and when customers experience nice service, they’re so thrilled that they go and tell all their friends and neighbors. It’s been a huge boon for our business and has definitely led to better margins.”
About that live person answering the phone: Jasper says the question whether or not they still need to do that comes up every so often and the decision is the same: a resounding yes. “I was at a party and someone told me a story about having a problem paying his Comcast bill. He could do it online, but the process wasn’t working, so he wanted to talk to a live person. They told him there would be a $6 charge to speak to a live person. Can you believe that?” he asks.
Sharp says phone calls are answered by a receptionist, usually within two rings, and a customer care agent is usually on the line to help with any problem within seconds. She tells the story about an agent recently receiving a tech support inquiry: The agent said she could hear the customer talking, so she interrupted him to ask what he was looking for so she could help. The customer paused momentarily and then said, “Oh, you’re a real person! I thought I was talking to a machine!”
A third major reason customers say they select Sonic is the company’s technical creativity and provisioning speed. “We’re smaller, more nimble and we’ve been able to adapt and improve upon our technologies in ways that big companies can’t. And when it comes to provisioning our services, we’re usually able to get it done quickly; whereas, with our competitors, it can take significantly longer,” Sharp says.
Ramping up
When it comes to Sonic’s future, it appears not even the sky is the limit. Construction projects for expansion are on the drawing board but haven’t been announced yet. “It’s timing,” Jasper says. “Some of the projects are still being engineered and others are in the permit stage.”
One thing’s for certain: Sonic, still privately held, has and will continue to be a crown jewel in the North Bay business community.
“No other business community in the United States, with the exception of Kansas City [Missouri and Kansas] has three business parks with gigabit fiber Internet,” says Sharp. “I believe these three parks [in Sonoma County] and other projects we’re planning for the future will have a tremendous economic impact on the North Bay and pave the way for even more growth,” not only for Sonic, but for all North Bay business sectors.
“No other business community in the United States, with the exception of Kansas City [Missouri and Kansas] has three business parks with gigabit fiber Internet,” says Sharp. “I believe these three parks [in Sonoma County] and other projects we’re planning for the future will have a tremendous economic impact on the North Bay and pave the way for even more growth,” not only for Sonic, but for all North Bay business sectors.
Sonic and Privacy
When it comes to Internet privacy, Sonic is the only service provider in the nation to receive a Perfect Privacy Score (six stars) from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that advocates for digital rights, including privacy.
“The Internet is an amazing tool for productivity and entertainment,” says Dane Jasper, Sonic CEO. “But by nature, it is also a very powerful tool for surveillance, and there needs to be checks and balances around our rights.”
In March, Sonic was one of 44 advocates, companies and organizations that signed a letter urging the White House and Congress to move forward with reform of the National Security Agency’s methods for bulk collection of data. The letter called for the termination of these practices under the USA PATRIOT Act, a revised bill containing transparency and accountability mechanisms for company reporting, as well as declassification for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decision.
“Over the last couple of years—with revelations about spying by our own, domestic intelligence agencies—companies have become more careful and concerned about the depth of that spying and about protecting our law-abiding members,” Jasper says. “It’s not our goal to protect criminals. And it can’t be defined in black or white terms. But it’s important consumers have providers advocating for their rights and not being quietly complicit.”
According to Tara Sharp, Sonic marketing director, Jasper established Internet privacy protocols for Sonic two decades ago, and the company has been the industry leader in championing Internet privacy.
Satisfied Customers
Sonic‘s customer list is a veritable Who’s Who, including such well-known names as Facebook, the Golden State Warriors, Tesla and even the Winchester Mystery House. We talked with a few of their North Bay clients to get a read on why they chose Sonic over more traditional service providers.
Rodney Strong Vineyards
For 15 years, Kurt Vanderwolk has been the self-described “chief geek” (manager of information technology) at Rodney Strong Vineyards in Healdsburg. For the last 11 of those years, Rodney Strong has used Sonic as its Internet service provider, and Vanderwolk can’t say enough nice things about the company and its customer service.
Last year, the Klein Family celebrated its 25th anniversary of owning Rodney Strong Vineyards. To celebrate, the company decided to hold celebrity chef wine dinners in four locations—Austin, Tex.; New York City, Coral Gables, Fla. and at its winery on Old Redwood Highway. The idea: simultaneous broadcasts so everyone could wine and dine together!
When the event organizers approached Vanderwolk with the idea, his initial reaction was that the idea was great, “But we’re pretty limited on bandwidth (the rate of successful message delivery through a communications channel),” he told them.
“It was Sonic that provided the fiber backbone that allowed us to do this in real time,” Vanderwolk says. “It took our existing 12-megabit-per-second and boosted it to 100-megabit-per-second with its fiber service.”
Tiffany Bagala was the Sonic sales representative who worked to get “fiber to the campus installed in just the nick of time,” Vanderwolk says. “Usually, you need at least a month of testing before you can switch all services,” he explains further. “When the big Southern California production company came up and set up for the event, it said it was the best Internet service it had ever seen.”
Vanderwolk’s experience with Sonic has been “absolutely fantastic,” he says. “If I need something, I’ll have an engineer or rep get back with me on the phone within 20 minutes. With other companies, you don’t get a live body until your service ticket is escalated. And they could never remember my name, the address or even the name of the company.”
Free Flow Wines, located on Napa Valley Corporate Drive in Napa, is the nation’s largest provider of tap wines. Since its founding in 2009, the company has experienced tremendous growth and today packages wine in and manages the distribution channel for about 90,000 stainless steel wine kegs—for 140 wineries and 4,000 restaurants.
Two years ago, it moved into its new facility, only to find the Internet service to the industrial park was significantly less than what it needed for its business. It approached Comcast and AT&T to see if it could get fiber to its building.
“They both said, ‘Sure, we’ll pull fiber for you,’ but only if we would pay them $10,000,” says Jordan Kivelstadt, Free Flow Wines CEO. That wasn’t exactly in the budget, so Kivelstadt called Sonic.net.
“Sonic gave us a couple of T1s (transmission system carrier) for a few months, and then, about six months later, got fiber to us. “We had to pay for the installation, but not for the actual running of the fiber,” Kivelstadt said. “Everyone else wanted us to pay for their infrastructure.”
“[Sonic is] very good service. We’ve been very happy,” he says.
