Justin Cobb Discusses Why Skype is So Crucial to the Way He Does Business

Justin Cobb, entrepreneur, public speaker, and managing director of the Justin Cobb Leadership Academy, spends a lot of his time travelling around on business. With clients in a variety of regional markets and various conferences and events to attend, Justin Cobb often finds himself jetting around Europe and America on a tight schedule. While this is something he loves about his work, and which gives him great opportunities to work with clients and network with other professionals face to face, it does mean he can’t always be in person at every meeting he’d like to be involved in – he simply can’t be in two places at once, and a lot of his time is also spent travelling between destinations.

This is why the Justin Cobb Leadership Academy, like so many other fast moving international businesses, sees Skype as a crucial tool in allowing them to do business and support customers wherever they are in the world, whenever they need it.

‘In the days before Skype, you really had to rely on phone calls if you wanted to speak to people far away from where you were that day or join a meeting you couldn’t attend in person. Conference calling is all well and good in some situations, but Skype allows you to have that face to face feel and also to time your conversations based on when the people you want to speak to are genuinely free to talk. Of course, there are also a lot of cost savings involved if you use Skype for your international calls rather than phoning people – when you are overseas as much as me the roaming charges can be extortionate, and a lot of the kind of conversations I want to have require a reasonably long call. You wouldn’t want to dial in to a two hour meeting on your mobile from abroad, that is for sure!’.

The importance of Skype to Justin Cobb is pretty typical in modern business, and Skype now sees users worldwide spend over 2 billion minutes a day on Skype calls. That is not to mention the other facilities the service offers like instant messaging. To put this in perspective, that is 1,388,000 days’ worth of time every day, or enough time to travel from Earth to Mars 5,400 plus times. It is clear that Skype is a tool businesses see a lot of value in, and are using to allow them to overcome the challenges of not being able to be everywhere at once.