bellows Rob Hale on a recent Friday morning. It’s 6:30 a.m., and two dozen employees of Granite Telecommunications have gathered for one of their CEO’s favorite rituals: hourlong morning workouts, a grueling grind of pushups, squats, burpees, sit-ups, planks, jumping jacks and stair runs through the company’s four-story office headquarters in Quincy, Massachusetts, a blue-collar burb 10 miles south of Boston.Hale, 56, likes routine.
Granite’s angle is to sell POTS to national retailers whose IT chiefs want a single point of contact for their many phone lines in many different states. When a POTS line in Montana goes down, techies at CVS don’t have to chase after the local phone carrier to fix it; they call Granite, which does it for them.
Granite is feeling the heat. Annual sales from its POTS business declined last year for the first time ever. “With the way this market is looking, at some point POTS may not be around,” says Denise Munro, a consultant at CRG Telecom, which focuses on cost management. Hale says Granite’s operating margins for its cable and wireless segments are “about the same” as for phone lines . He also argues, perhaps predictably, that Granite’s POTS background gives it a leg up on the transition. For instance, cable companies’ networks, like those of phone carriers, are geographically constrained, which means Granite’s national aggregation model is still workable. Wireless networks also vary dramatically in quality depending on location.
“When I got to sales, within a month I was like, ‘Wow, I’m good at this,’ ” he recalls. “I wasn’t that good academically, and I wasn’t that good athletically, but inherently I’m competitive. And in sales they keep score.”
Time is an interesting thing …