July 7, 2004
CED Magazine (click here for full article)
by Jeff Baumgartner
Pacesetter: Commercial Cable Services
Bill Stemper, vice president, Cox Business
Many operators have quickly jumped on the commercial services
bandwagon in recent years, hoping it will route them to newfound
riches, but Cox Communications has long served as the roadmap
to success in this area.
It’s hard to argue with the numbers. Cox, which has pursued
the commercial sector for more than a decade, has toiled and troubled
its way to a business that generated $83.1 million in revenues
during the first quarter of 2004, up a full 25 percent from the
$66.6 million that the MSO’s business services division
earned in the year-ago period. It was much the same story at the
end of 2003, when Cox Business raked in $287.6 million,
also up 25 percent year-over-year. One doesn’t need to take
Business 101 to realize the magnitude of that sustained success.
Recent growth and a path paved to future success are just two
of the reasons CED has named Bill Stemper, vice president of Cox
Business Services, as the inaugural selection for the Pacesetter
award winner in the Commercial Services Category.
If Cox were to meet and try to beat the telcos at their own
game, it only made sense that it signed on someone from the “other
side.” Stemper, who joined Cox Business in Sept.
2003, grew up in the telecommunications industry with AT&T
serving business customers of various shapes and sizes, including
large enterprise and global national customers–a service
category that any MSO would covet.
But he wasn’t about to jump to the cable ship until he
was certain that the brass was fully devoted to serving the commercial
sector.
“The first thing I saw as I joined without question was
a senior leadership commitment to serving the commercial sector
within the franchise area,” Stemper recalls. “It’s
not a hobby. It’s not a nice thing. There’s a real
commitment to it; and that makes all the difference in the world.”
He says his big business background at AT&T has complemented
him well at Cox, where localism and grass-roots involvement is
a benefit that a company like AT&T doesn’t necessarily
have.
But the challenge, he notes, is to ensure that the importance
of serving the commercial customer is shared across the Cox enterprise
even as that part of the business is growing in leaps and bounds.
“How we leverage the rest of Cox in the local systems
day in and day out becomes really paramount,” Stemper explains.
“How do we get the mindshare and the focus of every employee
to do a little bit for Cox Business, while those 1,100
(CBS employees) are pounding away? That’s been one of the
key opportunities and enjoyable opportunities that I’ve
found myself diving into since coming here.”
Although Cox Business has enjoyed a solid growth spurt,
Stemper is not ready to sit on his laurels. “We still have
plenty of customers out there that do not receive a bill from
Cox for service, and we would only be too pleased to turn that
around and have them as a customer.”
A good portion of that new growth will come from voice services,
Stemper predicts, noting that Cox’s intention is to market
carrier-class IP-based voice services to commercial customers.
“The technology is just coming of age to allow us to leverage
more and more of our embedded infrastructure. [VoIP] will open
up new reach and new opportunities with minimal capital,”
he predicts.
For other operators launching or just getting into the business
of serving businesses, Stemper offers this piece of advice: “To
not be bashful.”
“They [commercial customers] want to see cable succeed
as a viable player. They want a viable alternative,” Stemper
says.
