We grew from one office to five in 18 months. Each new office needed a phone system on day one — not day thirty after hardware procurement, installation, and configuration.
Here is how we did it with zero hardware purchases and a single unified system across all locations.
The Setup
5 offices, 3 countries:
- London HQ (35 people)
- Manchester satellite (12 people)
- Dublin support center (20 people)
- New York sales (8 people)
- Singapore APAC (5 people)
Requirements:
- Single phone system, single directory
- Local phone numbers in each city
- Calls between offices = free, internal extensions
- Call routing follows business hours per timezone
- CRM integration (HubSpot) across all offices
- Call recording for compliance (UK FCA regulations)
What We Deployed
No PBX boxes. No SIP gateways. No ISDN lines. No T1 circuits.
Each employee got:
- A softphone app on their laptop
- A softphone app on their mobile
- A desk phone (Yealink T54W) for those who wanted one — shipped directly, auto-provisioned
That is it. Total hardware cost for new offices: desk phones only, about $150 each for those who wanted them. Most people use the desktop or mobile app exclusively.
The Numbers (18 months in)
| Metric | Before (3 offices, legacy) | After (5 offices, cloud VoIP) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly telecom cost | $8,200 | $2,400 |
| Setup time for new office | 3-4 weeks | Same day |
| Inter-office call cost | $0.04-0.08/min | $0 (free) |
| IT admin time (phones) | 12 hrs/month | 2 hrs/month |
| Missed calls (after hours) | ~15% | ~3% (auto-routing) |
| CRM call logging | Manual (40% compliance) | Automatic (100%) |
Key Design Decisions
Auto-attendant per location: Each office has a local number with a local greeting. Callers in London hear a London number and accent. Callers in New York get a US number. But the routing engine is unified — a London call can overflow to Dublin if London is busy.
Follow-the-sun support: Our support queue starts in Singapore at 8 AM SGT, hands off to Dublin at 8 AM GMT, then to New York at 9 AM EST. One queue, three offices, 18-hour coverage without anyone working nights.
Extension dialing across offices: Everyone has a 4-digit extension. Dial 2xxx for London, 3xxx for Dublin, 4xxx for New York. No long distance charges, no country codes.
What We Learned
Bandwidth matters more than you think. Our Manchester office had 20 Mbps shared broadband. Fine for 5 people on calls simultaneously, not fine for 12. Upgraded to 100 Mbps dedicated — problem solved.
Desk phones are optional. About 60% of our team never uses the desk phone. They prefer the desktop app with a headset. We stopped ordering desk phones by default for new hires.
Auto-provisioning is essential. We ship preconfigured phones to new offices. They plug in, grab their config from the cloud, and work. Zero IT travel needed.
We use VestaCall (https://vestacall.com) is one provider that gets this right across all five offices. The key factor was their multi-region infrastructure — having points of presence in EU, US, and APAC means voice traffic stays local even though the system is unified.
