An uphill battle, but could be worth it - Sales Engineer Zayo Employee Review

Wow. What a long and thoughtful post. I am sorry it took me so long to response. First, I agree with most of your "pros". You cite "engineers" as an asset of the company along with the fiber/infrastructure. I would broaden this to emphasize employees in general. You say "work/life balance" is as good as its going to get. I believe we the rapid change and growth of the past was unachievable without incredibly hard work...but that the future is not destined to be a continuation of the past. I believe this has already improved in some areas, and can improve in all areas as we all focus on it. It is not clear why your first con -- commitment to financial transparency -- is list as a con. The reasons for this go way beyond appeasing investors/"Wall Street". Our organization structure is designed to allow us to create value on multiple fronts -- colo, dark fiber, waves, IP, etc. Our hyper-focus on operational financial matters is to help us make solid business decisions and, after the fact, know whether or not we are being successful in creating equity value. I agree in some ways but disagree in others with your comments on Customer Service. I personally do NOT think we are providing Great Customer Service today...and I suspect the senior team would have a similar view. I share my view with board members in board discussion -- so they know how I see the situation. So your perception of how senior execs view the situation is likely not correct. I agree with you that we are far better now than we were 6 months ago. I also believe we continue to improve. We do enamor customers every day through our hard work, commitment, and can-do attitude. As you suggest (and I agree with), we need to enamor them with the smoothness, reliability, and professionalism of our processes. The latter is the goal, and we are not there yet. It doesn't matter if we are better than many of our peer group....we must be great in an absolute sense. We will be. You make comments on communication and change. I cannot comment on "change control" communication, other than to say I know this has been a growing pain. The "every three months" has been a reality of the past two years -- but I think that was unavoidable given our organic and inorganic growth. Changes over the past 6 months have, for the most part, been fine tuning. I expect future changes to be more in the fine tuning category -- though we are still getting our feet completely underneath us from all that is happening. We did throw out a lot of mature and good processes and procedures from acquired companies. This was my call, as I have set this as the expectation. I refused to run the risk of us being a collection of disparate and unintegrated processes, systems, and pockets of employees. You might not agree, but I've seen it done the other way multiple times and its been a disaster. We navigated our way through a roll-up of the most valuable (by your assessment) assets in the industry while (a) achieving solid financial results through the chaos and (b) ending up as one organization. It will be far easier maturing our immature processes than to operate this business as disparate fiefdoms of multiple mature processes. Abovenet was investing in a massive expensive change to its OSS/BSS when we bought them, so something was deemed by someone to be inadequate. I hope you can let this go and be part of our team -- if you can't, you will end up frustrated no matter what else happens. On the GIS, time will tell. I know the GIS data transition has been a huge disappointment. I think our GIS approach will prove to be an extraordinary step forward for Zayo and the industry. I take zero issue with your point about the company you were was better than Zayo. Some (not all!!) of the companies we acquired were great companies, with great employees, and great cultures. Employees were content. We tore this apart. Today's Zayo is different. Its been chaotic. Its been unsettled (due to absorbing many acquisitions). Its different in its approach. The industry was going to consolidate whether Zayo existed or not, so the status quo for each company wasn't a realistic alternative. Our views differ in this regard: Zayo will become like your ex-company that you admire. Our processes will get smooth, our data will get accurate, and our intuitive understanding of the networks will emerge. It will become familiar to employees. Our work relationships will strengthen across all pockets of the company. We will further like and trust one another. All tenured employees will feel proud of what we are doing for our customers, investors, and fellow colleagues. We are making incredible strides this direction already...a year from now, this will (for most) feel much more like their home. You might or might not ever get there -- because you remember so fondly your past. I am out of characters so can't respond further.