Since 1986, Bend-based Buehner-Fry, Inc., has provided call management services to more than 2,000 houses, condos and vacation units in Sunriver, and thousands more nationwide.

The company has traditionally focused its efforts on call management services, which includes Linx, an automated concierge service, and Connections, a program that delivers phone messages to hundreds of guests in a short period of time.

Through technological innovation, however, Buehner-Fry has married the telephone to the Internet and developed a range of new products that are used for everything from appointment-reminder phone calls to blood donors to tracking temperatures in rental properties. Energy Sentinel, for example, works by plugging an interface device into a telephone jack, which then records room temperatures at set intervals and relays that information to the Internet via phone lines. The property owner can then access that information on the Buehner-Fry Web site.

Milton Buehner, chief executive and board chairman of Buehner-Fry, founded the company after a deep recession and double-digit inflation ended his seven-year stint in the home building industry. Once he hit financial turbulence, Buehner said his faith in God led him to his next, and most successful, career endeavor, Buehner-Fry Inc.

Give me a brief sketch of you career, prior to founding Buehner-Fry.

I started by raising rabbits. I was an entrepreneurial business man when I was about nine. I learned several lessons then. One is about production and the other is about demand. My production very quickly exceeded the demand. If you think about a 9 year old learning his first business lessons, that was a good one. That’s part of business, producing, and the other is being able to market. That was a fairly short-lived business. Raising rabbits in a small town in the Midwest where people shoot their own cottontails didn’t take me very far.

So then I had a career with the U.S. Navy, in electronics, actually what’s called a ping jockey, which is a submarine chaser, a sonar man.

It gave me a little bit of background for electronic circuitry. And from there, the military discharge, I had a television/radio repair shop. And that was in northern California….Then there was TNW Automotive Industries.

I was one of the founding members of that, and we rebuilt cylinder heads for Volkswagen engines, and set up distribution throughout the United States.

We started an entrepreneurial garage-type operation. I was in charge of finance and marketing. It’s one of those business where you wear lots of hats.

From there, I built custom homes in the west Portland area, Washington County area, for seven years, up until the recession and high interest rates of the early 80s. And I had to reinvent myself at that time because the industry just went away. The collapse of that was the foundation of Buehner-Fry. It started with an idea that would solve a problem for the vacation-rental industry, starting in 1987.

Buehner-Fry started in Central Oregon as a telecom provider to the vacation rental industry. At what point did it become apparent to you that a need for such services existed?

We had bought a cottage outside of Sunriver, and through a friend of mine I met Claude Browning at Coldwell Banker First Resort Realty. Through him we had a piece of technology that no one had applied to the vacation-rental industry. We experimented with some of these phones and determined (our telecom program) was a good solution to a real problem the industry had, which was guests charging the owners’ phones. It was a good solution for that.

Your company engineers Web-based products that require only Internet access in order for customer to get services. Much of your company’s efforts have been focused on tackling the problem of routing phone calls on a large scale. Will you explain, generally, how some of your programs in this area work?

We provide solutions for vacation rental management people who found difficulty in providing phone service, in being able to somehow charge guests for that service. So we do outsource billing for their use of the guest phone. That phone equipment actually sends calls back to our switch, which resides in Portland, from 48 states and Canada. It sends the call there and then at that point it automatically, through a live operator, catches the credit information from the caller.

But from that came the use of the telephone that we then married to the Internet. And by doing that we provide what’s called OMS-Operational Management System-to property managers throughout the country who really need to keep track of demographically dispersed work forces, i.e. housekeepers, maintenance personnel, swarming all over hundreds of individual rental units that change occupants maybe all in one day. So that equipment allowed us to provide that display inside of the property management company. It’s developed into a product that is now called Business Process Outsourcing. And that’s what we’re really doing now. We’re providing solutions to management problems with the use of the telephone, married to the Internet, that provides the administrative people with a real-time visual picture of what’s happening in demographically dispersed areas. There’s no boundaries to it, to be able to do that. That’s a pretty significant product.

