Again, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here today, um. It's somewhat ironic that on March 15th is actually what we call the ides of march and that historically is a day when, in ancient Rome, people use that as the deadline for settling debts. So, I can't think of a much more appropriate day to be talking about finance with a banking organization. It's also, of course, known as the day that didn't go so well for Julius Caesar, but again in the context of revolution, just a day to consider things that cause great change and transformation.
So, I think the question that this begs, whether revolution or evolution, really pivots around this idea and this perspective of whether or not you need the energy and chaos of a revolution to create change in your organization or whether your culture lends itself more to sort of the measured pace of an evolutionary process and I've been fortunate enough in my career to have had the pleasure and and the pain of experiencing both approaches to this, and those are the stories i'd like to share with you here today.
Let's rewind back to 2004, I was leading the financial planning and analysis function for a publicly held fiber optic telecommunications carrier here in North America called TW telecom. We were headquartered in Denver Colorado and we had a very traditional finance and accounting function. It was all the normal things that finance people and accountants do closing books, doing budgets, creating journal entries, and we were at a time in telecommunications just past when dot com had become a thing. Where our leadership, specifically our chief financial officer, recognized that some of the ways we do things from a financial perspective, really didn't lend itself to how we had to respond in the environment that we are in. It was very fast paced from a technology perspective. Products technology was outpacing and was obsolescing at a rate that was really unprecedented and thankfully he was foresightful enough to recognize that, albeit the way he presented it is by calling me into his office one January morning and basically saying that the budget that my team had worked on for about six months, which is very typical in most organizations that it takes about that long to get the budget done, that he really said this wasn't going to work for us, it doesn't help him manage the business and he literally threw this book and threw into the trash can right in front of me and said “go figure out a better way to do this”
So, whether I wanted to or not I was kind of thrust into having to suddenly take on this. This role of a transformer, this role of somebody to create some innovation to create some agility in organization, even though, at the time when I was doing this, I had no idea that that's the journey I was embarking on. All I knew is that my boss did not like the budget, and I had to go, do something different.
So, through research and through a lot of thinking and a lot of sort of contemplating ideas and and reading uh. What do you do when you do try to do something different about budgeting? um. I came across this idea of beyond budgeting, and many of you might have heard of this. It's an idea that you really can manage an organization without the constraints of traditional budgets and that resonated with me in the concept of doing something different. So, we went down this path and I learned very quickly that our organization was around was about revolution when we set our mind to doing something, we were just going to go, do it. It was the cultural paradigm that we were operating under, and that sounds very Um much so like a bunch of people, you know creating chaos in the world, but it really in the moment, it feels very different. And I say this because there were some foundational things that I had that really lent itself to the story becoming a success.
The first thing was that we learned very quickly that executive sponsorship was key to transformation uh. This is actually the phrase, the sentence that our c level, our chief executive officer, our chief operating officer and our true financial officer, adapted to and communicated through the organization. They locked hands on this concept. Of that, not what we're doing is not getting rid of the budget. What we're doing is a fundamental change in how we want to manage and evaluate our business, and we spent a lot of time around the communication aspect of this and around showing um very transparently. The leadership of this initiative coming from the top, because what I learned very quickly, is that the budget in and of itself is just a portion of your management construct. And so, while that was my focus as the finance leader, there were lots of collateral decisions and process shifts that had to happen, and I'll talk a little bit more about that here, a few more slides down.
But so, executive sponsorship was key. I also realized very quickly. I wasn't going to get every single executive in the company to buy into this. For some people it was just not relevant to their core function. Other people were super skeptical, not surprisingly, when you're doing when you're changing things when you're transforming things. You're going to have people who are going to resist, and it's just the fundamental resistance that comes from being human. You don't like things, you don't understand. You don't like things you perceive as impacting you negatively and you don't like things being done by people you don't like or by functions, you're skeptical of like finance in most organizations.
