Shea Georgetti is the founder and CEO of Voiply, a telecommunications company he built from the ground up starting in 2012. What began as a vision to make reliable, affordable phone service accessible to everyone has grown into a company serving tens of thousands of customers across the country with home phone, business phone, hosted fax, and unlimited internet services.
Shea has spent over a decade in the telecom space doing things differently. Where most companies in the industry were standing still, Voiply was automating, innovating, and building systems designed to scale. His belief has always been simple. If a process can be automated it should be, and if a customer can solve their own problem they should be able to. That mindset is baked into everything Voiply builds.
Under Shea’s leadership Voiply has grown to over 40,000 customers and shows no signs of slowing down. He is a firm believer in the power of AI and what it means for small and mid sized businesses. Building AI into Voiply’s daily operations has been a priority from customer support to internal workflows, and he pushes his team to treat every customer interaction as an opportunity to learn and improve.
Outside of Voiply, Shea is a family man rooted in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He and his family run a small farm that keeps him grounded and reminds him that the best things in life take time, patience, and a lot of hard work.
Shea Georgetti is not chasing trends. He is building something that lasts.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
No two days look exactly the same and honestly that is part of what keeps me sharp. But there is a structure underneath all of it that never really changes.
I start my mornings by getting a pulse on the business. I am looking at what came in overnight, what the team is working through, and where the fires are before they become bigger fires. From there I am jumping between strategy and execution. Some days that means working with the team on a product, some days it is customer escalations, and some days it is building something entirely new.
What makes it productive is pretty simple. I do not let the day run me. I know what matters most and I protect time for that. I also lean heavily on automation and AI to handle the things that do not need me specifically. If I am doing something manually that a system could do, that is a problem I need to fix.
The other thing that keeps me productive is my team. I hire people I trust and then I actually trust them. That frees me up to stay focused on where I can make the biggest impact.
At the end of the day productivity is not about being busy. It is about moving the needle on the things that actually matter.
How do you bring ideas to life?
I am a big believer that ideas are worthless without execution. Everyone has ideas. The people who win are the ones who can take that idea from a thought to something real.
For me it starts with talking it out. I will bounce an idea off my team, poke holes in it, and figure out if it actually solves a real problem. If it does, we move. We do not over plan it. We build a version of it, put it in front of real people, and let the feedback tell us what to do next.
AI has completely changed how fast we can do that now. What used to take weeks we can prototype in days. That speed is everything in this industry. The faster you can test something the faster you know if it is worth doubling down on.
What’s one trend that excites you?
The trend that excites me most is AI and I do not think we are even close to seeing what it is capable of yet. We are still in the early innings and the teams that are moving now are going to have a massive head start on everyone else.
What gets me fired up is that AI is not just a tool you bolt onto your business. It is something you can weave into the entire customer experience. At Voiply we are already doing that. Our AI Receptionist is a perfect example. Small businesses and law firms and medical offices do not always have someone available to answer every call. Our AI Receptionist picks up, handles the conversation, and makes sure nothing falls through the cracks. It is like having a front desk that never calls in sick and never has a bad day.
We are also building out AI Assistant capabilities that help customers and our own team work smarter. The goal has always been self service. Give people the tools to solve their own problems without waiting on hold or sending an email into a void. AI is making that vision real faster than anything we have seen before.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
Getting outside. That is my honest answer. I spend a lot of time on the farm with my family and there is something about working with your hands and stepping away from a screen that just resets you. Some of my best ideas have come to me when I was not even thinking about the business.
I think a lot of people in this industry confuse being busy with being productive. I do not buy that. The best version of me shows up when I am balanced. The farm teaches you patience. You cannot rush certain things and that mindset carries back into how I run the business.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Honestly when I think about it I am not sure I would change much. The early struggles with platforms, the growing pains, the hard lessons, all of that led us to where we are today. If we had not gone through what we went through we probably never would have found the right fit. So I have a lot of respect for that journey even when it was painful.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you.
Most people in business think you need a big team to build something great. I disagree completely.
I think a small, focused, highly automated team will outperform a bloated organization every single time. People hear that and they push back. They say you cannot scale without headcount, you cannot support customers without more people, you cannot grow without adding bodies. I have spent over a decade proving that wrong.
The answer is not more people. The answer is better systems. When you build the right automation, when your customers can solve their own problems, when your processes do not require a human to touch every single thing, you can do more with less than most people think is possible.
The telecom industry is full of companies with massive support teams and mediocre customer experiences. We have a lean team and we serve tens of thousands of customers. That is not an accident. That is a philosophy.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Get outside. That is my answer and I mean it.
