November 27, 2007

Excerpts from Stemper Keynote

Bill Stemper on Business Services

Bill Stemper was named president of Comcast Business Services in August 2006. He was previously VP of Cox Business Services. Prior to that, he held executive positions with AT&T. Here are some excerpts from his Business Services Symposium keynote:

On another leader from Atlanta:

"I feel compelled and think it's only appropriate to recognize a leader from Atlanta who's no longer with us and who really had a lot to do with the founding of business services, and that's our good friend Jim Robbins. It was over a decade ago that he and a team at Cox saw an opportunity, probably worked it out on a napkin, and it's evolved into business services at Cox and business services at the rest of our MSOs."

On getting corporate buy-in:

"I talk to people … about business services, and everybody says: 'Yeah, I get it. It's the next big thing. Count me in. I'm really there.' Until you ask them to do something different."

On the power of the entire team:

"It's not so much a discussion of the what. The trick to me is the discussion of the how. It's not the three or four or five thousand business services people in Comcast, it's the 90,000 people of Comcast. What if we got constructive engagement from all 90,000 people? To me, that's what's critical."

On the overall opportunity:

"We happen to have … a market opportunity that rivals the size of the core business. It's big. And it can be reached and dealt with by taking core competencies and reaching to the next level."

On gratitude for good fortune:

"The first place I would ask you to pause and think is how fortunate we really are, that we have billions of dollars of market growth and market opportunity, right in our area of strength."

On the small-to-medium business (SMB) market:

"In our case, we have about 6 million of these (SMB) customers in our footprint, and if we tally up what we think they spend, it's around $20 billion."

On Comcast's priority:

"First and foremost, we're focused on addressing these SMBs. They've really been underserved. These are companies in the strip malls, down the local streets, professional organizations, small accounting firms, real estate agencies, fast food places, restaurants, retail outlets. I question if they have ever seen a rep from a competitor …. If we do only one thing well, we want to do SMB well."

On other opportunities:

"From there, we will look at opportunities in enterprise kind of situations where maybe a large fortune X company has many small outlets, and they're looking to buy from one provider for those outlets …. A good number of our customers today are either tele-workers of large companies or they're branch offices of large companies."

On serving verticals:

Thirdly, because of our fiber deep capability, there are enormous opportunities to serve more complicated bandwidth needs. I think especially in health care, which is a community of large locations generally nearby, where fiber is required to move bandwidth and services. But that's supported by a community of outlets and doctor locations and infrastructure that are really a whole bunch of SMBs. In that space, in local government, in education, those are all dynamite verticals to be in."

On ranking these priorities:

"It's probably, roughly speaking, 70 percent focused on SMB, and the remaining split as we deal with the other two (opportunities)."

On the value proposition:

"The fundamental services that business customers want: a reliable data service, a reliable voice service, and if needed - and I'm surprised at how many customers do find value in it - video. So the true triple play. Delivered by a company that is local."

On being local:

"Kevin was asked earlier here today what do our customers want. His answer, very appropriately, was productivity. But when we can give them productivity surrounded by support and intimacy because we can leverage our localism, that's something that really cannot be repeated very well by our competitors."

On being a permanent presence:

"We really are here to stay. We're not going away. We have the same interest and passion in seeing the community thrive, to part of that thriving, as our customers, and we're not going to let (them) down. Many of these customers saw the evolution of the Telecom Act in '96 that created a lot of CLECs and bad business models. They had choice, and choice was then taken away. Part of our value proposition is that we're not going away."