So, one of the things that we had learned as an organization was that we were really terrible at change. Change was not in our DNA change was not a skill set that we had a lot of depth in, and we learned this because we had managed to flounder on some very major system initiatives. So, right about the time when our IT organization was playing around with the idea of agile back in the early 2000s. Our overall business was recognizing the need to be competent at change management. And so, we actually hired a leader to head up this very important area and since I've been past part of the task force that identified this need and hired this gentleman, I also took the advantage of inviting him to join my project with me transforming the organization to move away from budgets and to a much different approach to our planning process.
One of the things that he taught me was that the biggest problem with these types of changes is this gap in communication that you create. I'm sure there are lots of idioms attached to this for everybody that you've heard before this idea that you have to say something seven times before somebody else hears you or this idea that by the time you're really sick and tired of talking about something, is about the time somebody else understands what you're talking about and I love this quote about the fact that the single biggest problem with communication is this idea that it's happened when it really hasn't.
And so, he taught me about how you engage with your stakeholders. How you assess the need. How you make sure that the communication is coming through the way you intended it to and it became a very core foundation for us around this burning platform issue that we created for organization to embrace this change in the our financial infrastructure in our management constructs. Where we employed some small aspect of revolutionary innovation was really about eliminating the budget and we moved to a rolling forecast.
Again, there are a lot of finance people in the world that will tell you yeah yeah yeah we do that too, but i will also tell you about 90% of them do it wrong. Because all they're doing is doing their budget like four or 12 times a year and we truly eliminated it. We took our budget down from being a monthly 18-month view, gl level detail for every department and every function, new organization to really consolidating it down to 45 items for our field operations, organizations and 18 items for our corporate organizations. And we ran our budget pro, our forecasting process quarterly on the staggered cadence, and it worked spectacularly well and no, it didn't work spectacularly well, the first time just with any kind of innovation, especially when it's something truly unique and unprecedented. You're gonna fall down a couple ten, twelve, two dozen times before it's really perfect but we kept tinkering with it and we kept trying and we kept adapting and we kept going and it ultimately turned into something extraordinarily powerful for tw telecom.
The other thing we learned that when you start challenging the status quo. When you start changing the paradigms into which you operate. You break everybody's toys and what I mean by that is you rip apart processes that are foundational to your organization. Things like target setting and planning and performance management and rewards and approval processes. All of those things are intertwined with your budgets, and so I broke pretty much all of them and we had to come up with new ways of doing things, and it gave us this opportunity to really think differently. And when we came up with this idea or when we realized that this idea of eliminating the budget basically set aside.
This notion that we couldn't change things, because this one sort of very core foundational everybody believed had to have a management structure. This budgeting process, when we said that wasn't needed anymore, it suddenly opened the door for people to really challenge other things and think differently about other processes in the organization. And so, from that perspective, just by eliminating one thing. We really allowed the organization to stretch Into to a different mindset into really reassessing why we were doing certain things and if they were really necessary. Which created just you know, change beginning change all over the organization and was just a really um a really powerful way for us to move forward into this environment that was so dramatically shifting around us.
The other thing we figured out was that empowerment was a key part of this. Giving people the ability to actually lead and to actually manage their functions. Well, it's one thing that everybody always told us they wanted when we actually handed it to them. Suddenly there was this moment of like oh no. What did I just do? Because empowerment comes with accountability. You take away the sort of autopilot control that a budget gives an organization where people's decisions are fairly binary. If it's in a budget, you do it. If it's not in the budget, you don't. So, when you take away the budget suddenly people have to actually manage they have to make decisions in the moment. You know, should I spend this money? Should I hire this person? Would I be better off hiring this person in another area where they can support my organization? Because that makes all of my people better.
And so, having to make those decisions real time became a very powerful challenge for our leadership and for our managers. And so, we had to figure out ways to support them in adapting to this environment and in embracing um. what was it that had been given to them? Something they've always asked for when they suddenly got it, um didn't want it so much.