I live on a screen. That is just the reality of what I do. But the one thing I keep coming back to is stepping away from it. Getting outside, working with my hands on the farm, being present with my family. That is what keeps my mind clear.
People throw around the term work life balance but I do not love that phrase. What I am really talking about is a well rounded mind. When your mind is clear you make better decisions and you come back to the work sharper than when you left it.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
Honestly I get outside. That is always my first move.
When things are piling up and my head is full I stop trying to think my way out of it at a desk. I get up, I get outside, whether that is the farm, a walk, or just some fresh air and I let my brain decompress. Nine times out of ten I come back with a clearer head and a better answer than if I had just kept staring at the screen.
The other thing I do is talk to people I trust. My partner, my family, someone close to me. Sometimes you just need to say what is on your mind out loud to realize it is not as big as it felt inside your head. The people around you are your greatest resource when things feel heavy.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
The one strategy that has made the biggest difference is automation. We realized very early on at Voiply that the questions customers were asking and the tasks involved in onboarding were the same things over and over again. Once you see that pattern you have two choices. You keep doing it manually and it buries you, or you build a system that handles it. We chose to build.
Every time we found ourselves doing the same thing twice we asked how do we make this automatic. Good systems are the foundation everything else is built on.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
I was dead wrong about how long we could stay on open source platforms.
For years I told myself that this platform could scale. We could make it work, we could patch it, we could build around its limitations. I kept pushing that belief longer than I should have because switching platforms is painful and expensive and honestly a little scary when you have thousands of customers depending on you.
But the platform was not scaling with us and our customers were feeling it before we were ready to admit it. That is the worst place to be as a business. When your customers experience your mistakes before you do, you have waited too long.
Making the decision to move was hard. Executing it was harder.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
A subscription based farm box service built around a 50 mile radius. Completely hyperlocal.
Most people have seen the meal kit delivery companies but this is different. You partner directly with small local farms, butchers, and egg producers within your region and build a weekly or monthly box sourced entirely from close to home. No giant distribution centers, no produce sitting on a truck for a week. Real food from real farms down the road.
I say this from personal experience. We run a small farm and I see firsthand how much incredible product never reaches the right people simply because small farms do not have the infrastructure to market and distribute at scale. That is the gap.
You handle the logistics, the marketing, and the subscriptions. The farms focus on what they do best. Everyone wins and the customer gets something they cannot find at any grocery store.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
Claude. And I do not say that lightly.
I live on a screen all day and the amount of thinking, writing, planning, and problem solving that goes into running a business is constant. Claude has become the tool I reach for more than anything else. It is like having a brilliant teammate available around the clock who never gets tired, never has a bad day, and never runs out of ideas.
We use it across the entire business. Writing, customer communication, building automations, analyzing data, working through problems. What used to take hours now takes minutes and the quality is better than what we were producing before.
What is the best $100 you recently spent?
The best hundred dollars I recently spent was a donation to my local VFW.
Take care of your community. It took care of you first.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast from which you’ve received much value?
Two books that have stuck with me are Atomic Habits by James Clear and Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell.
Atomic Habits changed how I think about building systems inside a business. The idea that small consistent improvements compound into massive results over time is something I apply every single day at Voiply. It is not about making one giant leap. It is about getting one percent better every day and letting that build on itself.
Buy Back Your Time hit different as an entrepreneur. Dan Martell makes a point that your job as a founder is not to do all the work. Your job is to buy back your time so you can focus on what only you can do. That mindset pushed me to double down on automation and delegation and it completely changed how I run the business.
Both books are worth your time.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
Honestly I do not watch much TV. When I do sit down I am not looking for something new and complex. I recently found myself rewatching old episodes of Home Improvement and I have zero regrets about that.
There is something about that show that just holds up. Tim Allen building things, breaking things, and figuring it out along the way. As a kid who grew up working with his hands, that show always resonated with me. It still does.
Key learnings:
- Shea believes that a small, focused, automated team will outperform a large bloated organization every single time. The answer is never more people. The answer is better systems.
- Patience is a skill you have to develop intentionally. Whether you are hunting, farming, or building a business, the right opportunity will come. You just have to be prepared when it does and ready to move when the moment is right.
- The best ideas do not come from staring at a screen. Stepping away, getting outside, and giving your mind room to breathe is not a luxury. It is a strategy.
- Your customers are your greatest source of feedback. Every ticket, every call, and every complaint is telling you exactly where your business needs to improve. The entrepreneurs who listen win.
- Success has nothing to do with revenue numbers or customer counts. If the people closest to you are taken care of and you have the freedom to be present with them, you are doing something right.