Randy Ripkey Says Answering Services Should Know Their Numbers Before They Change Anything

Jacksonville, Florida Nov 4, 2026 (Issuewire.com) - The Question Owners Ask First

Randy Ripkey has spent years listening to answering service owners talk about their business. He notices a pattern. Most owners want to know how to grow. Fewer stop to ask what their current accounts actually cost to run.

"You can't fix pricing if you don't know your cost per call," Ripkey says. "That's the question that comes before any other question."

This is the problem he sees most often at the conferences where he speaks on profitability analysis for the telephone answering service industry. Owners come in wanting to talk about new services or new markets. Ripkey steers the conversation back to the numbers they already have sitting in their billing system, mostly unused.

What TASbillerCloud Is Built to Do

TAS Concepts sells TASbillerCloud, a cloud based billing and analysis platform built for the answering service industry. The software handles billing, but Ripkey built it around analysis first.

"Billing tells you what you charged," he says. "Analysis tells you whether you should have charged that much."

The distinction matters to him because he came up through the industry himself, running an answering service for years before moving into software full time. He has seen both sides of the billing report: the side that produces an invoice, and the side that should produce a decision.

Why Guesswork Costs More Than It Looks Like

Ripkey says the cost of skipping analysis rarely shows up right away. An account that looked profitable at signing can quietly lose money for years if call volume creeps up and the rate never adjusts.

"Nobody notices a slow leak," he says. "It doesn't show up as a loss on any one invoice. It shows up as a business that works twice as hard for the same margin it had five years ago."

He points to this as the reason he keeps the analysis side of TASbillerCloud focused on account level detail rather than just totals. A total revenue number can look healthy while individual accounts are dragging the average down. Ripkey says owners need to see the account, not just the summary.

Speaking to the Industry

Ripkey is asked regularly to speak at answering service conferences on this exact subject. He has served in leadership roles across several industry associations, including as past president of the Southern Telemessaging Association and on the board of ATSI, the national association for the industry. He received the ATSI President's Award in 2023 and has taken part in the organization's annual Hill Walk in Washington, DC, representing ATSI and its members.

That background shapes how he talks about profitability. He is not presenting theory. He is describing the questions he has watched owners avoid, and the numbers he thinks they should look at before making any other call about their business.

"I'm not telling anyone to change their pricing," Ripkey says. "I'm telling them to look at what the numbers already say, and then decide for themselves."

A Starting Point, Not a Finish Line

Ripkey is careful to frame analysis as an ongoing habit rather than a one time fix. Rates that make sense today may not make sense in a year, and the only way to know is to keep checking.

"The numbers change whether you look at them or not," he says. "The only choice you have is whether you're the one who notices first."

About Randy Ripkey

Randy Ripkey is president of TAS Concepts, Inc., based in Jacksonville, Florida, where the company builds TASbillerCloud, a cloud based billing and analysis platform for the telephone answering service industry. He has worked in the answering service field since 1995 and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences on profitability analysis. He has served on the boards of several answering service associations, including ATSI, and received the ATSI President's Award in 2023.

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Randy Ripkey

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