So, elim this meaningful change, eliminating all this bureaucracy that we had embedded in our organization really allowed us to become very nimble. In retrospect, we became very agile, even though at the time when we were doing this, that's not how we talked about it, because we didn't know that certainly finance and agile in finance wasn't the thing back then it was barely a thing on the IT side but I tell you change those kinds of changes aligned us beautifully from the perspective of making our planning cycles more frequent and more rapid. Which in our industry, was absolutely required to be able to adapt and roll With what was being thrown at us from both our customers and our in the technology and the environment that we were in.
And while i will never sit here and tell you that the reason tw telecom was as successful as it was um in the 40 quarters that we ran that publicly held company without budgets. We had 40 consecutive quarters of top line revenue growth. So, the fact that we got our leaders out of the business of doing these old bureaucratic processes and gave them the flexibility to really stand and challenge the status quo made us extraordinarily successful.
The company was sold in 2014 and I parted ways with them and then fast forward to 2019, I took a role as leading the accounting function for another telecommunications company in Hilton Head South Carolina called hardware communications group. What I learned here is, and even though I kind of already knew this, but it became very obvious that, even though we were telecommunications and a lot of the same concepts applied. I could not copy paste the things that I had done at tw telecom and apply them to heart rate. It was a family-owned business, a much different culture. Just a completely different environment to be operating in.
So, we had to set about and and do the work differently. We had to think about how culturally this organization could start adapting to change. There wasn't going to be a revolution, we weren't going to just up end the budget and throw it out the door inside of one year. We were just starting in on how to do things differently in this organization in terms of moving to different planning processes. In terms of having different conversations across the organizations about what was important and how we would better adapt to sort of a more core quarterly planning approach and and embracing the change that was um coming with with what this organization had to deliver which is local telecom services uh. This organization was actually pretty agile in a different kind of way. What I experienced moving to South Carolina was a thing called a hurricane which we don't have in Colorado. Watching this organization pivot into it in a matter of a couple of days, as basically, you have to uproot your organization and seek shelter and still function as a business was a very unique thing to watch. And it creates a different kind of approach to being agile as a business and being able to sort of situationally relocate when there is a when there's an emergency to deal with.
This also left this organization extraordinarily well positioned to deal with the pandemic, because we already knew how to pick up and change things. And so again, agility presented itself in a completely different light when we suddenly were providing free services to local residents with kids coming home to have to school via zoom and with businesses having to retrench to everybody working from a home office. So, being the local broadband provider in this area had us pivot into the pandemic in a completely different way.
Alas, this company was also sold last year, and so I find myself pivoting again from a more evolutionary environment to now working for a startup. Which again leaves me with the chaos and energy of a revolutionary environment because we're starting from scratch with a whole new organization. Um doing things very differently and while I still can't copy-paste the things I learned either at tw telecom and at hargray, it's very energizing to see the radical innovation that we're experiencing here because delivering broadband in rural areas is an imperative in this world that we live in today. In this world, where you never know, when, suddenly kids are home from school and having to learn remotely or your office closes, and you have to suddenly function in your business environment from your living room. And so, being able to pivot into that wiith this new organization has allowed me to once again figure out some of these, these core foundational revolutionary and evolutionary approaches in a business environment um that that allows an organization to be truly agile, no matter what comes at them out there.
One of our key operating Principles at clearway fiber is to keep it simple.So, we're building a company that not only understands this concept of revolutionary innovation, but also understands the concept of not building bureaucracy that isn't necessary. We are about nine weeks old. We have just over 300 people working for us and it's remarkably um invigorating to watch an organization live into its purpose in what truly is a somewhat revolutionary evolution. So, I challenge you to think courageously about these terms. About embracing whichever comes and being willing to mix and mingle, because I think whether your organization culturally embraces revolution or requires the steady pace of evolution. You can embed both the energy of one and the measure thoughtful approach of the other to be truly making yourself successful, with a very agile mindset and sort of an agile environment. So, have the courage to experiment to think about things a little bit differently. Don't just check the box on the term, but actually do the hard work of making this something that moves your organization forward in a very powerful way. Thank you so much you