Article Excerpt:
TWST: We would like to begin with a brief historical sketch of Alaska Communications and a picture of the things you are doing at the present time.Ms. Pelletier: The company came together through a rollup of several firms in Alaska. These were firms focused on local telephony, long distance, Internet, and wireless. They were in disparate locations, operated under different brands and had different ownership structures. The founding group brought those together in early 1999 under the brand of Alaska Communications Systems and then the company IPO'd on the NASDAQ in late 1999. The company operated with its founding group of managers until October 2003, when the Board of Directors recruited me to take ACS to the next stage of development. Today, we operate as an integrated telecommunications company, rather than operating differently across geographies and product lines. Since I spent over 17 years at Sprint, the dials to turn at ACS were familiar to me, and I saw a lot of untapped opportunity. One of the first opportunities was to eliminate the silos around products and create an organization centered around customers. The reorganization effected three years ago is by and large the one we live in today. We have an enduring, sustainable organization and business model. We have sales and service people who do nothing but understand, sell to and service the needs of consumers. We have a mirror image of that for business, and there is a third group for carriers. This business model has allowed us to achieve top-line and bottom-line growth; for example, the sales and service teams focus efficiently on the top line and the supporting functions like network drive efficiencies to grow the bottom line. As a way to achieve efficiencies, for example, we created one engineering team across different product platforms. We created one monitoring team across all different kinds of networks.
Tickers included in this excerpt: ALSK, FCFS
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