2010 Buyers Guide - Broadband Properties

with a provider that you never heard of.
A provider that is a co-op.
“Co-ops have a perception of being
not progressive. So we need to get to the
customer first. We have nine sales channels.
If you interface with a customer,
you have a quota. It is an expectation
here at GVTC. If you are a technician
or CSR or service center rep, you are expected
to ask for the business.”
How did Sorrells rally the troops?
“His coming here was my confidence
in him and what he wanted to do,” says
Mnick. “We were not just going to sit
here as a me-too company and just try to
hold off a Time Warner onslaught or try
to compete with Verizon [on copper].
He put us in a position to win … not
just to stop the bleeding but to reverse
the effect of what we were losing prior to
his coming on board.
“We were one of the first co-ops to
put an outside sales force together. We
were doing it before BellSouth. We were
not going to just put out direct mailers
and sit back. My background was
in the CLEC end of the business. We
had to scratch and fight against the incumbents.
As a CLEC manager, I was
battle-worn. And many of our managers
are from CLECs.”
“Fear is a great motivator,” says Sorrells.
“We compete against Verizon in
Boerne. They are the incumbent. We
GVTC customer service center.
had to seize the opportunity, or the window
would close. We saw that in 2004.
So we had to change the culture and
seize the opportunity. We had to do the
overbuild and do it right then.”
NEXT MOVES
GVTC is also quickly overbuilding its
older network. “We have an overbuild
strategy in our brownfields where we had
copper and have a 60 to 70 percent penetration
of homes that have computers,”
said Sorrells. “Some 23 percent of the
homes in our service area do not have a
computer. We got out there quickly with
broadband and now we are adding speed
and TV. Lots of people in the area have
satellite TV, so the urgency of the customer
for change is not there. We have
to come up with better services.
“The fact that we are active in the
community makes people in our area
want to buy from GVTC, but sometimes
they have to work through [long-term]
contracts with other providers. They are
not just going to wait in line for us until
the contract expires unless we promote
to them. We do mailers, telemarketing,
we have two stores, door-to-door sales
staff and telephone sales.”
Sorrells noted that marketing to
greenfields was easy, “but now we are
seeing second-generation home ownership
in what was a greenfield two years
ago. We no longer have a relationship
with the builder, but we have an investment
in the equipment at the side of the
house. How do we get a relationship with
that second homeowner when we had a
single-source partnership with a builder
before? And we’re competing at a disadvantage.
The electric company, CPS, has
a relationship with a third-party vendor
for broadband, and we’re so small compared
to their footprint that we don’t get
to represent ourselves in this area.”
Early on, GVTC had to explain the
advantages of fiber to developers. “Today
they are asking for it to a greater degree
as they see the value long-term and
that it helps sales,” says Mnick.
Mnick notes, however, that MDUs
aren’t GVTC’s niche. “The Time Warners
of the world will cable it for free,
pay the builders, pay door fees, and we
can’t afford that. We need a return on
investment, and they want the market
share at any cost. The problem is that
the customer loses because the customer
is not getting a discount. The guy in the
MDU pays double the price of the guy
in a subdivision.”
It all comes back to the economic development
effort. “The fact that we are
involved in the EDC gets us in front of
the owners and developers, and we are
winning some of the MDU business –
we just won two of them,” says Sorrells.
Mnick adds, “We have not approached
any of these MDUs with price.
We talk about value and future-proofing,
but we are not interested in ‘free
this, free that.’”
The future? “So many public companies
are driven by quarterly results and
what the Street has to say about those
results. I find concentration on those
results is very short-sighted and a detriment
to the services we try to provide,”
says Sorrells. “Obviously at GVTC we’re
all about the long term … our strategic
purpose is to stay in business … we’re
planning today to be in business 20
years from now.”
“We’re looking at CLEC opportunities,”
says Mnick. “We have three subdivisions
in the planning stage that were
ready go when the economic downturn
hit. They total nearly 9,000 lots.”
What will you bet that GVTC gets
there first? BBP
74 | BROADBAND PROPERTIES | www.broadbandproperties.com | November/December 2009