Jason Shouldice has a job-interview question that leaves very little room for a charming answer. Tell him your last call center’s contact rate, appointment rate and drop rate. From memory. The question appears in his company’s director recruitment pitch, ahead of a scenario in which contact rates suddenly fall. A candidate can arrive with an impressive title. The numbers must come along too.
It is a useful introduction to the founder and CEO of The Call Center Doctors. Shouldice sells an operation assembled from people, software and repeated conversations. The glamorous part of sales is usually the handshake. His territory includes the unanswered ring, the neglected record and the manager who needs to know why Tuesday went wrong.
There is a particular comedy in that territory. A company can spend money persuading strangers to become interested, then lose track of the strangers as soon as they oblige. Shouldice has made a business of attending to the second half of that exchange.
A good problem to have, until it wasn’t
His route into ownership began with a marketing agency serving real estate clients. Generating inquiries created another obligation: helping clients stay with prospects long enough to complete a transaction. He built a call center to support that work, later sold the business and moved into consulting. Colleagues began asking for help with their own phone operations.
By his account, his earlier experience answering technical-support calls had started in 1998, at sixteen. Years later, the company name itself changed from the singular Call Center Doctor to the plural. He wanted a business that could grow beyond his own face.
That desire sits entertainingly beside his approach to trade shows. He describes covering himself and colleagues in stickers, inviting conversations and photographs. The willingness to look slightly ridiculous is part of the sales method. Pride, in his telling, can be an expensive marketing expense.
“We also specialize in building new call centers.”
Jason Shouldice, explaining the business in a public video
The long road from a name to a conversation
There is an earlier marker of the same preoccupation. In October 2018, Shouldice published an article titled “Loan Officers need to Adjust to the Online World.” He introduced himself as a partner in a lead-generation company producing more than 500 leads a day. That was his description of the operation, rather than an independently audited count.
The interesting connection is the movement between professions. Mortgage marketing, real estate inquiries and roofing appointments belong to different businesses, yet each has a handoff between someone expressing interest and someone taking responsibility for it. Shouldice’s career has kept returning to that handoff.
His LinkedIn profile lists Ottawa and Glebe Collegiate. His commercial work now has a different geographic center of gravity: The Call Center Doctors lists a Houston office and serves businesses across the United States. The company dates its founding as a consulting practice to fall 2021. Roofing, solar and home services became its recurring territory.
The customer gets a working floor
The service Shouldice has built is unusually easy to misunderstand if reduced to the word “outsourcing.” In an early-2024 pitch, he stressed ownership of the client’s call center while listing recruiting, training, payroll, technical support and daily management. The point of that combination is responsibility across several jobs that a business might otherwise buy separately.
A dialer cannot interview an applicant. A recruiter cannot make a booking appear in the right calendar. A script cannot notice that a connection between two systems has stopped working. In this model, those tasks belong inside the same operating arrangement. The practical question for a client becomes who will keep the whole thing moving on an ordinary Wednesday.
The company’s current deployment offer describes three phases: build, staff and manage. It advertises seven to fourteen days from kickoff. That is a delivery promise, rather than a record of how every installation has performed. The package includes phone numbers, campaign scripts, bilingual recruitment, CRM connections and a dedicated manager.
- 01InterestA name enters the system
- 02ConversationAn agent reaches a person
- 03CommitmentA date reaches the calendar
- 04Follow-throughThe next person takes over
The last phase matters to the portrait of the founder. His product includes the continuing inconvenience of running something: monitoring calls, adjusting scripts and replacing a rep who does not work out. The launch is a beginning. Someone still has to turn up after the celebratory meeting.
Teach the next call, then the next
Shouldice’s company also works on existing floors. Its development service describes checking recorded calls, coaching individuals, adjusting dialing settings and alerting managers when something needs attention. The training premise is concrete: study what the strongest agent does and make that behavior teachable.
That is a more demanding assignment than telling everyone to sound confident. A conversation has timing. There is an opening, a question, a moment when the customer hesitates, and a request for the appointment. Coaching becomes useful when it identifies something a person can change before the next conversation begins.
The company reports a spread in appointment rates among eleven agents with published scorecards from February and March 2026. The lowest listed rate was 1.2% of contacted homeowners; the highest was 5.3%. These are company-reported figures from a particular group, not general expectations for an agent or a client.
Appointments per contacted homeowner. Eleven published agent scorecards; a comparison within this cohort.
The spread gives his coaching proposition a visible problem to address. Before adding another chair, examine what happens in the chairs already occupied. For a founder selling better execution, individual variation is a place to begin asking questions.
He still wants to hear a voice
Shouldice’s enthusiasm for software coexists with a stubborn attachment to phone conversations. In a public post about database reactivation, he warned against handing a whole customer list to an unproven automated campaign. He advocated calling before moving to texts and email.
His reasoning was conversational: a caller can hear hesitation, ask another question and change the explanation. A short written reply offers less information about what went wrong. These are his sales judgments; they do not make every unanswered call an invitation to keep trying.
For the portrait, the revealing detail is his concern about using up an opportunity carelessly. A database represents people a business has already spent effort reaching. Automation can move through it quickly. Speed is valuable only if the resulting exchange is worth having.
Down among the dialer settings
His ViciStack work extends the same argument into the machinery. Its biography names him founder and CEO and describes his involvement with VICIdial installations, telephone infrastructure and the settings that determine how a floor reaches people. It also links to his writing about dialer economics and operating metrics.
Here the vocabulary gets less sociable: answering-machine detection, number rotation, carrier settings. Each term describes something that can happen before an agent gets the chance to be persuasive. A capable caller is of limited use if a system misclassifies a human answer or the connection never arrives.
His research sites examine predictive-dialer returns, hosting costs and call-center dashboards. The stated editorial approach separates modeled numbers from measured ones and discloses his commercial interest in the subject. He is writing as an operator with services to sell.
That disclosure helps make sense of the technical branch of his career. Shouldice’s interest runs across the boundary between the call itself and the equipment enabling it. The caller, the manager and the system administrator are dealing with different portions of the same working day.
What a booked appointment actually sounds like
The Call Center Doctors publishes a library of twenty recorded roofing calls, with identifying details muted. The conversations are selected for a common ending: a booked inspection. The collection lets a listener hear the distance between an opening greeting and an agreed time.
It also supplies a useful distinction for understanding Shouldice’s business. A recording can demonstrate how a conversation works. It cannot, by itself, establish how often the whole campaign succeeds. Every entry in this particular library was chosen because the appointment happened.
Still, the form suits his emphasis on execution. The buyer can listen to the actual work being sold, including the homeowner’s questions and the agent’s responses. A booking becomes something more tangible than a colored cell in a report. Two people have to agree on what happens next.
The wager is on the hour
By October 2026, his company was promoting a $10,000 Challenge built around a thirty-day measured trial. The offer promises a 30% improvement in sales per paid agent-hour, with a money-back provision. Its published terms describe a setup week before measurement and a baseline agreed using the client’s own system.
This is an offer, rather than an achieved result. Its denominator nevertheless explains where Shouldice wants to take the business. Counting sales against paid time asks whether the operation gets more useful work from the hours it already purchases.
A bigger call count would be easier to admire from a distance. An hour is closer to the daily business: somebody’s wages, somebody’s waiting time, somebody’s chance to speak with a customer. Shouldice has spent his working life moving around that hour, from the headset to the agency to the manager’s report.
The business began with the difficulty of helping clients follow up. Its continuing test is just as ordinary. When interest arrives, will someone know what to do with it?