Last summer, you said the company was stepping outside of its ”sandbox” and heading in new directions in technological research. Can you tell me more about new products that have resulted from that effort?

Mike Newman (Buehner-Fry director of operations) has really been the champion for research of applications outside of our market. And probably the most significant find is the American Red Cross, which is now one of our customers nationwide. And they use one of our products, which we called Guest Messaging at the time. Now we just call it Messaging.

The way they are using it is unique in a couple of ways. First, they started by sending reminders of your appointment to give blood because there were a fair number of no-shows who for one reason or another may have forgotten. And that has resulted in a dramatic, measurable increase in blood donations. They were extremely pleased. I think there are 36 divisions of the Red Cross, with each of them operating independently. They can control it via the Internet. They just merely go to the Internet, they send us their databases. They click on the parties they want to receive the message, and two days before the appointment it notifies them. Most currently we are using a gal whose life was saved by a blood bank. She is reminding them that it is valuable. And we have even used celebrities to petition for blood, in a proactive advance. The technology itself allows us to give that reminder.

When you approach potential new customers, is there an average number for cost savings that you present to them?

The benefit would be the difference in cost (between using live operators versus an automated program.) It should be running somewhere between 20 and 25 percent, maybe less. Given what we’ve learned so far about the cost, 50 percent of the time a live operator calls someone, they get a busy signal or no answer. So that means a second call, and maybe a third call, or fourth call. Our system automatically makes those calls, up to eight attempts spread over the time duration that you would choose. It can also be used for emergency notification, and that’s what we designed it for, for the outer banks of North Carolina for hurricanes.

Who is your competition in this industry, or is it such a unique product that you’ve developed that you have none?

Our uniqueness is that we don’t create a product and then go try to find someone to buy it. We try to find somebody who has a need and then design to it. That’s what we have with the Red Cross. Our basic product will work for so many different types of applications. I think how we differentiate ourselves is that we customize to their specific needs. The Red Cross has used someone else. And it was just totally unsatisfactory.

There are some other companies doing it, what’s called message blasting. It just pushes out, it’s not responsive. You can’t poll doing that (for example.) We can do that.

What did Sept. 11 and a marked slowdown in the vacation rental industry mean to your company, if anything?

The immediate response for 9-11 was a flurry of calls. We had a captive audience in Florida because it’s a key vacation spot and they were locked in, so we had a real spike in international calls. That lasted for as many days as they were held captive.

Post 9-11 was a dramatic reduction in occupancy in destination resorts that were fly-to destinations, such as ski resort areas, but in particular, Disney World got hit pretty hard. And Florida is a large part, actually 20-something percent, of our market. So it’s had an impact.

What it has done in the vacation rental industry is made for shorter vacations with shorter booking times and some people postponing their vacation. So, overall, I don’t have the statistics for reduction in occupancy, but we’ve got people talking at the high end 25 (percent reduction), and on the low end, 10 or 12 (percent.) So somewhere in the 15 to 20 percent, I think, reduced occupancy during the past year. Now it’s been recovering, but again I can’t say what percentage recovery is there. But it’s coming back. And I believe vacations are sacred.

How much has your company grown since you founded it?

Well, we started from zero. We now have somewhere around 65,000 locations, and it has grown steadily with more dramatic numerical increases in the last five years.

We started putting in another layer of internal processes. We’re actually handling three times as many customers with the same or fewer staff than we had five years ago.

It’s because what we’re preaching to our property managers about the importance of putting internal processes in, that’s what we did first before we went out to preach it.

Now that we know what it can do, it makes it easier for us to show people how they can create efficiencies.

Are you expecting to maintain this dramatic increase over the next three to five years?

We have a competitive advantage now, which means we’ve been making serious inroads into the competitor and they are definitely disadvantaged for not keeping pace with technology. And because of that we expect some pretty dramatic growth.

Lisa Rosetta can be reached at lrosetta@bendbulletin.com.