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MILLINOCKET – A “nightmare” of technical problems has forced G&G Marketing LLC to suspend temporarily its Spring Street call center operations and not pay its workers for at least two weeks, a company owner said Thursday.
Mel Gould III conceded that the company’s 22 workers have gone unpaid for two weeks, but said he and other family members who founded the company have gone unpaid for seven or eight weeks.
The problem, he said, is getting the company’s dialer equipment to handle paging work for Employee Notification Services of Florida, which G&G has been trying to switch to since mid-September.
“Our tech issues were so huge that to operate while we were getting through them would have been crazy,” Gould said Thursday. “I have been without pay for seven weeks.
“Management takes the first hit,” he added. “When you run into problems like this, people think we get paid, but we are in worse shape than anyone else.”
Town Manager Eugene Conlogue, who had heard a little bit about the company’s problems, said he hoped G&G would persevere.
The Town Council voted 7-0 in June to grant a $20,000 gap-financing loan to G&G, which brothers Mel Gould III and Bill Gould formed with their father, Mel Gould Jr., to operate the business. The company has two years to pay the loan, which carries a 5 percent annual interest rate and requires monthly payments.
The money comes from the town’s Revolving Loan Fund, which was established to encourage business development. The Goulds invested about $80,000 of their own money in the business.
The company made its August loan payment, Conlogue said. He could not say whether the company made its September payment. September paperwork from the town’s bank hadn’t yet arrived.
ENS, which has 1,500 toll-free telephone numbers and has call centers in Mexico, Florida, Texas and several other states, hopes to enlist G&G in the emergency notification market, which entails working for businesses large and small sending messages to customers, suppliers and employees, ENS spokeswoman Melissa Kelly said.
Natural disasters such as Hurricane Ike, which have forced thousands of businesses and employees to relocate, show the need for quick, timely notification services such as ENS, she said.
Gould hopes to have ENS’ system operational by this coming Monday or the next Monday, he said.
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