As a life-long Chicago area resident (yes, that includes being a life-long Bears, Cubs, Bulls, and Hawks fan – please be kind), my wife of 41 years (Kathy) and I raised three beautiful, and brilliant adult daughters. By far, our proudest achievements.
Professionally, while my 45+ year career has been very diverse, it has all been focused on the Telecom Service Provider market – more specifically, with an emphasis on Network Technology and Operations.
I cut my teeth in the Bell Operating Company environment deploying and managing switching systems, and planning new technology architectures. I migrated to the vendor side of things with a move to Northern Telecom (as it was called at the time), with roles managing product support, technical support and deployment for switching, transport, and mobile products.
My entrepreneurial itch got the best of me with the onset of the unbundling and deregulation of competitive local phone service, and I left the corporate comfort to co-found a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (One Stop Telecommunications) offering a competitive alternative to the monopoly RBOC local voice and business services. We secured venture funding and quickly grew the business. A key to our successful growth was our ability to build back-office automation and integration that allowed us to seamlessly and efficiently on-board new customers. As the Operations prime, this was my focus.
As fate would have it, competitive local voice quickly became a bit of a land grab. We were presented with a very attractive acquisition offer, which we accepted. I was tagged to stay on for the transition/integration.
After completion of that transition, I participated in the founding of another start-up, where I served as CEO. This was an OSS software company (Concretio.com) that licensed solutions to CLECs to automate their back-office provisioning and customer acquisitions – essentially productizing the processes I created at One Stop. Concretio’s products and services quickly evolved from an ordering and provisioning platform for Local Service Requests to the incumbent carriers to a more comprehensive provisioning solution which included softswitch provisioning. As a part of its evolution, we navigated Concretio’s business model from a perpetual site licensing model to a recurring revenue, Software-as-a-Service model.
We negotiated a transaction to merge Concretio with a familiar Billing/OSS company (Custom Call Data Systems), and subsequent to that merger, I assumed a role to manage a successful campaign to sell the combined entity.
These entrepreneurial adventures allowed me to leverage my core experience with Service Provider operations, while exploring new opportunities to grow my experience through M&A.
In the meantime, I spent the next 11+ years as a Metaswitch proponent, developing and nurturing invaluable relationships with the Metaswitch customer community under my care as Regional Account Manager.
A few years ago, I took the initiative to strengthen my experience-based M&A expertise by taking the necessary coursework to obtain my credentials as a Certified M&A Advisor.
In 2021, Microsoft acquired Metaswitch, setting ambitious goals to integrate its assets into a robust cloud service portfolio. However, initial efforts did not meet Microsoft's objectives. Consequently, in mid-2024, Microsoft chose to sunset key Metaswitch products and significantly reduce the sales and service resources dedicated to Metaswitch. This strategic shift marked a pivotal moment in my career, allowing me to concentrate on advancing Cumulus Services.
