Personal Phone Numbers For Business, Yeah That Was A Mistake...

Here cautionary tale about a startup business mistake I made about 5 or 6 years ago that continues to haunt me to this day.  During the early days of a previous startup, ActiveRain we had very limited resources, thus no permanent office space or phone land lines.  I routinely used my personal cell phone number as a business contact number, which at the time worked just fine.  If they wanted to get a hold of the company they wanted to talk to me.

This phone number got used in a wide variety of places for example the contact number on domain name registrations, a credit card processing application, bank forms and various tax forms.  As the company grew and we had more resources we switched this contact number over to an actual business number answered by an actual office assistant instead of my personal cell phone. That would have been fine except for one problem, through the magic of the Internet and networked computer systems, contact information tends to get syndicated to dozens of places when it is first entered.  Often it does not get updated when the original source does.

It's now been about a year and a half since leaving that company and to this day, I receive an average of two or three phone calls a day of people trying to contact ActiveRain.  There's nothing like being woken up at 6:00 am by an irate real estate agent complaining on how someone slandered them in a blog post wanting it removed. 

They primarily found my phone number through a random Google search or on a credit card statement.  It's been a constant battle of trying to track down the places the number is now listed and get them changed.  In many instances even though we can determine where the number was found, but we can't figure out the way to actually change it.  The worst has been the credit card processing company, who syndicated the number all over the place to various credit card companies yet seemingly has no process in place to update that number in all those places. 

So unless you want to potentially answers with calls from frustrated customers looking for technical support, or answers to billing questions for the next five years, I would suggest not using a personal number for business purposes..

By the way, if you somehow find this post on a Google search for "ActiveRain Phone Number" it's (206) 470-2901

The original version of this post can be found on BigStartups