By guest blogger John Scarano a.k.a. Johnny Scannns
Thank you for the opportunity to share these thoughts with you via posts to Dan’s blog. This is the second of 5 parts following the introduction post (part 1).
Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present the Zayo story to the shareholders of one of our major equity syndicate members. In this Part 2 of my blog series, I will share my thoughts leading up to the presentation:
As Zayo’s employees know, the Zayo business unit leadership teams hold monthly all-employee meetings with our teams. The Zayo Bandwidth meetings tend to follow a fairly consistent format.
We provide a summary level and deep dive financial review. We discuss various key factors that have enabled our success to date such as pending acquisitions, sales performance, installs performance, service maintenance, etc. We are open about feedback, results, progress against plan, good and bad. We solicit for questions in advance of our meetings and we open the calls to questions during the meetings.
Additionally, we hold once weekly a sales, installs and service maintenance meeting with all service delivery personnel as well as all management team members across Zayo Bandwidth. We are a geographically distributed team which is nimble and adapting to the way our customers need us to support them. These consistent discussions have helped bind us together as we have evolved.
At the top of most of these meetings I find myself almost instinctively presenting the ‘state of the business’ in a snapshot form. Periodically, I have begun offering the simple view that there are two types of work environments – for profit and not for profit. Either we work for a cause—as do educators, government employees, charities OR we work for a return for our shareholders.
And this is the point. As a for-profit enterprise, we at Zayo work for our shareholders and they expect a good return on their investment. This is our top priority.
Specifically, we work for our private equity shareholders. These shareholders in turn raise money (typically) from wealthy individuals or a wide range of institutions such as endowment funds or insurance companies who seek a return on their money diversified from their other investments. These parties all TRUST US to work for THEM to make money.
By the way, were we publicly traded instead of privately held, should this trust in us offered by more distributed shareholders be handled any differently by us? Of course not.
And yet, ironically, I have offended people at times having heard feedback after having relayed the points above. I have been told that I am ‘crass’ and ‘callous’; that I am ‘all about the shareholders and by extension, not the employees’. And other things I should not write.
Frankly, I have ignored this criticism as naïve, and have continued to repeat and provide context for this key message. These points above were my own key thoughts leading up to the presentation to our shareholders of shareholders.
Leave a response (1 so far)
Subscribe via RSS
Well, w/o private capital (provided by shareholders), there would be no jobs for employees. Zayo is in a capital intensive business *and* is also in acquisition mode, so private capital (on the right terms) is vital. The 3-legged stool (shareholders, employees, & customers) can be very difficult to balance.