THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 11, 1997 TAG: 9702110423
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: 39 lines
Telelink Systems Inc. said Monday that it has purchased the assets of Tele-Communications Inc.'s closed Greenbrier-area telemarketing center. The company said it plans to relocate the operation to another facility in Chesapeake or Norfolk.
Terms of the sale to Denver-based Telelink weren't disclosed.
Tim Hardin, Telelink's president, said in an interview that his company has retained the center's roughly 30 salaried employees and will offer full-time jobs to many of nearly 270 part-time hourly workers affected by the TCI shutdown last week.
TCI announced in early December that it was closing the center and farming the telephone sales duties performed by the workers to outside contractors.
The 9-year-old Telelink is one such company. Its more than 300 employees in Denver, Pueblo, Colo., and Falmouth, England, make telemarketing calls on behalf of cable-TV operators, including TCI.
Hardin visited the Chesapeake center in mid-January and has been negotiating with TCI since then to acquire its assets. He said Telelink had already been looking for an East Coast facility when it learned of the Chesapeake center's shutdown.
Hardin said he is looking for a larger facility - about 8,000 square feet - to permanently house the new operation. He said his company hopes to decide from a list of five candidate facilities within the next few days, and begin operating there within 90 days with about 100 full-time workers. He said eventually, he plans to expand the work force to about 300.
In the meantime, Hardin said, he hopes to contract with another telemarketing center in Hampton Roads for off-hours use of between 40 and 50 of its calling stations.
He declined to divulge planned wages for starting workers, but said, `` It's going to be very competitive because we're going to want to draw as many people as possible.''
KEYWORDS: TELELINK SYSTEM INC. TCI