A Second Number Service Built For Small Businesses 

In 2022, I dropped my iPhone into a waterfall.  I had hopped from one slab of rock protruding from the river to an adjacent isle, hoping I’d find a better angle to photograph the towering wall of thundering foam in front of me. Instead, my iPhone 11 escaped my pocket and dashed out, leaving me to watch it bounce just out of grasp, be swept into the current, a silicon, glass, and lithium sacrifice to Banff National Park.   

There was nothing to do but laugh, as my friends safely ensconced on shore did. The remarkably smooth experience of the Kalispell T-Mobile lessened the financial sting of purchasing a replacement, as I walked out with a brand-new iPhone 12 and a determination to avoid dropping this one into thundering curtains of water.  

So instead, I dropped it out the car window while ordering a cheeseburger at a Sonic in Vacaville, not three days later. The shattered green glass and chewed metal on the back remain a testament to my own clumsiness.  

I tell these stories to demonstrate the fragility of even the most well-engineered smartphones. Two feet and a bit of asphalt or a shallower-than-expected hiking short pocket can result in a $1,000 mistake.  

So why are businesses still buying physical phones? It’s an entirely unneeded hassle and expense. And yet, businesses still pony up thousands of dollars to equip their workforce with phones that end up unused. Who really wants to carry two phones around anyway? 

A new iPhone currently costs $1,099 – and a typical iPhone lasts 2-3 years. Take for example, a small landscape or irrigation company with 10 full-time employees – that’s a ~$11,000 outlay. For the sake of argument, let’s say service costs can easily run around $50 per line per month, or $600 per line per year. For our hypothetical 10-person landscaping firm, the expense for a three-year smartphone cycle is going to end up at around ~$30,000 dollars. That number, of course, presumes that none of the 10 employees accidentally drop their work phone into a waterfall, which, as the above story illustrates, is very unrealistic.  

But $30,000 is not an insignificant amount of money, it’s the sort of number that makes one ask the question: do we really need these? Simply put, employees do need to communicate, and just as you might provide them with a company email address, providing a method for communicating via mobile phone is just as essential. Smartphones are ubiquitous and used heavily. The average screen time for a typical smartphone user runs in excess of 2 hours and 30 minutes per day, and people are creatures of comfort, ease and habit. If they’re using their personal phones for everything else, they’ll inevitably use them for work too.  

So, carve a space where work can exist on the same devices people use already.  

MultiLine™ by Movius does that by adding a second number to any smartphone via an app. It allows employees to consolidate all their work communication to their personal phone, while maintaining privacy and work-personal separation.  

MultiLine can use any network (mobile voice, data, Wi-Fi) and can make phone calls, send SMS or WhatsApp messages, as well as WeChat, Microsoft Teams, and more. The app maintains a separate contact list than the employee’s personal phone and can set up to be only available during employee business hours. It really is a full-service solution at a fraction of the cost of a new smartphone.  

Smartphones are ubiquitous in the developed and developing world and have become deeply personal decisions. People care about the phone they procure; the color of the group chats they participate in, and – good-natured complaining aside – the ease with which smartphones connect them to the world.  

Let’s make work just that simple too.