If you want to find Michael Tessler most days, look on a plane. As head of Gaithersburg-based BroadSoft, Tessler is spreading word of the company’s VoIP application software throughout the world. Selling its product to foreign customers saved the company, which was launched in 1998, from the telecommunications downfall a few years ago when competitors were dropping out left and right. The company went to Asia and Europe to sell its VoIP application software, which allows mobile carriers to offer VoIP calling features. The strategy helped it land customers like Korea Telecom and Telefonica. But it also has a healthy list of U.S. customers such as BellSouth and Verizon. Going abroad also recently helped the company land at No. 99 on Deloitte & Touche’s Technology Fast 500. With $60 million in venture capital and 225 employees, BroadSoft grew revenue 2,171 percent from 2001 to 2005. Tessler’s leadership also got him noticed by Ernst & Young, which named him a finalist in its Entrepreneur of the Year competition this year. Tessler, 45, came to the U.S. in 1998 to launch BroadSoft with Scott Hoffpauir after living in Montreal most of his life. He recently spoke with Bisnow on Business about the importance of buzz and the challenge of hiring employees abroad.

Tania Anderson for Bisnow on Business: You know about buzz—you’ve been getting a lot of it. Does it matter?
It helps us recruit the best people. People like to work for companies that are moving quickly. It helps to have global buzz in the countries where we’re trying to sell. Customers know about us and people feel comfortable buying products from companies that are garnering press.

How hard is it to run a telecom companies these days?
We certainly have a challenge of growing an operation and hiring people all around the world to work with our customers. Our challenge every day is to recruit and retain the best talent. We’re operating in 30 plus countries.

How many employees do you have abroad?
Lots. More than half. We have 50 people in an R&D facility in Montreal, a dozen in Sydney and then we have a dozen sales folks in Europe and a dozen in Asia. We just opened a technical assistance center in Belfast. We have a joint venture in Bangladesh.

How do you go about finding employees in other countries?
You do local media and we’ve done quite a bit of that in Belfast. You use local resources to recruit. You try to find some leadership to run the operation. We have a senior management team that is accustomed to managing teams across the world. We’re accustomed to dealing with local cultures.

What’s the best business lesson you’ve learned in your career?
When you hit the nuclear winter, learn how to drink. (Laughs.) Become well acquainted with premium vodka. Based on our experience of starting something in a bubble and living through the tough times and coming out of that and having a pretty good company, I would say the important thing is to stay focused. A lot of people get panicked and start losing focus.

How did you keep your focus?
When you’re in a tough market, it’s hard to focus because you get hungry. When you’re growing, you sometimes have too many all-appealing choices on the left and right and you have to be careful not to distract yourself. We’ve tried hard to stay out of things that would take us in directions we never wanted to go.

What was the toughest period in your career and what did you do to get through it?
The toughest period was taking this company through the telecom meltdown. It was extremely difficult to sell anything. If you had a great product or a bad product, it didn’t matter. Customers weren’t buying anything. It was difficult to fund the company, it was difficult to keep employees motivated. It was hard to continue to generate some forward momentum. But we found ways. For example, we started to spend and create a set of opportunities in Asia. We spent a tremendous amount of time face to face with customers far away. As the North American market returned, we were then able to capitalize on that.

Did you ever think it would all fall apart?
Oh, yeah. It was very close. A lot of really good companies, employees, ideas and products just vaporized after the bubble burst. Some of them were bad companies with bad ideas and some were really good ideas. They just couldn’t make it through the cycle. Being a technologist by training, it’s always hard to see someone’s invention go nowhere. It was tough for ourselves but it was also difficult to watch other entrepreneurs suffer.

Were you exposed to technology growing up in Montreal?
Nope. I didn’t grow up with any technology. We had Saturday night hockey.

How did you end up here?
When we started BroadSoft, Scott and I were looking for a location. We did what we figured was the midway point between his home in Louisiana and my home in Montreal. It also turned out at the time to be an area where we could recruit good talent in a fairly healthy telecom market. Customers were also here in the region. One of our largest is XO Communications. It’s been a really good place to start and grow a business.

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